Fijate

Question

Fijate

in the dictionary : the verb fijar: to set,to establish,to fix....
my teacher said that fijate is like saying LOOK!! followed by an explaination or a reason.
im still confused, could anyone give me the exact meaning for it and tell me in what situations we can use this word, if possible i would like to have some examples in english that have similar meanings aswell.

Answer 1

Natasha said:

P.S. I´ll go out on a limb and bet this is one of those spelling variations that eventually gets accepted just because it´s so prevalent. Look, it is even in published books

Maybe in English. In Spanish no one would ever say "pronomial". It sounds awful! If we did that, we'd have to remove the N from *

ignominia, ignominiosamente, denominativo, ignominioso, denominar, innominable, denominador, innominado, denominadamente, nominación denominación, nominador, cognominar, nominal, agnominación, nominalismo, adnominal, nominalista, nominalización, nominalizar, nominalmente, nominar, nominátim, nominativo, nominilla, posnominal, postnominal , prenominal, pronominado, pronominal*, and trasnominación.

Unlike in English, the matching between spelling and sound makes it these sort of spelling mistakes very rare (the common ones are those with H, B, V,...).

These dictionaries have "pronominal", but not "pronomial":

' Oxford English Dictionary
' Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary
' Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
' Collins Dictionary of English
' The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language
' Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary
' Dictionary.com Unabridged (v 1.1)

Actually, I haven't found "pronomial" in any dictionary yet.

By the way, I can't find "pronomial" in this site's dictionary either.

Answer 2

Maybe in English. In Spanish no one would ever say "pronomial". It sounds awful!

Sounds better than pronominal in English, at least to my ear. And it makes sense, too. Nom is French for noun, and English was heavily influenced by French. So pronom makes sense to us as a variant of pronoun. And the suffix -ial is very common in English. So pronomial is entirely logical.

By the way, I can't find "pronomial" in this site's dictionary either.

See the following, for example.

http://www.spanishdict.com/translate/ir

Answer 3

James Santiago said:

Sounds better than pronominal in English, at least to my ear. And it makes sense, too. Nom is French for noun, and English was heavily influenced by French. So pronom makes sense to us as a variant of pronoun. And the suffix -ial is very common in English. So pronomial is entirely logical.
I'm not sure that that's a very good supporting argument. While it's true that noun is nom in French, pronominal is pronominal in French.

Answer 4

I was not saying that the entire word comes from French, just that the individual parts all make sense, and that may explain why the misspelling is so common.

Answer 5

Could we get back to what "fijate" means? I'm still confused.

• This question and answer series is one year old. If you have a new quetion about the subject, enter it into a new Question Post and Thread. - Moe Nov 17, 2009