Re: Weekly Vocab 6: to know

Quoting Stone Gordonssen <stonegordonssen@...>:

> >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>/
German _können_ (_koennen_) isn't really a separate word for this - it's also
the modal "can"*. For the record, you can do a very similar triad in Swedish:

_att känna_ "to know (someone)" (also = "to feel")
_att kunna_ "to know how to" (also modal "can", like _können_)
_att veta_ "to know (a fact)"

* What in the ergativity is the infinitive of "can"? "To can" appears to mean
something else ... The English modals appear not to deign to have any
infinitives.

                                             Andreas

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