In the Know

A French student of mine, a banker but philosopher at heart, recently asked what the “k” and “w” were doing on either end of the word, “know.” C’est un bon question, I replied, stalling for time, though realizing fairly instantly, and admitting: I did not KNOW.

I followed up by asking him why French had two words for “know” – one (connaitre) for being acquainted with people and places, and another one (savoir) for facts, general ideas and basic experience. His reply was similar to mine, in that he didn’t know; but then, with a Gallic shrug, he added (supply your own French accent here) that maybe two words for “know” are necessary -- but maybe they are just tradition.

Hmm: necessary, or tradition -- Which is it? Perhaps not as thought-provoking as Clairol’s old ads, “Does she or doesn’t she? or “Is it true blondes have more fun?” but I decided to look into the whole “know” question anyway.

One thought I’ve come to is that there may have been a time when Old English, say, 1,500 years ago, also had two words for “know”; but back then the language also had genders and case endings for nouns, two forms for “you” and other complexities. English eventually (and thankfully!) shed those and other features and so, if there ever were two “knows,” we have gotten along just fine with our one “know” for literally ages:

“Do you know the way to San Jose?”
“Hey, whaddya know?!”
“Johnny, I Hardly Knew Ye”
“What did he know and when did he know it?”
“It’s not what you know; it’s who you know.”

How easy with the one-word-fits-all kind of thing (except for in the biblical sense, which is now considered archaic). And not one of my foreign students has ever complained about the paucity of “knows” in English.

Oddly enough, many widely spoken languages agree with the French that two “knows” are better (or necessary, or tradition) than one. To see this globally, grab a map and color in all of Western Europe, Russia, China, Japan, South and Central America and any former French, Dutch or Portuguese colonies in Africa and elsewhere. (I admit, I’m not accounting for India’s languages, but that’s too confusing.) Still, at the very least the number of “two know” language speakers comes to more than 2 billion people, versus the clearly out-numbered half billion English speakers using one. So, in the spirit of, “50,000 Elvis Fans Can’t Be Wrong?” should we reconsider?

The sheer diversity and quantity of “two-know” speakers are what make me think that perhaps English used to have two “knows,” just as we once used two words for “you”: “you” for the formal, and “thou” (like “tu” in Spanish and French, and “du” in German) for the informal, as in, “But thou O Lord, have mercy upon us,” (from the King James Bible – which, I agree sound anything but informal). In any case, whatever English lost in dropping “thou” -- perhaps a touch of linguistic intimacy – we have gained as a culture by the simple, democratic nature of “you” and in not having to worry about offending an elder or recent acquaintance. But I digress: with a second “know,” I can’t think of anything that might have been lost.

One difference might be in introductions: The Frank Sinatra song, “Have You Met Miss Jones?” might be otherwise translated as, “Do You Know Miss Jones?” (Perhaps that lingering archaic biblical reference is another reason we phrase introductions the way we do.) Then there’s the phrase, “It’s not what you know, it’s who* you know:” Okay, it’s a cliché, but at least it’s got some symmetry. The French, on the other hand, must say, “Ce n’est pas ce qu’on sait, mais qui on connait,” which means, “It is not what one knows but whom one is acquainted with,” which completely loses the What-You-Know-Who-You-Know rhythm, and the phrase simply becomes a truism. (*Grammar hounds: let’s not choose this place to quibble over “who” vs. “whom,” okay? But I’m happy you spotted that.)

To find out why “know” is spelled with a silent “k” and “w” required a little search in the dictionary (I like the Random House American Heritage one):
The word began with the Indo-European root (and these roots are about 8,000 years old), “gno,” which meant “to know.” The early Germans (a barbarian people we call the Saxons) took that word and stretched it out a bit to “gnow” and later … to the word (and pronouncing the “k”) “know.” The Saxon tribes brought this word from northern Europe to the post-Roman Britain (450 A.D.), and there the word merged unchanged into Old English and, albeit with pronunciation changes, into today’s word.

The beauty of English is that it’s not a pure language – it’s a hybrid, with a Germanic core and Latin overlay, with a strong streak of practicality allowing for word and pronunciation changes, and a mind-boggling breadth of expression. And unlike pure languages (from Spanish to Icelandic to Basque), English speakers themselves can call the shots on what’s useful and what’s not. So if people decide to root out, or add on, it’s pretty much just done. No Ministry of Language to say if it’s okay or not. Just voce popular. (That’s not to say there aren’t standards to be upheld – hence, this blog.) Still, it’s got a flexibility I haven’t found in any other language.

But back to “know”: anyone who knows German today also knows that they no longer use “know.” Instead, being a “two-know” language, they use “kennen” for people and places, and “wissen” for facts and things, with “wissen” rooted in the ancient Sanskrit word, “veda,” meaning “knowledge.” Other Germanic languages (from Scandinavia, Holland, etc.) use similar words. And though our words “wise” and “wit” come from that, English still has the only “k-n-o-w” verb I know of.

And just so you k-n-o-w, French and other Latin languages also started out with “gno,” but ended up attaching the prefix, “co,” (meaning “with”) to the Romanized, “gnoscere,” creating, “cognoscere,” which is still Italian for knowing people and places. The French, Spanish and Portuguese formed their particular variations from that. The Latin (and again, still Italian) “sapere,” for knowing facts and ideas, and which became “savoir” in French and “saber” in Spanish and Portuguese, actually first meant, “to taste or perceive.” Would that mean that those cultures originally equated good taste with knowledge? I can’t help but think they would agree.

As for the “necessary vs. tradition” question: World languages other than English may find it hard to accept that they don’t need to distinguish one “know” from another – but it does seem a mere tradition at this point. Even Scottish English, which still uses the Germanic “kennen,” uses that word for people, places, facts and ideas, just as we use “know.”

Still, given how truly ancient the root words for all these “knows” are, it’s certainly possible to think that at one time it was necessary to distinguish between what a person knew from experience and memorization, and what the same person knew from visual recognition. But is the need for that distinction going the way of our little toe?

Evolutionarily speaking, English may have jumped the gun with our one “know” by millennia.

Just so you know.