# That'll  larn 'im



## gordon e-d

I know that dialects can carry remnants of language history.
Is this the case with the confusion between "to teach" and "to learn" or is it simply a matter of inadequate education  ?  
Young children have trouble distinguishing the difference between the concepts and learners of English also  confuse them.
( _Apprendre_ in French normally means "to learn" but is also used to mean "to teach" when referring to   a skill).)


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## Baranxi

After checking with wiktionary and OED, it apparently is interference from a dialect standard - 'to learn' (intransitive) comes from _leornian_, and 'to learn' (transitive) from _læran_. 

(As a side note, while German preserves both lernen (to learn) and lehren (to teach), there is a similar usage with 'lernen').


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## gordon e-d

Baranxi said:


> After checking with wiktionary and OED, it apparently is interference from a dialect standard - 'to learn' (intransitive) comes from _leornian_, and 'to learn' (transitive) from _læran_.
> 
> (As a side note, while German preserves both lernen (to learn) and lehren (to teach), there is a similar usage with 'lernen').


Thank you Baranxi. but I  don't understand your explanation. What does "interference from a dialect standard"  mean ?


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## berndf

Middle English still had the two verbs, _lernen _(<_leornian_) and _leren _(<_læran_). But there are many attested uses of _lernen_ in the sense of _to teach_. An echo of this use in modern English is the adjective _learned_ from Middle English _lerned_ which was used as an alternative to _lered_ (=_taught_, i.e. _educated_).

Confusion of the two verbs (which probably originated from passive and causative forms of the same stem in ancient times, according to Grimm) seems to have a long history in all West-Germanic languages (English, German, Dutch, and Frisian).

The removal of _to learn=to teach_ from the standard seems to be a relatively recent development (within the last 500 years, or even less). My *guess* is that this is probably due to the influence of grammarians on the definition of standard languages who insisted on "logical" use of words. This is maybe similar to double negations (_there ain't no water_) which are considered wrong for reasons of logic in standard language but which are very common in dialectal speech.


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## gordon e-d

Thank you.
That is quite clear now.


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## colophonius

Russian also has a verb with both meanings, so this phenomenon is not confined to the Germanic languages. Polar differences like this frequently lead to confusion (cf. BE slow down --> slow up; up to you --> down to you [used wrongly]; bring/take [used interchangeably] etc.).


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## colophonius

berndf said:


> This is maybe similar to double negations (_there ain't no water_) which are considered wrong for reasons of logic in standard language but which are very common in dialectal speech.



Which only goes to prove that 'standard' languages are constructs, which can therefore be made to conform to logic, as opposed to 'dialects' which reflect real useage. The so-called double negative prohibition does not apply in many languages (Russian, Afrikaans etc.), so it is not a logical prohibition _per se_, but a reflection of what grammarians think _should _be correct.


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## berndf

It might be interesting to note that the opposite confusion happens too. In Dutch _leren_ can mean _to teach_ and _to learn_.


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## Arrius

berndf said:


> It might be interesting to note that the opposite confusion happens too. In Dutch _leren_ can mean _to teach_ and _to learn_.


 
and _leer _in Afrikaans also means both _to teach_ and _to learn_ (and also _leather, ladder,_ and _doctrine_ - a very economical language, Afrikaans!)


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## vatrahos

The same confusion (or perhaps coalescence of meanings) also exists in Modern Greek.

Ο πατέρας μου μού *έμαθε* να κολυμπώ = My father taught ("learned") me to swim


In an informal setting -- that is to say, outside of academia -- the verb *μαθαίνω* ("learn") is used much (much much) more commonly than *διδάσκω* ("teach").

And while I don't speak Bulgarian fluently, I can vouch for the same phenomenon in that language as well. The verb *уча* means initially "learn" but comes to mean "teach" as well. For example we could say:

кой те *научи* да пишеш така? = Who taught ("learned") you to write like that?

It seems from the other posts that this characteristic is actually pretty common.

Thanks for the interesting thread!


