Helen Maguire, a teacher, wrote from Gloucester recently to tell me that the inability to distinguish between learn and teach, a matter that used to wound the tender sensibilities of her own Monaghan teachers, is just as common in rural England. She hears things like "my mother learned me that poem" daily; and she wonders why people are confused like this.
Not a thousand miles from where Helen lives a man generally regarded as being worth a pass in English wrote "A thousand more mischances than this one have learn'd me how to brook this patiently" in Two Gentlemen of Verona. Now the origin of learn is Old English leornian, to study, to learn; it did not then mean to teach. But later on, in the Middle English period, learn came to mean teach as well, and was considered correct until the eighteenth century when the new, prescriptive grammarians decided to describe both Spenser's and Shakespeare's use of learn as "illiterate". Dr Johnson in his dictionary (1755) was kinder than the grammarians. Thinking of Wyclif, perhaps, who in 1382 wrote "Who lerneth a scornere, doth worng he to hymself" (and who a few years later changed lerneth to techith), Johnson simply said "this sense is now obsolete." He must have known that this was not so: it was used all about him, even by his friend Malone, the great authority on Shakespeare.
"Learn", by the way, derived from an ancient source which meant to follow a furrow or track. Isn't this what learning is about? Old High German lirnen, lernen, was akin to -leisa, a track; lira, a Latin cognate of learn, kept the old meaning of furrow.
Teach is from Old English taecan, to show. A survival is the south-east Wexford teach, as in "teach me that", show me, pass it to me, of which I have written here recently.
John Walsh from Ferrybank, Waterford, enquires about the word mail, as in Royal Mail. From Middle English male, a bag, from Old French male. The word is of Teutonic origin. Compare Old High German malha, the Middle Dutch male and the modern Dutch maal. A tract of 1205 speaks of "a male riche". In 1654 a royal ordinance ordered "To have in readiness one good Horse or Mare to receive and carry the Male of Letters. That no other person (beside the Post that carrieth the Male) be suffered to ride Post with the Male."
I'll return to post, a very old and interesting word.