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The differences between ser and estar are considered one of the most difficult concepts for non-native speakers. Both ser and estar translate into English as "to be", but they have different uses, depending on whether they are used with nouns, with adjectives, with past participles (more precisely, passive participles), or to express location.
Silva-Corvalán discovered that estar had a decrease in meaning over time, and began to be used in a greater range of contexts. [4] The distinction between ser and estar had lessened. There is a universal tendency of semantic bleaching, which is the loss of meaning or emphasis of a word over time, that is present in estar. [4]
The Spanish copulas are ser and estar.The latter developed as follows: stare → *estare → estar. The copula ser developed from two Latin verbs. Thus its inflectional paradigm is a combination: most of it derives from svm (to be) but the present subjunctive appears to come from sedeo (to sit) via the Old Spanish verb seer.
Another difference between middle voice and the other two grammatical voices is that there are middle marked verbs for which no corresponding active verb form exists. [9] In some cases, the middle voice is any grammatical option where the subject of a material process cannot be categorized as either an actor (someone doing something) or a goal ...
Spanish generally uses adjectives in a similar way to English and most other Indo-European languages. However, there are three key differences between English and Spanish adjectives. In Spanish, adjectives usually go after the noun they modify. The exception is when the writer/speaker is being slightly emphatic, or even poetic, about a ...
Another well-known example comes from the Portuguese or Spanish verbs ser and estar, both being translatable as to be (see Romance copula). Ser is used with essence or nature, while estar is used with states or conditions, however. Sometimes this information is not very relevant for the meaning of the whole sentence and the translator will ...
This is similar to the difference between the verbs ser and estar in Spanish and Portuguese (see Romance copula), although this is not an exact match; is and tá are cognate respectively with the Spanish es and está. Examples are: Is fear é. "He is a man." (Spanish Es un hombre, Portuguese (Ele) é um homem) Is duine fuar é.
the rest of the endings are the usual for -er/-ir verbs, even for the -ar verbs estar and andar. in the verbs with -je preterite (decir, traer, and most verbs ending in -ducir) unstressed i is dropped between the j and a vowel: ellos trajeron, yo trajera...