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Meaning: know

Hans-Jörg Bibiko edited this page Mar 13, 2020 · 5 revisions

Illustrative Context

“They’re coming tomorrow.” — “Yes, I know.”

Target Sense

  • The most generic verb for knowing a fact, having information about something.
  • Beware of the polysemy/broad applicability of the English lexeme know .
    • Do not confuse with ‘knowing’ in the sense of being acquainted with people (or places). If your language uses a different lexeme for this sense, e.g. Italian conoscere, German kennen, then do not provide this lexeme, but only the lexeme for the IE-CoR target sense of knowing a fact. So the correct entry for Italian is only sapere (not conoscere), for German it is wissen (not kennen), for French savoir (not connaître), and so on.
    • Do not confuse with ‘knowing’ in the sense of being able to, having learnt or ‘knowing’ how to do something, often related to the ‘can’ verb (e.g. German können) in contexts such as I know how to swim, I know (how to speak) German. So again, the correct entry in German is wissen, not können.
  • The lexeme selected should be applicable to knowing an individual fact, as in the illustrative context. Do not enter other lexemes with the specific and more abstract meaning of just being generally wise, intelligent, ‘knowing many things’.
  • The default term should be neutral. Do not enter terms with specific judgement values of wisdom, ‘(all)-knowingness’, holy or sacred knowledge, etc..
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