Re: Weekly Vocab 6: to know
| From: | Mark J. Reed <markjreed@...> |
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| Date: | Wednesday, May 7, 2003, 17:10 |
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On Wed, May 07, 2003 at 08:57:45AM -0700, Garrett Jones wrote:
> something interesting i noted with people's translations for the verb 'to
> know': all but one person's conlang either had more than one word for the
> english word 'to know' or omitted a word in one case.
That is interesting. Many natlangs distinguish "to know" as in
"to know a person" (Spanish conocer, German konne?) from "to know" as in
"to know a fact" (Spanish saber, German weiss?), but I haven't run across
many who distinguish "to know a fact" from "to know how to do something".
The partcular way the latter gets expressed is highly idiomatic
(English sticks the "how" in there, Spanish just uses the bare infinitive),
but they usually seem to involve the same verb as the former.
So how come we conlangers all felt the need to make this distinction?
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