By Anatoly Liberman
An odd bundle of meanings exists in some Indo-European languages. The first thread in it connects “praise” and “permit,” and this is where we will begin. The verb allow has two senses that today cannot be distinguished without an effort, namely, “permit” and “assign, grant” (hence allowance). Both are from Old French alouer ~ allouer, in which the reflexes (continuations) of two Latin verbs were confused (or blended): allocare “allot, allocate” and allaudare (the latter traceable to ad + laudare and familiar to English-speakers from laud and its derivatives laudatory, laudable, and laudation). A prefix may change the meaning of a verb radically. Yet laudare meant “to praise” even with ad-/al- before it, so why do Old French al (l)ouer and Engl. allow mean “to permit”? (Modern French allouer means “grant, allocate” and in some contexts “allow.”) The sense development is usually reconstructed so: from “praise” to “approve, assign with approval” and to “permit.” If this is how the events unfolded, the French verb underwent a certain degradation of meaning in comparison with its Latin etymon. We won’t worry about its fate but remember that no chasm separates “praise” from “permit.”
The situation in Germanic is more complicated. In Middle High German, the verb loben meant both “praise” and “vow, swear,” that is, “promise solemnly” (today only geloben has the second meaning). Old Engl. lofian also meant “praise,” but leaf, a noun related to it, meant “permission,” and we still say by your leave. This leave has nothing to do with the verb leave “depart, quit,” though most people think that in take one’s leave and a leave of absence they hear an echo of the verb. Old Icelandic lofa meant both “praise” and “permit.” Thus, what we observe between Latin and French as a process is represented in Germanic as a state. The root of Engl. (be)lieve, German (g)lauben, and their cognates elsewhere in Germanic is likewise akin to leave “permission,” though to have faith in something is not exactly the same as to praise or allow it to happen. Finally, the unquestionable cognates of lofian, lofa, and the rest are English archaic lief “beloved” (by contrast, German lieb “dear” is a common word) and love (cf. German Liebe) The Germanic bundle consists of “praise,” “permit,” “believe,” and “love.”
Faced with such a semantic tangle, language historians try to extricate the nucleus from which all the meanings sprouted (of course, this is the goal of reconstructing all protoforms). Unfortunately, one can begin almost anywhere and arrive at feasible conclusions. 1) Love presupposes trust (faith); we believe in the object of our longing, praise the person we adore and permit him or her to do what they like. 2) Or we permit a certain act or allow someone to do something and praise, believe in, and love the results. 3) Or we praise something and permit it. The results are worthy of our love, and we believe in them. Other variants are easy to concoct. Allow came from allaudare, but in an excellent etymological dictionary of Old Icelandic it is said that “permit” preceded “praise,” rather than the other way around Even the most authoritative statements should be taken