"Lo puedo atender ahora."

Hola wchargin, I also want to thank you again for your comments. For the most part we are in agreement.

You may want to note however that according to the various sites that I checked in regards to cognates and false cognates, both are in fact pairs of words typically from two different languages that share a similar look and sound as well as the SAME ETYMOLOGICAL ORIGIN. But of course the False Cognates although sharing the same etymological origin have a quite DIFFERENT MEANING. It may be further noted that the words "FALSE FRIENDS" and "FALSE COGNATES" appear to be the same and are used interchangeably as a linguistic term according to the sites I checked. . I must admit however that I was familiar with the term Cognate but I was not familiar with the term 'False Friends".

Asi es que parece que los dos aprendimos algo nuevo. Tambien yo chequee con la Real Academia Española acerca de las varias definiciónes de la palabra "asistir". Hay muchas definiciónes diferentes dependiendo del contexto. A coninuación he proveido algunos enlaces: http://www.elearnspanishlanguage.com/vocabulary/falsosamigos.html

Falsos Amigos - False Cognates One of the great things about learning Spanish or English is that many words have the same roots in the Romance languages and English. However, there are also a great many falsos amigos, or false cognates, which look similar but are in fact very different. This is one of the biggest pitfalls for students of Spanish. There are also semi-false cognates: words that can only sometimes be translated by the similar word in the other language. http://www.brown.edu/Departments/LRC/pluma/voc_false_cognates.pdf FALSE COGNATES There are literally thousands of words that are the same or similar in appearance in English and Spanish, and have the same meaning in both languages (“cognates”). There are also, however, many instances where appearances are deceiving and words that look alike are quite different in meaning (“false cognates”). The following list includes some of the most common false cognates, also known as “false friends

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After translating the verbs ES/EN, EN/DE, ES/DE I think I finally got it. Thanks for your patience and help. Sometimes it's hard to use a foreign language in order to learn another one.

what about if you ae attending to an injured cat or dog? Then we can use the word it

The problem with this explanation is that in English you can tend to a concert. If you are a stage manager you are looking after it and paying attention to it. But if you simply mean to say that atender is for people and asistir is for things, I can just try to remember that.

so "lo" is the direct object pronoun for the formal "You/usted" and not just the direct object for it/him?

Thanks! This helps :)

Thanks, but they didn't. :(

The best explanation I can come up with is that since there is no other DO (stated or implied), "you/he/she/it" has to be the DO, since you can't have an IO without a DO. I'm guessing this verb (to attend) came from "give attention to," where "attention" was the DO and whomever/whatever you were giving your attention to was the IO. Somewhere along the line we dropped the "give" and now just say "attend to" as a verb. Since "attend" isn't the DO anymore, the "you/he/she/it" becomes the DO and there is no longer a IO, even though the "to" is still there (I can attend to you now). Does this make sense to anyone else besides me?

Okay, I'm starting to get it. But my teachers were Cuban and Colombian, and they all said "le" for Usted. I presume both forms would be okay and not sound like bad Spanish? Now that I know that both are used, I won't remember which is preferred or where.