Re: What's going on here?

[JORGE JOAQUIN LLAMBIAS <jorge@INTERMEDIA.COM.AR>]

>Well, you tell me, Jorge. Did you learn or notice anything significant or
>deep and meaningful when you first learned that there was one kind of
>hacer represented by "to do" and another kind represented by "to make"?

I don't remember. I certainly see a difference now, as I see a
difference between "ser" and "estar", and in many other distinctions
that one language makes explicitly and the other doesn't.

>Because if you didn't, those words might well NOT pick out anything
>objectively different about the two different forms of "hacer", mightn't
>they?

I don't really understand what you mean by "objectively different".
The distinction can be made in Spanish, for example by using
near synonyms like "fabricar", "construir", etc. for "to make", and
many different ones for "to do", which has really a lot of different
meanings.

 >You can be
>fond of a person, but you cannot plausibly feel strong affectionate
>devotion for potato chips! This is a difference that I think is far deeper
>than "being" in a place and "being" an Australian.

I thought you were talking of the different copula uses of ser/estar.
The {zvati} meaning of "estar" (as well as the {zasti} meaning of "ser")
are really quite clearly different.

>If some distinctions weren't deeper than others, there would seem no point
>in learning any other languages to try to expand the mind.

I don't know. I enjoyed very much learning English and Esperanto,
which are the languages besides Spanish in which I can "think"
(meaning that I can formulate my thoughts directly in those
languages without going through a process of translation). I haven't
reached that point yet with Lojban, except for some short sentences
with some often used constructions. Learning other languages has
taught me a lot about my native language as well, things that I
wouldn't have noticed otherwise.

co'o mi'e xorxes