As a noun, a bear is a type of carnivore. As a verb, to bear means to support or produce.
I wonder how the two meanings finally ended up in one single word. Is there any connection between the two meanings which I don’t know yet?
Learn English – Two quite different meanings of “bear”
etymologyhomographs
Related Solutions
What's happened is that the verb to sanction has retained the original sense relating to endorsement/recognition by official decree.
But the noun sanctions (invariably pluralised, frequently imposed or applied) has come to mean measures taken by authority (often, multiple cooperating authorities) to discourage unsanctioned activities. By default, it's usually governments restricting trade in certain goods and services with some other nation, in order to put pressure on its government.
There is also the "positive" singular noun give (ones) sanction, but as that link shows, it's rapidly declined as the "negative" plural noun impose sanctions has gained currency.
Although superficially this looks odd, in practice there's unlikely to be any confusion because the verb / plural noun distinction is almost always made.
Having said all that, usage does change. Increasing numbers of younger speakers rarely hear the verb or singular noun form with positive associations, and they effectively "back-form" a new verb form they want to mean to impose sanctions. @Jay has identified a few such usages already in "print", and much as they make me cringe, doubtless there will be more in future.
From the Phrase Finder:
- The OED relates "bear with" to "bear" in the sense "sustain [anything painful or trying]; to endure, to tolerate".
The expression is quite old and can be found in Shakespeare's works:
- Actually Shakespeare uses the phrase very often, e.g:
- Julius Caesar: "Bear with me; My heart is in the coffin there with Caesar"
- Richard III: "My Lord of York will still be cross in talk: Uncle, your grace knows how to bear with him"
- King Lear: "You must bear with me: Pray you now, forget and forgive"
and As You Like it, in which he puns on it. Celia says: "I pray you, bear with me, I cannot go no further." Touchstone replies: "For my part, I had rather bear with [put up with] you than bear [carry] you."
- Shakespeare certainly didn't invent it; it was clearly a standard part of Elizabethan speech. (It's quite possible, though, that it was the frequent occurrence of it in his plays that kept it familiar and current, and that otherwise it might simply have fallen out of use.)
Best Answer
TLDR: Probably not, but maybe. Both words seem to derive from two different PIE roots that we’ve reconstructed to the same spelling (*bher), so it is no surprise therefore that they should continue to be spelled the same way. See etymonline for more.
For the ursid, Old English used bera, cognate to Old (and modern) Norse björn, and which both drew from older roots relating to the color brown, one of the creature’s most common colors.
For the verb you’re referring to, Old English used the strong verb beran. It had the same senses as the Modern English verb bear.
Those two are already so close that there is every reason for the two of them to wind up being spelled the same way in Modern English, where it remains a strong verb: bear, bore, borne.
And that is probably the end of the story.
However, there might be one other trace. We already know that a conjectured Proto-Indo-European root *bʰer‑ for the verb must also be behind the cognate Latin verb fero (from infinitive ferre). So the Latin verb fero and Old English verb beran do share a common ancestor. The Latin verb meant several things, but amongst these were the senses of its Old English cognate.
There is some speculation, however, that there is also a connection between the Old English noun bera and the Latin adjective ferus meaning “wild”, now spelled fiero in Italian and Spanish. The OED cites an author Fick as equating these, in that the bear was the wild beast (the bestia fiera) of the north.
However, such a connection between bera and fera is questionable and remains to be demonstrated. That’s because the proposed PIE root for ferus “wild” is now *ǵʰwēr‑ instead, not *bʰer‑ as before with the verb. It is possible that the wild aspect reinforced the brown one, but I for one am not convinced, as I do not believe that Latin ferus for wild and Latin fero for “I bear” have been shown to be related.