Arguments and making up

The nineteenth entry is arrepender-se, and English has no single verb that sits where it sits. We own the same two ideas and we have put them in two different rooms. « Regret » is the everyday one, and it takes a plain object: you regret a sentence, a decision, an evening. « Repent » is the other, and outside the chapel it is barely used at all — it belongs to sermons, it wants « of » in front of what is repented, and somebody who says he repents of an e-mail is being funny on purpose. Portuguese divides nothing. Arrependo-me das palavras de ontem is what anyone says the morning after a row, with no religious colouring whatever, and the very same verb carries contrition in a church without changing register. Two details follow. It is always pronominal — arrepender-se, never arrepender standing alone — and what is regretted arrives under de, exactly where « regret » takes its object bare. And the state is usually said with an adjective: estou arrependido is the ordinary way to put what English puts with a verb, « I regret it ».