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srean • yesterday at 7:16 PM • 3 replies • view on HN

I have always wondered about this. The verb for the first person is to 'see'. To a third person you 'show'

For the first person there is 'listen' (or 'hear'). Does English not have a corresponding word for the third person ?

What about Germanaic or Nordic languages ? Do they have a third person analogue of 'listen' ?

Replies

munificent • today at 1:25 AM

Interesting. This is indeed a funny gap in the language.

"Show" work for any sort of visual thing you might want to present to someone. It's a bitransitive verb: it takes both a direct and indirect object in addition to the subject:

    "Bill showed Marsha her new car."
     ^^^^        ^^^^^^ ^^^^^^^^^^^ 
     Subject     D.Obj  Indirect Obj.
For an auditory thing, our common words seem to subdivide it based on the sound source: "tell" for presenting speech to someone, "play" for presenting something musical:

    "Amy told Fred a story."
    "Bill played Fred a song."
"Play" has grown to encompass recorded audio, so is probably the closest thing to an auditory equivalent to "show".

There is also "audition" which can be used transitively, but I don't think it works bitransitively. You can say "I auditioned a bunch of saxophone recordings.", but you can't audition something to someone.

onestay42 • yesterday at 7:45 PM

AFAIK listen used to be used therefor[sic] but it has fallen out of use nowadays. From wiktionary:

> Listen the watchman’s cry upon the wall.

Edit: formatting

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smlavine • yesterday at 7:38 PM

"tell"?

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