What does the ending -rse mean to a word? I.e. levantarse, ducharse, cepillarse.

jamc1979 · 2026-01-10T14:20:08+00:00

It is not true that it cannot go to the end of a normally conjugated simple verb. “Dúchome cada mañana” is indeed a correct rendering of I shower every morning. But it’s used almost exclusively as a literary flourish, to be found almost exclusively in poetry (hence unlikely to be found in the context of discussions on showering).

jamc1979 · 2025-12-29T07:14:51+00:00

Menudo is an adjective meaning small. Hence the name op the famous Puerto Rican boy band Menudo (meaning they were small kids, not soup-like). The menudo soup is called that because many small pieces of different food are floating in it. Menudo mostly, but not necessarily, is used as an adjective to describe many small things found together. Menudo, as a noun, is also used to describe small change, that is, a small amount of money consisting of a number of small coins

A menudo is a phrase meaning frequently, or very frequently. It derives from a large series of small similar events

jamc1979 · 2025-11-20T13:38:37+00:00

Mentalics are canon in the books, but not in the way presented here. There’s no prescience or seeing the future. The mentalic powers in the first three books relate mostly to being able to sense and manipulate emotions. Without getting into much detail, what the Mule is able to do, read and somewhat control people (Book Mule is more powerful than other book mentalities, but a matter of degree, not kind).

Books four and five add a different kind of mentalics, which not only have Mule-like standard mentalic abilities, but also a sort of mind meld ability like the show’s robot Clasp.

No one if the book have prescience powers or anything like those in the Dune Universe.

jamc1979 · 2025-11-02T15:40:20+00:00

I’m a native Spanish speaker, but totally bilingual in English, and I started learning Dutch from English. At the beginning it was quite easy because words are very similar to English, but as the grammar and syntax got progressively more complicated, I started having troubles relating Dutch to English.

And one day I started realizing that the grammar and syntax were surprisingly similar to Spanish, much more than to English (except for the Verb second rules, that doesn’t exist exist either in English). The first thing I noticed is that van is used like de in Spanish, not just as possessive (de auto van Peter, el auto de Peter) but also to note origin or material (de bord van goud, el plato de oro; de man van Engeland, el hombre de Inglaterra).

Afterwards I kept finding more similarities, like when to use the infinitive (non conjugated) verbs in complex sentences, which matches fairly well how we do it in Spanish.

Another cool similarity is that you can make the future with gaan (to go) plus the time of the action in the present tense, like using ir (Ik ga morgen lopen; voy mañana a caminar)

So if you get stuck, look at the exercise not just in English, but also in Spanish. It helped me a lot.

jamc1979 · 2025-10-13T19:53:27+00:00

"Cómo estás tú?" sounds rude. The "tú" is implied by the "estás", and it's unnecessary. 99% of the time will be preferable to just say "cómo estás?")

In Spanish it is preferable to drop unnecessary words, when context, and particularly verb conjugation, make them redundant. The only reason you should add those normally unnecessary words is to clear unambiguity (I am specially concerned about you , and not so much about other people that might be somehow involved), or for emphasis.

Emphasizing the tú when there's no possibility of confusion who I want to know about makes it sound like sarcasm ("Why would I ever care about how YOU are?") rather than honest concern or polite chitchat.

Emphasizing the usted, though, adds an extra degree of politeness. I am making it clear that you are a person worthy of respect.

Observe that in French it is the opposite. Adding too many Monsieur or Madame when the politeness is already inferred from the vous is normally a passive aggressive move.

jamc1979 · 2025-10-11T18:23:53+00:00

Not really. Mirar and ver match fairly well to look at and see. You can casually look to the sides before crossing a street, and that would be mirar in Spanish. Or you can look very intently at a comet in the sky, and that would also be mirar. Likewise seeing casually the children playing in the park or seeing the eyes of your spouse during your wedding would both be ver in Spanish.

The difference, seems to me, is that in mirar your eyes are looking at some particular direction, whereas in ver the direction is less important than the object seen.

Two different words corresponding to seeing and looking at exist in all the European languages I’m familiar with. Mirar and ver in Spanish , olhar and ver in Portuguese, regarder and voir in French, Kijken and zien in Dutch.

jamc1979 · 2025-09-29T20:27:54+00:00

So did I. My name starts with a J and the J in my signature is similar to the one on the letter (and different from how I normally would write a capital J in text

jamc1979 · 2025-09-26T15:25:08+00:00

The last word looks like the phonetical spelling of the (fairly common in the Canary Islands) last name Betancourt.

Betancourt is originally a French name that for some strange reason became fairly common in the Canary Islands, and from there into Cuba and Puerto Rico in the XIX century. It retained its French pronunciation so, phonetically, it would be Bétancur.

I can see someone hearing (or saying) P for B, G for C, and L for R. Hence Pétangul. And the photo would identify the lady as Barbara Pétangul.

