Criminal law

Spanish la tentativa and our « tentative » have parted company completely. La tentativa is the attempt: the offence begun and not finished, and punishable in its own right — una tentativa de homicidio is an attempted killing. Our adjective means provisional, not yet settled, and that is provisional in Spanish: a tentative answer is una respuesta provisional. The verb behind the Spanish noun, intentar, is the everyday one for trying anything at all — intenté abrir la puerta — so the word sits in the courtroom and in the kitchen at once, and never means « not quite sure ».