‘to know’, ‘to teach’, and ‘to learn’ in Germanic

Three Germanic verbs with the meanings ‘to know’, ‘to teach’, and ‘to learn’ can all be traced back to the same PIE root * lei̯s - ‘to follow a track’. While evidence for all three verbs is recoverable from Gothic, only two verbal derivates passed down into the West Germanic languages, and none survived into North Germanic (although there was later reborrowing from Old English). This article charts these developments as well as subsequent ones, including the emergence of new verbs that came to express these key concepts in West and North Germanic up to present times. This etymological trail is guided by insights from Conceptual Metaphor Theory, which seeks to understand how more familiar concrete concepts (e.g. ‘to follow a track’, ‘to grasp’, ‘to see’) capture more abstract ones like ‘to know’, ‘to teach’, and ‘to learn’ in language. The main findings are: (i) that the original system “stative ∼ causative ∼ present” reconstructible for Proto-Germanic on the PIE root * lei̯s - is best continued today in German, whereas English already refashioned it early on in its history. North Germanic does not directly continue any verbal formation on that root, whereas Gothic displays a “perfect” system; (ii) formations on PIE * ǵneh 3 - ‘to recognize’ and * u̯ei̯d - ‘to see’ are of common Indo-European heritage, whereas those on * lei̯s -, also found in nominal formations in Italic, may have arisen polygenetically in the two branches, as also possibly those on PIE * teng -. Finally, (iii) only one conceptual metaphor among those found can be said to be of common Indo-European descent, namely to know is to recognize/have recognized .*