>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.
My dictionaries are packed away, but
German:
(vb) _kennen_ /to be aquainted with/
(vb) _koennen_ /to know how to/
(vb) _wissen_ /to know <a fact>/
Japanese
(vb) _wakaru_ /to recognise, to know by the senses/
(vb) _dekiru_ /to know <a language>
(vb suffix) _-eru_ /to know how to/
>So how come we conlangers all felt the need to make this distinction?
Because we like to control the occurance of ambiguity in our conlangs? :)
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