[tharkun__]

Remove Ver, add t and you got German: Gift

Vergiftet would be past tense.

Funny that in English gift is a word but entirely different meaning.

Languages are fun, especially in Europe where they're all different but all so related but everyone does not want to admit it.

[thaumasiotes]

> Funny that in English gift is a word but entirely different meaning.

In English it maintains its original Germanic meaning derived from the verb give.

The sense of "poison" in German comes from a euphemistic use of "gift". (Literally 'something given' but actually used to calque Greek "dosis", which also literally meant 'something given', but was used to mean 'dose [of medicine]'.)

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Gift#Etymology

Summing up, the reason gift is a word in English with an entirely different meaning from what it has in German is that everyone in Germany forgot what gift meant.

(The reason it's gift and not something more like yift is the Danelaw.)

[tharkun__]

This is one of the reasons I like HN: Random knowledge transfer like this. Appreciated!

Also: in German Dosis is the word for dose.

    Die Dosis macht das Gift

(the dose makes the poison)

[animal531]

It's probably the same, for example in Afrikaans its just gif. Vergif is the verb action of doing it, and vergiftig the same past tense of it having happened previously.

[birdsongs]

In Norwegian, "gift" is poison. It's also the word for married (de er gift).

[pantalaimon]

In German "Mitgift" is what the bride gets from her family when she enters marriage.

[stevekemp]

> all so related but everyone does not want to admit it.

I'm laughing in Finnish..

[tharkun__]

Hehe, you found the exception that proves the rule :P

[SllX]

And Basque, Maltese, Turkish and Georgian.

Magyar (Hungarian) and Finnish are both Uralic languages along with Estonian and the Sámi languages, but none of these are related to the Indo-European languages common in the other parts of Europe.

And while most of Europe’s extant languages are in the Indo-European language family, there’s still a fair number of differences between Albanian, Germanic, Hellenic, Celtic, Romantic and Slavic languages.

[tharkun__]

Oh for sure there are many differences, that comes with them being different languages, countries, ethnicity. You can do this on many levels.

The point was essentially what you're showing here: People focusing on all the differences instead of shared history, languages influencing each other and how we're all not that different in the end.

If you want to, even within what are nowadays countries and what outsiders would say is "one language" and "one ethnicity", you can start focusing on differences and make people dislike each other.

[SllX]

That’s fair. I tunneled in through a linguistic lens.