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Comment by ravila4 | Hacker News Reader

In Spanish, we have two different versions of "to be": 'ser' is for defining what something is (I am a human), and 'estar' is for temporary states of being (I am sad). I do find it strange that English assigns the two meanings to one word.

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I never got far into Spanish, but I remember that there were exceptions to that rule. Like things that aren't really permanent, but still use ser.

In the end I just saw it as a strange and random language quirk. Like articles in German or Dutch.

Yeah, I think about this a lot as I've been brushing up on my Spanish lately. A lot of people are eager to come up with and apply "rules" to the grammar, but I suspect most of these rules are post-hoc, and the way it _really_ works is largely statistical. Peter Norvig has a great discussion here[0] that asserts as much, compared to Chomsky's idea that language is based on instinctual rules.

I help out on /r/EnglishLearning, and a lot of the time my answers are like, "well, I don't know why but it sounds better this way...", which makes me think of the statistical model.

On the Spanish side, I recently thought about it with regard to the subjunctive mood, and in particular its use with the verbs pensar and creer (to think/believe). The upshot is that you use the indicative mood in the positive case, and subjunctive mood in the negative case (creo que estas bien / no creo que estés bien). People give lots of motivated reasons for why this is, and how in the negative case you're not "sure" of it, while in the positive case you're "sure" that you "think" it, or something like that. But ultimately, I think it's just the simple aforementioned positive/negative rule that native speakers build up over time from being exposed to sentence constructions, maybe without even realizing it, and only post-hoc rationalize why it is.

[0] https://norvig.com/chomsky.html

As a native speaker of portuguese, which uses the exact same two words, I can't think of any exceptions.

I don't see why this would be a "strange" and "random" language quirk when it makes perfect sense in practice. The only situations I can see where it wouldn't make perfect sense would be in situations where you're translating to English, which is not a productive way to think about languages.

Not to pick a fight (just a student of spanish), but my spanish teacher would caution us against the categorization of permanent vs temporary and gave us acronyms instead because of examples like:

It is 1 => Es la una (describing time uses Ser)

I am an engineer => Soy ingeniero (describing a profession which can be seen as a temporary state of affairs)

I can't think of a counterexample for "estar", but you are absolutely right about "ser". Off the top of my head: "soy rubio" (I'm blonde), "soy joven" (I'm young), "soy ciudadano Español" (I'm a Spanish citizen).

My favorite quirk is "estoy muerto" (I'm dead), which leads to plenty of metaphysical discussions.

Good point, I never thought about those. Still, I'd personally say these are the quirks rather than the entire premise of permanent vs temporary. This is from the perspective of a native speaker though, I don't know anything about linguistics.

I still remember the mnemonic my 9th grade Spanish teacher gave for this: DONT BE LOCO DONT: Ser is for Description, Origin, Nationality, and Time. BE: these verbs mean "to be" LOCO: Estar is for Location and Condition.

Determining whether a sentence describes the subject or describes the subject's condition is the trickiest part.

My favorite is that it's ingrained in the language that living is temporary:

"I am alive" uses "estar" -> "Estoy vivo."

But "I am dead" also uses "estar" -> "Estoy muerto."

AFAIK, when most people die, they are dead forever.

Because temporary vs permanent is not the correct categorizations of estar and ser. It's more like state vs characteristic. State and characteristic is still a fuzzy boundary, but hey it's a human language.

English uses "to be" even further where other languages like Spanish would use another verb—for example statements about the weather are "it is hot" rather than Spanish's "hace calor".

I hadn't really thought about that, but yes of course. E.g. French "il fait beau", "elle a quarate ans" etc. Making and having, rather than being.

I have read that the use of the “meaningless it” with an impersonal verb like this in English is due to an influence from the Celtic languages that were extant across Britain prior to the Anglo-Saxon invasion.

I love this about spanish. Took me forever to initially get it, and then I've never gone back. It helps identify permanence in a very useful way.

Yes, this and the very common use of passive voice (at least in LATAM): El vaso se rompió vs Rompí el vaso.

Native Spanish speaker here: it was very interesting to me to read this way of explaining the difference. I always thought about it as ”ser" for essence and "estar" for state, but reading the comments below made me realise this isn't fully accurate either, but I'd still argue it's closer.

French has something a bit like that: we don't say "I'm hungry" but "I have hunger", or "I'm scared" but "I have fear". I'm not sure if there's a rule on when to use which though.

I recall an incident while I studied Spanish. An older woman in my class was nearly in tears of frustration as she angrily demanded of our teacher why they use "estar" to denote locations. For example "París está en Francia". Given the naive classification of estar as temporary it seems counter-intuitive to suggest Paris is temporarily in France.

There are a few other ambiguous ser/estar situations we were taught, exceptions to the permanent/temporary distinction that I can't recall. But the near break-down this woman had about Paris was quite memorable.

It's made sense to me that "estar" is used as a means to "localize" the subject to a particular space/time. Thus the non-permanence (i.e. "non-global") meaning of the word.

It reminds me of the Polish phrasing "masz racje", literally "you have right", as compared to the English "you are right".

On the other hand, 'you have right' translated literally to polish is 'masz prawo' which is exactly what 'you have right' means. I think 'masz racje' -> 'you have correct' -> 'you are correct' would be a better way to show the difference.

And the longer I think about the word 'racja' the less I'm confident I'm able to explain precisely what it means using english.

I guess that's part of the fun of learning other languages, I will never understand articles in english and I made peace with it. Now I'm also learning spanish and subjuntivos drives me nuts but spanish and polish grammar are surprisingly similar (waaay closer than both are to english)

To me 'masz racje' is somewhat between 'you are correct' and 'makes sense'

The Spanish version, literally translated, is "you have reason" :)

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