Not related to the discussion, but I love these verbal dualities.
give/take
inherit/bequeath
and so forth!
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What fantastic reasoning! I am constantly amazed at the early and current astronomers, able to work out fairly and increasingly accurate cosmological views from pinpoints of light.
Give/take duality is significant in the study of proto-indo/european language. IIRC, some root words took opposite meanings in their descendent languages. Some have gone so far as to speculate that this suggests reciprocality was an important culture expectation around gift-giving in PIE society.
I'm in New Zealand and I've never heard that; I feel like I might have heard it somewhere when I lived in England though. There are definitely oddities in NZ though; the NZ press uses the word "trespass" in a very strange way that seems to be somehow backwards: https://www.stuff.co.nz/timaru-herald/news/126753711/timaru-...
One I've noticed that is US vs UK/NZ/AU/...: "bring him with you" vs "take him with you", which has a directional component in British usage that I can't quite explain (away from the speaker maybe?) that the Americans don't do.
From a nearby reply there is a clue that it's a new Americanism. I have to resist the urge to send a complaint... I'm not ready to become an old geezer who complains about things changing. But I admit that I grit my teeth when people talk about their 'gas bill' and I genuinely don't know whether they're talking about petrol or heating gas, or say "gotten" instead of "got", etc etc; there's no way to say "but we're supposed to use British words here" without sounding like an arse...
French has the directional component specifically for people (amener vs emmener) which could have influenced British English like many other words and phrasings, or it could have just been lost/simplified in American English.
give/take
inherit/bequeath
and so forth!
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What fantastic reasoning! I am constantly amazed at the early and current astronomers, able to work out fairly and increasingly accurate cosmological views from pinpoints of light.