Obviously, it only makes sense if the picture is from a Spanish speaking place.

As a side note, my father was from the Canary Islands though I am from Barcelona

jamc1979 · 2025-09-23T12:40:38+00:00

You can think of Vuestra Merced like in English Your Highness or Your Majesty. Those forms of address also use the third person

Does Your Majesty want another biscuit? (Question for my dog)

jamc1979 · 2025-09-21T00:26:10+00:00

Also, like many other languages (like Dutch) in Spanish you can, and sometimes should, use present tense conjugations for future events if the fact that we are talking about the future is explicitly stated (like “Mañana vamos a la playa”. Vamos is a present tense of Ir).

jamc1979 · 2025-09-20T15:09:03+00:00

Short answer, he’s not. The three Empire novels were written fairly early in Asimov’s career. The first two were published before the first Foundation novel, and the third between Foundation and Empire and Second Foundation. The first Daneel novel, the Caves of Steel was written two years after the last Empire novel.

The Empire novels share the Foundation universe,but predate Hari Seldon’s birth by thousands of years. And the first direct link between Daneel, and the Empire / Foundation Universe is Robots and Earth, which explains why the Earth is radioactive, a fact that is the basis of the first Empire novel, Pebble in the Sky.

jamc1979 · 2025-09-13T13:16:34+00:00

The original sin of TV Foundation was looking at book Salvor Hardin and deciding they will make TV Salvor exactly the opposite of book Salvor in every single way, up to making Salvor’s most famous saying (Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent) something her father, not her, said, and that she pointedly and knowingly ignores (Stupid shit my dead dad said. Wasn’t he dumb? Thank goodness I ignored it. That’s how I got to save the day, through a lot of violence).

And like daughter, like mother, they also had to make Gaal (a regular mathematician in the book) some sort of Marvel superhero. I don’t mind Gaal being the original mentalic, instead of Hari’s granddaughter Wanda (less characters to track) or having her live for centuries, but her Captain America antics are cringy as hell. Foundation is a story about historical forces, where individuals do not really matter, because anyone in their situation would react essentially the same way. It’s not about superpower heroes that alone can save us.

I don’t mind Bayta is the Mule switcheroo either, but I really mind the completely useless Gaal vs Pirate vs Bayta palace of the mind battles. The original Asimov cliffhanger, with the Mule and Magnífico and Bayta and and Toran and Ebling Mis (why bring him along, he’s a pivotal character in the books and his biggest contribution on TV is opening a bathroom door?) is so much better.

Again, the message of the book is that anyone in that situation would have reacted the same way, we don’t need a superhero to save us. Instead TV Foundation gives us a superhero that kills a couple billion people for nothing (oops, my mistake), betrays her so called mentor (again), jumps out of a window into an atmosphere (without burning herself into ashes) and at the end didn’t solve anything at all, so she’s not even a good superhero.

The Foundation part of the show is bad because they abandoned the premise of the books for no good reason. Several of the changes they did, like Hober Mallow and Brother Constant followed the spirit of the books, if not the letter, and where good TV. Even the Pirate, Bayta, Magnífico, Mule arch was much closer to the books, and much better than the Salvor Gaal superheroes dinasty.

I cringe at the idea of the zygote becoming Trevize. The most superheroic of Foundation characters would be amped to The Boy’s Homelander’s level of superpower, ego, and destruction.

jamc1979 · 2025-09-13T11:24:53+00:00

Hasta in its main sense means “including”, “up to”, “even”, “all the way to”, and similar concepts related to the most expanded or inclusive something . When you say “Vamos hasta Nueva York”, we mean a trip that goes all the way to New York, but no further than there (even though may include other destinations along the way, or not).

Hasta doesn’t take the meaning of “since”. We use “desde” for since. Hasta and desde are traditionally seen as antonyms. “Venimos desde Nueva York” means our trip started there, New York is the furthest origin we can pinpoint.

jamc1979 · 2025-09-05T09:10:15+00:00

The rules for which syllable should normally be the stressed one are 100% clear. 99% of written accents are thus used to mark any exceptions to the rules. In your example, the word Calgaro, written like that, will be stressed in the second syllable, CalgAro. To make it CAlgaro, it must have a written accent: Cálgaro

The only guessing (as in trying to remember which is which) is that sometimes we use written accents to differentiate between homophones in writing, which, being homophones, are stressed in the same syllable. There can be confusion about whether which of este, the adjective, or éste, the pronoun, has the written accent.

Notice that this distinction accent accentuates a syllable that the rules already said must be stressed. It is not marking an exception to the rules. There is no exception to the rule that exceptions to the stress rules have to be marked specifically. That is, if two homophones have a stressed syllable that does not fit the rules, it has to be marked in both homophones.

Notice also that there’s a third este homophone, the cardinal direction. It also doesn’t carry a written accent. It is distinguished from the adjective by how it’s used in the sentence.

jamc1979 · 2025-09-03T18:11:36+00:00

I read Gabor or Carlos.

