Re: Weekly Vocab 6: to know

On Wed, 7 May 2003 13:09:42 -0400, "Mark J. Reed" <markjreed@...>
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?) 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?
Tirelat doesn't even use a verb for "know how to", but instead uses a
suffix (-rei)! The other versions of "know" are both _naza_ in Tirelat.

I don't know when I started distinguishing "know" (facts) from "know how"
(to do something), but it may have been around the time I was learning
Russian, which has a similar distinction (_znat'_ vs. _umet'_).

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