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A similar distinction between different kinds of knowledge is found in several European languages also, and I'm sure all over the world. In German: koennen: "to know by personal acquaintance" wissen: "to know by learning or authority" Given that one *can* break it down as I just did in English, no doubt one can in the interlingua also. But this seems a wee bit English-parochial. Even English used to make this distinction with different words. As for ser and estar, I don't think it will come up too often, simply because the interlingua doesn't use "to be" very much. You would say, "I located-at work", "I emotional-state-verb well", "I Australian-state", "I work-as a data analyst", and so on. I imagine sentences like the headline you mention will require special handling in the programs that parse Spanish for translation to the interlingua. It'll have to be translated across much like you did in the English version. For what it's worth, though, Lexical Semantics does come up with an equivalent for "ser", though I forget what it is at the moment. (Search on "copula" in the monograph.) I can't think of an equivalent for "estar" off the top of my head. You'd need some sort of state-verb meaning, "having the quality of". There may be one already, I just don't recall it offhand. --- In Ladekwa@yahoogroups.com, Geoff Hacker <geoff.hacker@g...> wrote: > > Hello, > > Ladekwa--and, I presume, its successor Latejami--has shown itself to be > proficient at making all the lexical distinctions that English- speakers are > accustomed to making. It also makes many grammatical distinctions that > non-English speakers are accustomed to making, such as degrees of > politeness, topicalisation or voice changes. But what about some important > non-English lexical distinctions? I am thinking here of the Spanish > distinction between ser and estar, both of which would translate into > English as "to be", yet which make what to the Spanish-speakers is an > important distinction between essence and accident. You "estar" at work > today, or you "estar" well at the moment, but you "ser" an Australian or you > "ser" a data analyst. In most cases, this distinction could probably be > ignored in the interlingua, because "ser" and "estar" have customary usages > that can be identified from context, i.e. translate with "ser" when talking > about nationality or occupation but "estar" when talking about location, > condition or emotion--but the distinction could not be ignored in every > case. An editorial in La Nacion once had the headline "Somos o estamos > indeciso?", or "Are we indecisive, or merely undecided?" How would the > interlingua make this kind of distinction when it had to be made? > > Geoff >