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tags: Etymology
NOTE
In reading Photography - A Cultural History by Mary Warner Marion I noticed this form of understanding, under-standing. “Understanding” as a word, has evolved over time and cannot be easily decomposed “under/standing” to find a clear relationship based on our current understanding of under- and -stand.
Under doesn’t mean beneath, it stems from “among.”
I thought to investigate this here, because I like how it felt.
Ok - so there’s something interesting with understanding, and this is a complete wander after I write this. But If I frame my mind towards ‘understanding’ there is always a subordinate relationship. The understanding comes from something external. I understand this, and that. Even though I want understanding to be a kind of core system, where I’m embodying the truth of it, I’m always standing and looking at it. It looks the same if I get it or not. In this frame of thinking (possibly artificially manipulated) I am always standing in the midst of something to understand it.
I should really delete this.
From An Analytic Dictionary of the English Etymology: An Introduction
Understand ‘intercept’, ‘notice’ show the same development of meanings.
The extent to which the idea of separation was prominent in the minds of those who first endowed verbal units like ‘stand beneath ~ among’ ‘stand in front’ ‘stand against’ with meaning is beyond reconstruction. Nor can we establish whether those words go back to popular usage of the language of scholars (poets, priests).
Thought
Meaning is beyond reconstruction. Maybe some connection with LLM.
John Newman, “How to understand understand”
I have examined the use of under- as a verbal prefix in documented old english. The work on polysemy in the cognitive linguistics movement would lead us to expect a network of meanings associated with a verbal prefix like this and there is indeed quite a degree of complexity found within this prefix. Subtle semantic meanings can be associated with this prefix and the compound understandan is in varying degrees compatible with some of these meanings. The semantics of stand in its central sense of standing upright may also be relevant. The earlier hypotheses about the semantics of understand have seen no real contribution of the meaning ‘stand’ to ‘understand’ other than taking ‘stand’ to imply a positioning or location. ‘Stand’ predicates may often be extended to senses relation to mere position, but it is also the case that ‘stand’ predicates can give rise to other extensions building upon images such as balance and verticality. These components of meaning in the ‘stand’ concept are probably relevant to the development of understand and belief senses. Previous work on straight with its connection to thinking is relevant too. Straightness is a typical feature of standing, and one should expect some overlap in the kinds of semantic extensions associated with straight and stand.
Academic subjects are often described as branches, one who understands could simply be standing beneath the the branch of whatever it is they understand, and are thus enveloped in its shade of knowing.