Re: Weekly Vocab 6: to know

* H. S. Teoh said on 2003-05-07 20:29:07 +0200
> On Wed, May 07, 2003 at 01:09:42PM -0400, Mark J. Reed wrote:
> > 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?)
zu kennen "konw a person"
zu ko¨nnen "know how to do something, as in can, could"
zu wissen "know a fact"

> > 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".
>
> This is distinguished in my L1, Hokkien. /tsai1/ is to know a fact, but /e
> hiao2/ is to know how to do something. The latter also applies to acquired
> skills or tastes; one might say that a child /beh hiao1 jiak t_hsai/ -
> "hasn't acquired a taste for vegetables", literally meaning "doesn't know
> how to eat vegetables".
Eeeenteresting :)

> Furthermore, to know a person is /bat/. So you /tsai1/ that something has
> happened, but you /bat/ a person, and you /e hiao2/ to do something.
>
> > So how come we conlangers all felt the need to make this distinction?
>
> 'Cos my L1 *does* make that distinction? :-)
Ditto for me, and Taruven also has the three way distinction though
I don't know what the word for "to be familiar with, to know <someone>"
is yet:

In ASCIIfied orthography:

a:r   /A:r/  "to know <something>"
-lann /lAn:/ "to be able to do <something>, to be capable of <something>"

Though I can't remember whether -lann suffixes to verbs or nouns or both
right now. (The vocab-files are at home.)

In Norwegian the triplet is:

å vite "to know <something>"
å kunne "to know how to do <something>", same as English _can, could_
å kjenne "to know <someone>"

The last two probably derives from the same word.


t.

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