How do native Spanish speakers view 'ser' and 'estar'?

[DarrenS]

When foreigners are learning Spanish, the distinction between "ser" and "estar" presents difficulties, because in many other languages, the two map to a single word - "to be" in English. In fact, as far as I know, even the other Latin languages only have a single word for "to be".

So, do Spanish speakers who don't speak other languages consider "ser" and "estar" to be two different forms of the same concept, one for "temporary" being and one for "permanent" being? Or is their mental model that they are two totally separate verbs, with nothing in common, and it would never occur to them to lump them together?

Alternatively, when children in Spanish-speaking countries are learning the language, do they make Gringo-type mistakes like confusing "ser" and "estar"?

[The Niply Elder]

Totally different concepts, so its pretty rare even for children to make a gringo style mistake.

[John Mace]

Does Portuguese have the ser/estar dichotomy?

[KarlGrenze]

As a native Spanish speaker, it didn't occur to me the differences until we were studying them in school. Actually, for English, were the verb "to be" encompasses both ser and estar, and the teacher then went a bit about the differences.

I'm sure as a wee little lad I probably made mistakes, but I don't remember them, and I don't remember any others. Certainly, by the time I was 5-6 years old, most of what for foreigners may be "tricky" for me it was just normal.

Portuguese does have the dichotomy between ser and estar. An interesting thing is that (like many other things) the dichotomy between ser/estar in Spanish does not mirror Portuguese. That is, for situations that would use estar in Spanish, for example, the verb ser is used in Portuguese. It gets confusing, and now I mixed them up when talking in either Spanish or Portuguese.

The best example is in relationship status. In Spanish it would be "Yo estoy casada" (I'm married), but in Portuguese it would be "Eu sou casada".

[Dr. Drake]

Italian has essere / stare.

Irish* and to a lesser extent Welsh also have a split within the verb to be which is very similar but not quite the same as Spanish (or Portuguese). The third-person singular in Irish is tá, cognate with estar (specifically está), and is, pron. "iss", cognate with ser (specifically es as well as English is). Welsh has the lexical cognates taw and ys*** but functionally the equivalents are mae and yw.****

*Not, of course, a Romance language, but arguably is the next closest thing if you believe in Italo-Celtic.**

**The hypothesis that the Romance and Celtic languages are closer to each other than either is to any other branch of Indo-European, i.e. that the split between the Italic group (Latin and a few other languages) and the Celtic languages was chronologically the last node on the tree before Proto-Italic. I buy it, but it's not exactly universally accepted.

***I'm pretty sure. I didn't look it up to verify that they're cognates, though.

****Sort of. All of these are 3rd-person singular forms of "to be", but there are more (e.g. sy) and it's even more off-topic.