Re: Weekly Vocab 6: to know

Quoting Stone Gordonssen <stonegordonssen@...>:

> >zu kennen "know a person"
> >zu ko¨nnen "know how to do something, as in can, could"
> >zu wissen "know a fact"
>
> I listed the same German verbs yesterday, and was immediately shot
> down
> because _koennen_ is "modal" only, whether or not the associated verb
> is
> spoken or intuited.
You overinterpret what I said. I said that 1) it _also_ functions as a modal
auxiliary, and 2) in the particular example you gave, I (a non-native speaker)
feel it to be modal.

Duden, a prestige German lexicon, gives _Er kann alles_ as an example of a
sentence where _können_ is a full verb.

                                                           Andreas