The verb "to know (facts)" in Spanish is saber, which is highly irregular in the first person present indicative:

[table]
[tr][td]I know  [/td][td](yo) sé[/td][/tr]
[tr][td]you know  [/td][td](tú) sabes[/td][/tr]
[tr][td]he/she knows  [/td][td](él/ella) sabe[/td][/tr]
[/table]
So where does sé come from? It appears to be post-Latin, because the conjugation of Latin sapere is regular:

[table]
[tr][td]I know/sense/taste  [/td][td]ego sapio[/td][/tr]
[tr][td]you know/sense/taste  [/td][td]tu sapis[/td][/tr]
[tr][td]he/she knows/senses/tastes  [/td][td]is/ea sapit[/td][/tr]
[/table]
Interestingly, French savoir has what looks to be a related irregularity; unlike the Spanish version, however, it appears in all singular forms:

[table]
[tr][td]I know  [/td][td]je sais[/td][/tr]
[tr][td]you know  [/td][td]tu sais[/td][/tr]
[tr][td]he/she knows  [/td][td]il/elle sait[/td][/tr]
[/table]
This would suggest that the irregularity was forming around the same time that Spanish and French began to diverge.

So one has to ask how the irregularity came about, and also why did it "filter through" differently in Spanish than in French?

Interesting question, Salsamore! ...although, shouldn’t your subject read porqué, rather than "por que"?

I found a website with a fascinating comparison chart of the Romance languages and their Latin roots:

Comparisons among the languages

There may be a clue among the rest of the data on the site somewhere… Our own resident Dr. Language probably already knows the answer, though!

-Tim

Orbis Latinus is a great reference site I found during this search.  (Having a sick child and being up anyway, it’s not really wasting time on the Internet, is it? )

The page on irregular verb forms for Spanish covers, of course, Saber, among various other verbs.  It’s interesting to me to note that the link to ancient Latin was preserved in the subjunctive and (some of) the imperative forms…

And what’s up with the present participle in the French, sachant...?  There were a few other forms of the verb that had this kind of transformation from savoir.  Could this be an even stranger link between the two verbs in ancient Latin, Classical scire and Late Latin sapere?

-Tim

Doesn’t "Timothy" mean "lame" in Biblical Greek?

What a misnomer!  I looked for that sort of reference al morning.

(I’m tired.  I’ll get to it later!)

Sitran

Thank God you’re there in times like these!

Salsamore and Tim,

I don’t know the answer, but the heading should be "No sé por qué..."

[quote author=uncronopio link=board=translate;num=1070232499;start=0#4 date=12/01/03 at 07:56:55]I don’t know the answer, but the heading should be "No sé por qué..."

Thanks uncron ... the distinction between por que, por qué, porque and porqué still gives me fits. Let me know if you’ve seen any good webpages on the subject because I must’ve searched for half an hour to no avail before I posted my original message. I thought of giving up and just writing the subject line in English but the Spanish version is so much more melodic. 8)

[quote author=Tim Ward link=board=translate;num=1070232499;start=0#2 date=12/01/03 at 02:16:36]The page on irregular verb forms for Spanish covers, of course, Saber, among various other verbs.  It’s interesting to me to note that the link to ancient Latin was preserved in the subjunctive and (some of) the imperative forms…

It appears that the voiced stop b replaced the unvoiced stop p when it followed the open vowel a, but that the original p was preserved following the more closed vowels e and u. (If you try it out, you’ll find that it takes a sliver more effort to stop an a than an e or u, which would explain the softening of the consonant.) That would lead me to believe that there was once an intermediate form sepo "I know" in old Spanish, which would explain the imperative forms sepa, sepamos and sepan. If we start from the supposed base form sepo, then these imperative forms indeed follow the rule of taking the -o off the first-person singular and adding the opposite conjugative endings (i.e., using the -ar endings on an -er or -ir verb).

From sepo then, it would just take a few lazy speakers to beget the clipped form sé. Since this form was still different from the other five in the present tense, it would’ve stuck.

So why did the vowel in sapio change, or more specifically become more closed, in the first place? I would’ve thought because it was followed by a closed vowel. (This is the same phenomenon that caused old English gos to have its plural form gosis change to gøsis, eventually giving us modern "goose" and "geese.") However, the other two singular forms sapis and sapit have a closed vowel in the second syllable as well. Maybe the one in sapio was somehow "stronger"?

By the way, check out Verbix.com for a seriously rocking verb conjugator.

¿Por qué ‘por qué’?

-Tim

[quote author=Tim Ward link=board=translate;num=1070232499;start=0#7 date=12/01/03 at 16:08:04]¿Por qué ‘por qué’?

Thanks! This website helps a lot (even with me having to overcome my lack of fluency to read it ). Obviously even native Spanish speakers have trouble with this one so I’m not so ashamed I didn’t get it right the first time. ::)

In Portuguese we also say não sei for I don´t know.  It´s interesting that kids, when they are learning to talk, fall into the trap of conjugating the verb as if it were irregular and come up with the nonexistant não sabo, which, by the way, became the motto of a McDonald´s TV commercial two or three years ago.
Regards,
Brazilian dude