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## qdb

Hello.
In Tatar(a Turkic) language this two meanings are clearly separated:

uqo - read/learn
uqot - make to read / teach / make to learn
oyran - learn
oyrat - make to learn / teach

This is modern official Tatar language. These words are written in official this way: укы, укыт, өйрән, өйрәт .
May be there is also oyra version instead of oyran in some dialect.

By the way I think uqo is same/similar/{from one root} word with Russian uchi (учи).


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## Maroseika

qdb said:


> By the way I think uqo is same/similar/{from one root} word with Russian uchi (учи).




  Strange enough, but this is өйрән that is probably connected with the IE stem (not Russian, of course).

First of all, укы, укыт are purely Turc, comp.:

Kazakh:
to teach, to learn (учить, учиться )* - оқу *(and үйрету - see below about this stem)
teacher - *оқытушы*
student - *оқушы*

Turkish: 
to study - *okumak*
but
to teach - öğretmek


According to Sevortyan's etym. Turc dictionary this stem - *оқa - *originally meant "to read loudly" < to cry, to call < onomatopoetic "o". There are parallels for this stem in Tungus, Mongolian, Korean*. *Same semantic tie between "to call", "to name" and "to read"  etymologists see in other languages such as Persian, Armenian and Hebrew.

As for öğretmek and өйрән, өйрәт, they origin from the word meaning "to tame" (comp. Kasakh қолға үйрету - to tame, Tatar өйрәтелгән - tame). 
Further it goes back to the words *o-* (to know) and *og *(idea, thought). Some etymologists compare them with IE stem *euk *- to get used to (> Russian ук > учить; Lith. jaukìnti - to  train, to tame).


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## Hutschi

berndf said:


> ...
> The removal of _to learn=to teach_ from the standard seems to be a relatively recent development (within the last 500 years, or even less). My *guess* is that this is probably due to the influence of grammarians on the definition of standard languages who insisted on "logical" use of words. This is maybe similar to double negations (_there ain't no water_) which are considered wrong for reasons of logic in standard language but which are very common in dialectal speech.



My mother usually uses "lernen+dativ" in the sense of teaching, she never said "lehren" if she wanted to teach me something.
"Ich lerne dir, wie man das macht." (Literally "I'll learn you how to do it." similar to Mark Twain's sentence below.) So it took me a long time to see that this form is extinct, and even more to use "lehren+accusative". I only knew it in phrases like "Ich werde dich Mores lehren".

In English Mark Twain used "to learn" in the meaning "to teach" in "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer"
_"It's easy" whispered Tom, "*I'll learn you*." 

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer_


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## Karton Realista

In Polish learn - uczyć się, teach - uczyć, nauczać. The source of confusion here is, I think, obvious. 
In Polish you can either "teach" or "teach yourself" (=learn). It is perfectly logical, but not so much to English speakers.


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## Panceltic

I think it's similar in all of the Slavic languages. There is a verb 'to teach', and 'to learn' is expressed as a reflexive construction, i.e. 'to teach yourself'.


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## adebo

*Moderator note: Moved from this other thread where learn/teach has only been a side remark.*



berndf said:


> This is not correct. You have probably only looked for OE attestations. The shift happened, as I wrote, in ME.



(I hope this exchange is not engendering any animosity.)

In Middle English, the source of the *form *_learn_, with the meaning of _teach_, was _leren_ from Old English _laeran_; not at all from the Old English _leornian_.
The Old English _leornian_ became _lernen_ in Middle English.
Thus, only the form was identical, but not the genesis.
No "replacing" took place.

-------------------------------------------------
Below, just one easily accessible source to back this up:
learn - Wiktionary
*Etymology 2*
From Middle English _leren_, from Old English _lǣran_ ‎(“to teach, instruct, indoctrinate”), from Proto-Germanic _*laizijaną_ ‎(“to teach”), from _*laizō_ ‎(“lore, teaching", literally, "track, trace”), from Proto-Indo-European _*leyəs-_ ‎(“to track, furrow”). Cognate with Scots _lere_, _leir_, Saterland Frisian _leere_, West Frisian _leare_, Dutch _leren_, German _lehren_, Swedish _lära_. See also lear, lore.

