Work work work

[tahnan]

Just a quick note: if anyone reading my livejournal is the native speaker of a language other than English (see here for a discussion of that construction), post and remind me? I might have the occasional question to ask about the facts in your native language. (At the moment, I'm trying to be sure I know the difference between connaitre/savoir, kennen/wissen, and conocer/saber.)

Comments

[touchstone.livejournal.com]

I'm almost but not quite totally unlike a native speaker of German. But as I recall, we were taught that 'wissen' is 'to possess factual knowledge of', where 'kennen' is more like 'to have personal experience with'.

So, you might not know (kennen) a person personally, but still know (wissen) something about them.

[touchstone.livejournal.com]

Duh; I only mentioned that because I was going to ask a question, and then I forgot to ask it :)

How common is that sort of distinction? Are there many languages that have the idea of 'degrees' of knowing something built into the structure of the language?

[tahnan.livejournal.com]

Right, of course--but I wanted to know for certain whether "Ich weiss Johannes" is indeed entirely ungramamtical (as opposed to "Ich kenne Johannes"). Our department's German speaker assures me it is. But I have a lingering feeling that, while "Je connais Marie" means that I know Mary, "Je sais Marie", rather than being ungrammatical, does have a meaning, namely that I, heh heh, know Mary, heh heh, Biblical sense and all that.

As to how common the distinction is: got me. I'm only starting to investigate it. But it's not really a "degree" of knowledge; it's really a very different kind of knowledge. I can know (kennen) Mary very well, or I can know Mary just a little; I can entirely know (wissen) who plays for the Red Sox, or I can only partly know who plays for them (like, um, Johnny Damon, and...Nomar got traded, I think, and...).

The difference between "Ich kenne die Marke" and "Ich weiss die Marke" doesn't have to do with how well I know the brand, but instead with being familiar with the brand versus knowing what the brand of this object here is (as if you held up a shoe and said, "I wonder who makes this").

But at any rate, I don't know what non-Indo-European languages make this distinction.

[touchstone.livejournal.com]

Sorry, I left out a couple steps there. Those were semi-distinct questions, because the first one reminded me that I'd heard that there was some language in which 'I know because I was a direct witness to the occurance of', 'I know because I was told by a reliable source', 'I know because it's general knowledge whose source I no longer remember' and 'I know because it seems to make sense even though I don't have any direct evidence' all had their own verbs or were somehow made clear through some other method (like a tense?)

[tahnan.livejournal.com]

Oh! Yes. There are definitely languages that do that sort of thing, and I have no idea which ones or how many.

I do know, though, that the distinction you mention here doesn't appear in the form of multiple verbs; typically it's a particle, either affixed to the verb or to the sentence (that is: I can't recall which it is; not: both behaviors are seen in language, though that may be true too). So you get a difference between "John fell-ka", meaning that I saw him fall; "John fell-na", meaning that someone told me John fell; "John fell-du", meaning that I saw that John had scraped knees and therefore I infer he must have fallen.... Not that those are the actual morphemes, but you get the idea.

So: yes, languages do that. Norvin, who pops in occasionally, knows far, far more about it than I do.

[touchstone.livejournal.com]

Nifty. I have to admit that my fascination with things like that lies mainly in thinking about what sort of social structure would have created the need for it (and why English discarded or never developed it). If I were to ever get deeply interested in linguistics, I think it'd be from the anthropology perspective of language-as-a-cultural-artifact.

[tahnan.livejournal.com]

Though see my rant in cqs for some dangers in taking language as a reflection of the culture too seriously. I mean, some languages also mark case on their nouns, and some (e.g. English) don't, but does that say anything deep about the cultures?

[touchstone.livejournal.com]

Oh, absolutely. I think it's at best overly optimistic and more generally outright specious to claim that one can justify a specific claim about a culture purely on the grounds of a single fact about their language.

But at the same time, language (and particularly the changes a language experiences over time as a result of changes in usage, introduction of new concepts, etc...and not including the changes from other effects like general laziness and drift, which I'm sure there are proper technical terms for) IS an artifact of culture, just as much as any purely physical artifact would be. It's another source of data...so long as you don't go off the deep end and start making conclusions on the basis of too little material. People who actually know their stuff in anthropology (which includes neither myself nor Moore, but unlike Moore, I don't claim otherwise...) are used to dealing with 'suggests' and 'implies' rather than 'demonstrates' or 'proves'.

Usually, it's looking at word derivations that reminds me of this the most.

[janne.livejournal.com]

Native norwegian here, but that wouldn't help with any of the slashes above :)

[tahnan.livejournal.com]

Janne, you goddess of Norway! I knew someone out there had to be non-Anglophonic.

Does Norwegian have the same distinction as German? That is, do you say "I know John" and "I know that John left" with the same verb, as we do in English, or with two different verbs?

[janne.livejournal.com]

That would be kjenner/vet respectively, so quite like German.
-Jeg kjenner John
-Jeg vet at John dro

[tahnan.livejournal.com]

And "Jeg kjenner at John dro" and "Jeg vet John" aren't good sentences of Norwegian? Or do they mean something, just not what the above two sentences mean?

[janne.livejournal.com]

I suppose one could construe 'Jeg kjenner John dro' to mean something like 'I can sense that John left', but I can't really think of an everyday use for that :) The second sentence is meaningless. (Kjenne is also a word for feeling or sensing, as well as 'being aquainted with' or 'being familiar with')

just plain ol' Spanish here

[toonhead-npl.livejournal.com]

Although with almost no one else around to speak it with, it's evaporating. (I didn't know native languages could do that.)

Re: just plain ol' Spanish here

[tahnan.livejournal.com]

Really? You were raised as a Spanish speaker? I had no idea. (What dialect?)

Yeah, unfortunately even a native language can evaporate. Do you remember it well enough to know whether I'm right that "I know John" and "I know that John left" are, respectively...um, I can't translate these sentences properly, but they're "conocer Juan" and "saber que Juan..."?

And whether "saber Juan" and "conocer que Juan..." have any meaning at all, or whether they're just plain Bad Spanish?

[aatish2.livejournal.com]

Hindi. It was my first and in some very odd ways I'm still more fluent in it than english.

[tahnan.livejournal.com]

Of course! Except that Hindi is so distant from anything that I'm prepared to look at yet...but I should definitely add it to my list. As a quick sort of pre-exploration question, I'll ask you what I asked Janne: does Hindi use different words for "know (a person)" and "know (a fact)"?

[aneequs.livejournal.com]

The occasional question keeps John awake.

[tahnan.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I noticed I was using that and consciously decided not to footnote it. It's so true in my case, though--these CQs, which occasionally are questions and occasionally are propositions, depending on whose theory I look at, do keep me awake.

[leighjen.livejournal.com]

The occasional cup of coffee keeps John awake.

[tayefeth.livejournal.com]

AFAIK (and I'm not a native speaker), Dutch makes the same distinction as German. That is,
Ik ken Jan. => I know John.
Ik weet dat Jan tot Woensdag weg blijft. => I know that John is away until Wednesday.

I can't imagine saying "Ik weet Jan".