Re: Weekly Vocab 6: to know

From: "Mark J. Reed" <markjreed@...>
> 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.
I think "know how to do something" was English "can" before it got reduced to an
auxiliary.

    *Muke!
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