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To return is regresar. I have heard that when there is a stress on e, it caves in and it turns into ie. For instance querer become quiero because at present tense the penultimate syllable is stressed and it should have been quero but the e part caves in.
Why doesn't this happen in the case of regresar. You would think it should have become regrieso but it is in fact regreso. Can anyone explain why?
The e → ie change is something that happens with what in Latin was a short e (same for o->ue and short o). Long e doesn't change.
It's not a hard and fast rule, however. Spanish tended to regularize more such words than, say, Asturian or Mirandese, which also underwent similar changes. So even though we might expect -gresar verbs to change because in Latin that e was short, for some reason, they don't (and in fact, they don't in Mirandese or Asturian either – so perhaps something happened in late Iberian Latin to explain it, but I'm not a Latinist)
eand when to useiewhen constructing the present tense from roots.