Re: Two different opposites (again)

Nik Taylor wrote:
>Christophe Grandsire wrote:
> > En réponse à Philippe Caquant :
> > >J'ai appris l'anglais à l'école (I learned English at
> > >school)
> > >J'ai appris l'anglais à mon fils (I teached English to
> > >my son) (or maybe I taught ? can't remember)
> >
> > Note, as shown in this sentence, that when using "apprendre" for "to
> > teach", a recipient is *mandatory*. If you want to say "I teach
>English",
> > you're obliged to use "enseigner".
>Some dialects of English do exactly the same thing.  You can say "I'll
>learn you to speak good".  This is, however, highly stigmatized (hence
>my example sentence :-)).  Is the same true for that usage of
>_apprendre_?
I'm sure you intended to imply this anyway, Nik, but I think it's
sufficiently interesting to make explicit -- not only can 'learn' be used
in this way in non-standard Eng. dialects, but just as in French it
requires (at least in my experience) an explicit recipient.

The context that comes most readily to my mind is the ten-year-old
in the playground dealing some physical blow to a 'friend', with the
comment 'That'll learn yer [... not to impugn my honour, etc.]'.
(My orthographic strategy follows the spirit of Nik's example. :) )

Jonathan.

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