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What seems to have been a replacing is actually the result of a phonetic event.
As it is well known, the Great Vowel Shift occurred in the period 1350-1600 -which means later Middle English period (1150-1500).
Some vowels and combinations of consonants-vowels were centralized and lowered (in pronunciation).
The Shift affected _leren_ into _learn_ /lərn/, as _iren_ (OE; ME) into _iron /ˈī(ə)rn/._
Compound this with the fact that the printing press was introduced in England in the 1470s, and the standard spellings were of Middle English pronunciations conflated with Old English spelling conventions. Finally, Middle English spellings were retained in Modern English while the Great Vowel Shift was in process.


*...*


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## berndf

@adebo : Wiki is a great first stop resource but the quality of its etymological explanations is _variable_, to put it mildly and always need to be taken with a grain of salt. I would never quote it against a proper scolarly dictionary like the MED or, for that matter, the OED which also explains _learn=teach_ as a secondary meaning of _learn=learn_ and not as an etymologically distinct verb.

It is true that the loss of equal hight (i.e. neither raising or lowering) diphthongs and the loss of the last remains of the Germanic _j_-conjungation caused the ME pair _lērnen-lēren_ to be phonetically much closer than the OE pair _leornian-lǣran_. These shifts belong properly to the transition from OE to ME and should never be lumped together with the GVS. It you wanted to demonstrate that the _learn=teach_ is a the result of a proper phonetic merger of _lērnen_ and _lēren_ rather than a transfer of meaning from one verb to an anther, phonetically similar one, i.e. a replacement of one verb by another, then you would have to find en explanation for the _n_-injection. And that will be difficult. I am not aware of any ME phonetic process that could possibly produce this.


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## Walshie79

The -en infinitive ending was universally lost at the end of the Middle English period (it's frequent in Chaucer, totally absent in Shakespeare), so "learn" must be from an original _lernen, _which can only be from _leornian. _However _leren _certainly existed in Middle English, and it seems reasonable that it assimilated phonetically to _lernen _when the ending was lost. It's interesting that in British English at least, _learned _(the adjective meaning "educated") is always pronounced with the -ed ending fully sounded, "lern-id"; while the past tense/participle of "learn" is "learnt"- they have clearly been kept apart. This does suggest that "learned" comes from a different verb and has just acquired the n by analogy/influence. So using "learn" to mean "teach" might have etymological justification.

I've just discovered that the one that really screams "illiterate" to most people, the mixing up of "borrow" and "lend", does too. Apparently _borgian _(the ancestor of "borrow"), originally meant "lend" in Old English. So even that isn't really a "mistake". And it shifted its meaning in OE "on the notion of collateral deposited as security for something borrowed"- a remarkable parallel to the recent usage of "loan" as a verb.


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## berndf

Walshie79 said:


> This does suggest that "learned" comes from a different verb and has just acquired the n by analogy/influence.


No, it doesn't. It only means that the deverbal adjective froze before the _e_ in _-ed_ became mute. If you follow the link to the other thread you will find sufficiently many ME attestations that already display characteristics of deverbal use.


Walshie79 said:


> However _leren _certainly existed in Middle English, ...


_Lere _is attested as a fully independent verb at least until the early 17th century (see attestations in the OED under the head-word _lere_). 19th century attestations are dialectal and/or poetic. Interestingly, the opposite secondary meaning with _lere _meaning learn (like _leren_ in Dutch that can mean both) existed too.


Walshie79 said:


> ..., and it seems reasonable that it assimilated phonetically to _lernen _when the ending was lost.


The loss of the infinitive ending is not a reason also to lose the or invent a consonant. The two verbs were already equally close as a result on the OE > ME shifts I explained before. An exchange of meaning or confusion of two verbs that sound similarly and with related semantic range and causative-non-causative opposition is indeed _reasonable to assume_ but that is a different process than a phonetic assimilation.

Parallel semantic developments also happened in other West Germanic languages and dialects (_lernen _to mean teach in several German dialects and _leren _to mean learn in Dutch) around the same time. There is is no reason to assume that the loss of the infinitive ending in English has anything to do with the process.


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