Re: lend/borrow

Thomas Weber wrote:

Is there a name for the specific type of lexical change whereby the
respective meanings of reciprocal pairs such as lend/borow,
learn/teach, ancestor/descendant, get confused and even swap round?
Nowadays this tends to arise only in dialectal usage ("That'll larn
yer!") or the colloquial register, and gets stamped on as a mistake
before entering the written language; so I do not actually know whether
a lasting semantic shift has ever arisen in this way. But it seems a
strong possibility, and in any case even if regarded as a mistake it
seems widespread enough to deserve consideration.

I remember meeting three nice Swiss girls (German speakers, but good at
French) who all but refused to believe in the existence of the verb
'emprunter' (they used 'prêter' for both sides of the transaction).

The first paragraph is about pairs of words with opposite meanings switching their meaning. The second is about a single word with a pair of opposite meanings.

You asked the name of the first. I'm curious about the name of the second -- like French *apprendre* or English *sanction* or *cleave*. I seem to remember that there is a name for that but that's as far as my brain gets.

I don't know if there is a name for it, but probably it reflects an ancestral situation where there was only one root, carrying one of the meanings, and the opposite one was derived from it. Just look at the synthetic passive in classical IE languages. In current portuguese, some verbs may be used in the apprendre fashion, though one of the usages is usually considered sloppy.
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