Comment by [deleted] on 08/12/2021 at 18:03 UTC

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View submission: 'videlicet': How did "it is permissible to see" semantically shift to mean ⟶ "that is to say"?

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The connection between "to see" and "to know" is actually Indo-European, meaning that it goes back to thousands of years before Sanskrit and Greek. "To know" is, literally, "to have seen".

That connection is reflected in many of the daughter languages as there are cognates in Germanic (including English; "to wit"), Greek, Indo-Iranian, Balto-Slavic, Armenian...

Wikipedia has them all lined up if you look up "to know" under their "Indo-European vocabulary" page, or if you look up on wiktionary "Proto-Indo-European/weyd-".

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There's nothing here!