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From: aeb@mcvax.UUCP (Andries Brouwer)
Newsgroups: net.nlang
Subject: Re: True Cognates, False Friends (about gift)
Message-ID: <765@mcvax.UUCP>
Date: Sat, 20-Jul-85 00:38:10 EDT
Article-I.D.: mcvax.765
Posted: Sat Jul 20 00:38:10 1985
Date-Received: Sun, 21-Jul-85 02:46:18 EDT
References: <627@panda.UUCP> <402@spar.UUCP>
Reply-To: aeb@mcvax.UUCP (Andries Brouwer)
Distribution: net
Organization: CWI, Amsterdam
Lines: 29

In article <402@spar.UUCP> ellis@spar.UUCP (Michael Ellis) writes:
>>>How about the word gift, which in German means poison.
>>
>>Even better, in Swedish, "gift" as a noun means "poison," as
>>an adjective, "married."
>
>  According to the OED, these words really ARE all cognate.
>  ...
>  Since there were two words for gift, the stem *ghifti- apparently
>  developed wildly specialized meanings {note that draft/draught also has
>  many meanings}, distinguished from each other by gender and number:
>    
>    Feminine: `what one gives upon marriage' => `payment for wife'
>    Neuter:   `what one gives to cause sickness/death' => `poison'
>    Plural:   `many things given when somebody marries' => `wedding'
>

  I do not really agree with this latter section.
Gift meaning poison is in all germanic languages a loan from German,
and in OHG it is a learned translation loan from Greek/Latin dosis.
(A euphemism just like poison itself, derived from Latin potio (potion).)
  This meaning was not distinguished from the neutral one by gender or
number: in old german one has the neuter sg. Gift `gift, transfer, poison',
and in old icelandic one has the feminines gipt, gipta, gipting
`gift, good luck, marriage' (all singular). In other words: there
was no synchronic variation of gender but a diachronic variation;
I don't know why the originally feminine word became neuter
(also Latin dos and Greek dosis are feminines) but both before and after
the change the gender was independent of the meaning.