acompañarlos vs. acompañarles

Question

I'm using Anki flashcards to help build my vocabulary. It's an excellent program and I highly recommend it to anyone needing flashcards. It supports images and sound, and you can run it on your PC, android, iphone, ipad, or via a web browser and keep all of your devices synchronized. It has several really good sets of public flashcards to help you learn Spanish (all kinds of other sets, too).

Anyway, I'm going through a set entitled "1001 Most Useful Spanish Words and Sentences" and there is a phrase:

Will you allow me to go with you?

and whoever made the card set translated it as:

¿Me permiten acompañarlos?

Is that incorrect? Souldn't it be acompañarles? It seems to me like "¿Me permiten acompañarlos?" would be "Will they allow me to go with them?"

Answer 1

"¿Me permiten acompañarlos?" and "¿Me permiten acompañarles?" are both gramatically correct.

"Leísmo de cortesía" allows us to use les in this case to show respect to the people you are talking to. It also helps avoid any possible confusion between "you" and "them." Even though leísmo is used throughout the entire Spanish speaking world, there seems to be a preference of usage among people rather than region and just as Chileno has mentioned that he would use los, I would use les for this situation.

It has a name! I am going to look up "leísmo de cortesía" and read about it. Thank you, Julian! - Lrtward, Jun 12, 2013

Answer 2

Let's say that both forms are accepted. I would've used "los" though.

Now, my problem is that although the answer is correct, the "other" meanings should be there to clarify things.

¿Me permite acompañarlo? lo a usted (male/la a usted (female)/le a usted (neuter)

¿Me permites acompañarte? a ti.

See?

I knew that acompañarte would be "a tí" but the fact that I can use le, lo, or la for usted (depending on gender, of course) and les, los, or las for ustedes is kind of confusing. Thanks for the response! - Lrtward, Jun 12, 2013

Answer 3

As JC and Chileno have stated, both work but if you want to be technically correct it would be los.

Thanks, Kiwi-Girl. This really had me confused. - Lrtward, Jun 12, 2013

:) - Kiwi-Girl, Jun 12, 2013

Answer 4

Topspinwilly, this is too much to put in a comment, so I'm adding an answer.

http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leísmo_de_cortesía

Se define como leísmo de cortesía al uso de le, les en vez de las formas lo, la, los, las para la segunda persona de cortesía del singular (usted), o segunda persona de cortesía en plural, segunda persona del plural (ustedes), ejemplo: ¿En qué puedo atenderle, señor?. Se puede llegar a considerar un mecanismo intrínseco de la lengua para evitar confusiones entre la segunda y la tercera persona en frases como. Le acompaño (a usted) al sitio donde va a esperarla (a ella).

Leísmo is not something that would translate to English, but it is a "le"ism of courtesy. It allows us to use le or les in place of lo, la, los, las for referring to usted or ustedes. It is used to avoid confusion between usted/ustedes and el/ellos. In other words, switching from los to les makes it clear that we are talking about ustedes and not ellos.

Answer 5

This is a matter of direct object Los and indirect object Les, is it not? And can I ask ....what is "Leísmo de cortesía" Leísmo.doesnt seem to be in the dictionary. Thanks for your posts.William