Mexican Spanish to Yucatec Maya: distinguish knowing, meeting and finding out
First establish what the Spanish knowledge word means
The Diccionario del español de México separates several meanings of saber: possessing information, having learned a skill, and perceiving a flavor. Its example Sabe a limón describes taste. A Yucatec translation that selects a knowledge expression merely because the Spanish verb is saber would therefore misrepresent a food description. The object or complement matters more than the infinitive listed in a bilingual vocabulary. A cooking instruction about flavor and a statement about cooking ability require different interpretations before any target construction is chosen.
Conocer also covers both familiarity and the beginning of an acquaintance. The dictionary illustrates the latter with Conoció a su esposa en una reunión. In a family history, that sentence introduces an encounter; it does not simply establish that a person already knew his wife. For Mexican Spanish to Yucatec Maya, identify whether the source describes an existing relationship, an introduction, or information acquired at a particular moment. That decision is especially useful when the Spanish past tense compresses the beginning of a relationship into one verb.
Existing acquaintance has a different construction from becoming acquainted
Christian Lehmann’s fieldwork-based description gives a k’ahóol-en for “you know me” and t-a k’ahóol-t-h-en for “you got to know me.” These are documented examples, not proposed translations of the dictionary’s meeting sentence. Their contrast shows why the Yucatec output may need more than a change of tense when the Spanish narrative moves from familiarity to the event that established it. The extra morphology in the second example belongs to the difference between the two constructions.
Lehmann groups k’ahóol and ohel among special transitive predicates expressing states. They take a preceding person clitic, but in this construction they do not combine with auxiliaries as ordinary verbs do. Consequently, a short Yucatec statement of acquaintance should not be expanded with an auxiliary solely to imitate a Spanish conjugated verb. Nor should the person marking be treated as an optional separate pronoun: it helps build the target predicate. The documented state/event distinction is a better diagnostic than expecting every Spanish verb form to receive the same kind of Yucatec verb phrase.
Finding out is an event, not simply another spelling of knowing
Manuel Andrade’s historical grammar independently distinguishes ohel, knowledge of something, from the derived ohelt, finding something out. His discussion includes a narrative in which a fish seller learns what happened. He associates this use particularly with receiving information. For a Mexican Spanish account of when someone learned the news, the relevant question is the acquisition of knowledge; for a statement about what someone already understands, it is the continuing state. Substituting one for the other can change the sequence of the story.
Andrade also distinguishes acquaintance with a person from a derived verb of recognizing a person. Recognition on seeing someone again should therefore not automatically be interpreted as a first introduction. His description reflects earlier recorded usage and uses spellings that differ from Lehmann’s later presentation. Those differences should not be silently converted into a new paradigm. Read the attested forms as evidence for meaning and construction, while keeping separate the three practical possibilities: existing knowledge, newly acquired information, and recognition of an already familiar person.
Language references