Learn English – Has the verb “to import me” ever been commonly used in English the way “to concern me” is in the phrase “It does not concern me”

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In various Euro­pean lan­guages, most es­pe­cially in the Ro­mance ones, their
own re­spec­tive cog­nates for our Latin-de­rived word im­port can be used as
a verb in much the way as the verb con­cern is used in cur­rent English:

  • Não me importa. (Portuguese)
  • No me importa. (Spanish)
  • No m’importa. (Catalan)
  • Cela ne m’importe pas. (French)

Those all trans­late lit­er­ally “It is not im­por­tant to me”, the
kind of thing you would say to mean “It does not con­cern me” or
“It does not mat­ter to me”.

Has English ever had a sim­i­lar us­age for the same sense of the same verb;
that is, has it ever been com­mon in English to say this?

  • It does not im­port me.

Please Note

I am ask­ing specif­i­cally about the use of im­port as a tran­si­tive verb and used a person of interest or personal pronoun used in the same manner and sense as we now use concern, as in:

  • It im­ports me.

The noun form seen in “It is of no im­port to me” is of no im­port to me.

Best Answer

Yes. The Oxford English Dictionary has this definition (and some other similar ones) for ɪᴍᴘᴏʀᴛ v. 6a in their section II of that verb:

II. To be of importance or consequence.

  1. transitive. To be of importance or consequence to; to matter to; to concern, have to do with. Only in third person.

    a. With anticipatory it as subject.

    • †⒜ With subordinate clause as complement. Obsolete.

    • ⒝ With to-infinitive clause as complement. Frequently with the sense ‘behove, be incumbent on, be the duty of’. Now rare.


    b. With the topic as subject.

    • ⒜ With personal object. Now rare.

    • †⒝ With non-personal object. Obsolete.

For example, in Tyrannick Love (1670):

It much imports me that this truth I know.

And in the negative in Elizabeth Evanshaw: The Sequel of "Truth": a Novel (1827):

“And does it not import me to know?"

Note that this verb sense of the word is obsolete, so you shouldn’t use it.