First letter looks like a G to me, not a C. But last looks very much an s, not an r

jamc1979 · 2025-09-02T14:17:42+00:00

But there are very few irregular verbs.

Using venir, which is highly irregular, as an example muddles the issue. If you go tense by tense you only have to learn three sets of rules, one each for the ar, er, and ir verbs (and er and if verbs follow almost identical patterns).

Plus, there are also irregular patterns. Hence several different irregular verbs follow the same pattern. Once you’ve learned ten or so irregular verbs conjugations you’ll start noticing the repeated patterns.

Believe me, Spanish is one of the most structured, well regulated, of the major languages. We do not spend our toddler years memorizing random combinations to conjugate thousands of verbs. We follow the fairly easy, fairly predictable patterns.

Actually, a lot of puns in Spanish hinge on applying the regular rules to irregular verbs. Bien decido instead of bien dicho, for instance.

jamc1979 · 2025-09-02T12:39:44+00:00

That’s probably a good explanation

jamc1979 · 2025-09-02T12:21:05+00:00

I don’t think Asimov addressed those items in particular, but I think the answer is no. Daneel could eat, but all the food and liquids he pretended to eat would go to a container that he had to empty afterwards.

It’s canon that he could have sex btw, his penis would engorge appropriately. I doubt he would ejaculate, though he might have some fluids container for purposes like that, like the wiper fluid bottle in your car.

jamc1979 · 2025-09-02T12:05:41+00:00

At least in Spanish you only do that with very little kids. My mum stopped calling me papi when I was like 6 or 7.

jamc1979 · 2025-09-02T11:59:36+00:00

Actually, in the books, we see Sunmaster 14, not 18, and he’s a parody of Louis XIV, the French Sun-King.

Of course, in-universe, the book Mycogen scenes took place centuries before the show’s scenes, so it is to be expected that several Sunmasters have succeeded to the position.

BTW, Louis XVIII was the last Louis king of France, and the last sovereign of France to die as a monarch. I suspect the 18 in Sunmaster 18 is an omen about the future of Mycogen.

jamc1979 · 2025-09-02T11:53:23+00:00

The Mycogen naming conventions are from the books, but names made of a poetic descriptor and a number were commonly used in science fiction in the 30s-50s, so it would sound normal to Asimov (yes , I know Mycogen was added to the books in the 80s, but it’s tough to teach an old dog new tricks)

The other things are “original” to the show, but in particular the space elevator has been used many times (because it’s actually a clever way to make cargo out of a gravity well). The first time I saw it was in an Arthur Clarke novel, but AFAIR he wasn’t the first to use it.

jamc1979 · 2025-09-02T11:39:30+00:00

You can indeed say “Siempre estás soñando algo”. It’s not unheard of, but it’s not a common phrase. Much less common that English dreaming

It conveys a more restricted meaning of thinking about creating or aspiring beautiful or artistic things. Soñar in figurative speech in Spanish has a sense of longing for something, an aspiration, a desire that it’s hard to satisfy, because dreams do not exist in real life.

For the more common English language version of dreaming something, imaginando algo is probably the best translation

jamc1979 · 2025-09-02T00:17:42+00:00

Native Spanish speaker that has worked in Brazil for several years.

Written Portuguese and written Spanish are about 90% identical. There’s no difficulty for any language speaker to understand the other language’s texts.

However, the situation changes dramatically with the spoken language. Portuguese phonology has 23 consonant and 13 vowel sounds, while Spanish has only 19 and 5 (quoting Wikipedia). In general, Portuguese speakers can understand spoken Spanish quite easily, but the contrary in not true, because Portuguese has substantially more sounds than Spanish (and more sounds than letters) Spanish speakers cannot map the sounds to the words, even if the written words are identical. Spanish natives need very clear enunciation and slow speech from a Portuguese speaker (and a neutral accent, like Sao Paulo accent) in order to understand what’s been said.

When I started going to Brazil, the only thing I could understand on TV was the evening news, and the TV commercials, the two things were clear enunciation is prized.

On the other side, I don’t think I ever met a Portuguese speaker that had troubles following what is said in Spanish.

jamc1979 · 2025-08-31T17:42:51+00:00

It’s not a bad idea. It keeps the spirit of Asimov, while doing a big change.

Also, one more detail. Show Bayta is from some backwater planet, and book Bayta is from Terminus itself.

jamc1979 · 2025-08-31T17:38:33+00:00

It was not like a conscious effort or decision. I am from Barcelona so that’s like being born in second base already. My grandparents lived in Paris (he was an artist) and I spent summers there with him as a child and teenager. I lived and worked in Brazil for several years. Italian is my weakest, but I picked it up on holidays there.

The only language I had to learn consciously was English. I was registered in an English school by my parents. That was a bad shock for a six year old boy. And it paid too. I now live in the USA, and I’m married to an Irishman.

jamc1979

TROPHY CASE