Timeline for "make" and "do" - how to make sure you take the right one?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
9 events
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| Sep 1, 2016 at 13:18 | comment | added | StoneyB on hiatus | @Em1 I did not agree that "to make" equals "to create" -- I said that the contrast between "do" and "make" tends to split along the 'perform'/'create' axis, but that that is no more than a tendency. In all of your examples 'create'--to cause something to be the case or come into existence which was not the case or in existence before--is a better approximation of the semantic domain of 'make' than 'perform' would be. | |
| Sep 1, 2016 at 13:14 | comment | added | Em1 | ....if you as a native English speaker — and if I'm not mistaken also sophisticated in (English) language history — can see any conclusion to the question at hand, based on the understanding that "make" is actually not equal to "create"? — On a side note, I read an article about the verbatim translation "to make sense" into German ("Sinn machen") and a discussion about why the German translation is completely amiss, based on the fact that the German "machen" in fact is a false friend to "make". This seems to be the cause why it's hard to grasp the meaning of "to make". | |
| Sep 1, 2016 at 13:12 | comment | added | Em1 | @StoneyB In your answer you agreed that "to make" equals "to create". However, it just came to my attention that — from an English perspective — this isn't really true. There are just a very few examples where this is the case, like "to make products". Usually, "to make" is rather in the sense of "to achieve", e.g. "to make the team", "to make money", or "to make sure". Or in the phrase "to make sense" it's more about "It's meaningful" rather than "to create meaning". That being said, understanding this matter doesn't explain why you "make the table" but "do the flowers". I'm wondering.... | |
| Dec 5, 2014 at 10:51 | vote | accept | Em1 | ||
| Jan 6, 2014 at 14:31 | comment | added | StoneyB on hiatus | @FumbleFingers Right. But your nose is informed by several decades of immersion in the language. I'd be surprised if you had to travel an unfamiliar route of this sort once a year; and if you did, you'd know another way to get there. That's not the case with our learners. | |
| Jan 6, 2014 at 13:36 | comment | added | FumbleFingers | If I write anything "important" these days, it's always on the computer - so a quick check is usually easy. But I imagine I'm much the same as everyone else - nearly all my language production is spoken (and relatively trivial, at that). To a considerable extent I think learning the "correct" use of prepositions, etc., is like learning a route used to be before satnavs. If it was vital I didn't take a wrong turn on any single occasion, I'd check it all out on the map first. Otherwise, I'd just "follow my nose", and only bother to learn those junctions where that approach didn't work. | |
| Jan 6, 2014 at 0:46 | comment | added | StoneyB on hiatus | @FumbleFingers Oh, sure; it's probably around 2:1 - but if you're writing something important do you roll the dice for a 67% chance, or do you take the time to look it up and have 100% chance of getting it right? | |
| Jan 5, 2014 at 23:50 | comment | added | FumbleFingers | I wouldn't want to get bogged down in an endless list of "ambivalent" usages - but for me at least, make the dinner and do the dinner, for example, are pretty much interchangeable variants of prepare the dinner. I also think it might be slightly more useful to think in terms of the do/make choice being more dependent on whether the primary focus is on action/result. And the "predictive value" may be less than 100% reliable, but it's certainly significantly higher than a "by chance" 50%, so things aren't quite as bad as your final paragraph suggests. | |
| Jan 5, 2014 at 20:35 | history | answered | StoneyB on hiatus | CC BY-SA 3.0 |