Re: USAGE: Speak-Say-Tell

On Wed, 8 Dec 2004 21:13:04 +0100, Philip Newton <philip.newton@...>
wrote:

>On Wed, 8 Dec 2004 11:30:26 -0700, Muke Tever <hotblack@...> wrote:
>> On Wed, 8 Dec 2004 12:23:46 -0500, Geoff Horswood
<geoffhorswood@...> wrote:
>> > What about other natlangs?
>>
>> In Spanish the ordinary words seem to be "hablar" (speak) and "decir"
>> (say, tell).
>
>German also has this two-way division into "sprechen" (speak) and
>"sagen" (say, tell). There's also "erzählen", but that's more "tell"
>in the sense of "recount", as in "tell a story", not so much "tell
>someone that [X happened]".
I had an inclination that the original meaning of English "tell"
was "recount, narrate."  Now I'm confirmed by the MSN Dictionary: "Old
English tellan , from a prehistoric Germanic word meaning 'put in order'
(both in narration and counting), which is also the ancestor of English
tale and talk" (http://encarta.msn.com/dictionary_/tell.html).

There is another primary usage of English "tell" - to issue an instruction
or a command.  For example, "I told him to keep that door shut!"  Perhaps
the development was like this: recount > remind > command.  In the sentence
above, "him" is actually an indirect object.

- Rob