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Where do the verb forms ending in -oy in the first person singular present indicative come from? It seems to be whenever you’d get a stressed -o, but nothing I know about the history of Spanish points to [o] breaking to [oj] or anything like that. I feel like hay is probably related to this process somehow, as (I presume) a derivative of ha.

I tihnk one theory is that it's derived from "yo" when it followed the verb, but I forget how well supported it is

Edit: here is a Wordreference thread that mentions that theory, but doesn't give it much support: https://forum.wordreference.com/threads ... r.2871781/ It looks like another theory is that it came about by analogy with "hay", where the "y" is from "ibi"

One person said:

Cenzontle wrote:But unfortunately the data I found don't support the "so[y] yo" theory (but they don't disprove it, either).
I extracted data from Prof. Davies's Corpus del Español for the 13th, 14th, and 15th centuries, for ser, estar, ir, and dar.
I figured a "percentage of innovation" — the number of "-oy" forms divided by the sum of the "-oy" and the "-o" forms —
to compare the "normal" (pron. + v.) order with the "inverted" order (v. + pron.).
The percentage of "-oy" forms in the inverted construction is far less than that in the pron. + v. construction, for each century.
The "-oy" innovation in the "-o[y] yo" construction doesn't lead, it lags.
This relationship holds true even when you omit "estar" and "dar" and look only at "ser" and "ir".

Actually, I think this could be interpreted as evidence for the "soy" < "so yo" theory, but I guess that just shows what weak evidence it is. My thought would be that the glide would not be written twice in the inverted form (because "so yo" looks more or less like it's pronounced "soyyo" anyway) but would be written in the non-inverted form, because otherwise there is no indication of the glide.

Another source that supports the "yo" theory mentions that all of these verbs are stressed, which might be relevant (I know /j~ʝ/ in Spanish sometimes behaves kind of like a geminate, as it often comes from Latin geminate /jj/, bu I forget how/if this realization is affected at all by stress): http://www.virginia.edu/cla/avd/linguis ... s/history/

More links:

• tumblr post: http://prototumblinguist.tumblr.com/pos ... -of-the-oy
• Google Books: https://books.google.com/books?id=9P3If ... yo&f=false

I've heard both those theories(ie. the soy yo/estoy yo etc. and the analogy w/ hay), and IMHO I don't think they're exclusive, likely they both happened and reinforced each other in making -oy standard in those verb forms.

What's important to note is that all the forms with -oy bear stress on the ending. I read a textbook (I'll dig up the citation later) that explained to me that this is essentially due to the fact that stress-bearing -o is typically associated with the 3s preterite (cf. habló, corrió, comió), and thus using it for the 1s pres was perceived as problematic by the Spanish speaking community, thus opening an opportunity for some sort of phonetic shift that was provided by the paragoge of the offglide -y (from the two sources above).

Whatever the reason, it’s certainly more recent than the split between Castilian and Ladino (Judeo-Spanish), as the latter doesn’t have -oy, but -ó: yo só, dó, vó, estó; yet it does have hay, which maybe tips the scales in favor of -oy coming from -o yo.