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Comment by Kaze404 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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