Board Thread:The Last Sovereign Discussion/@comment-29984007-20180410151643/@comment-31763506-20180608192845

Cool!

Yes, English only uses the "accudire/curare" sense of the cognate. Took a quick look at the etymological dictionary and the "being present" meaning doesn't seem to have ever existed for us. Although the direct translations of the Old French/Latin etymology "to stand by" has or had idiomatic forms carrying both meanings of "assistere". The phrase "stand by/with me/us" used to have the connotation of helping or aiding in addition to the more conventional modern sense of making a statement of political solidarity, or participating in a military "stand". The latest usage I could think of where "stand by us" was used to mean literally "help us" was a Sherlock Holmes story from 1904, "The Adventure of the Missing Three-Quarter". But the 1961 love song "Stand by Me" sort of preserves that meaning, and is based on a 1950s gospel hymn "Stand by Me Father" where the singer is directly imploring god for assistance. A noun form "standby", when used to refer to a person, is someone who will assist in the event of an emergency. And another noun form, "bystander", is someone who is an observer of an event. (Almost always a crime or a serious accident.) There's also the somewhat dated idiom "stand idly by" which means "don't help".

If it makes you feel better about your second language proficiency, my attempt to mentally translate "Il bambino ha assistito all'uccisione del padre ed è ancora sotto choc." in your link came out: "The boy witnessed the accusation of his father and something something chocolate."