No it comes from old english and before that a predecessor to the germanic languages. Dutch has duur and german has teuer both meaning expensive.
in the english language it has evolved from from something valuable (to you) to someone that you care for (so still has a high value to you) in some places like american english this new meaning has allmost entirely replaced the old meaning. In other places both are used. (I do believe it is used a lot in scotland the people i ve seen allways say dear instead of expensive)
I've heard the word dear used before to express how expensive a cost is. "It was quite a dear a price to pay" etc. Maybe not as common in the u.s. , however the Hungarian word for both dear and expensive are the same word. Which by the way is Draga.
I actually dont think we have a word for dear in dutch that fits the same spot (not the expensive one, that is duur, where dear originated from /shares origins with).
It would be sweet (lieve) in dear Chris. And someone is dear to me, i guess would become someone is important (belangrijk) to me or means a lot to me (betekend veel voor me) or I care (a lot) for (geef (veel) om)
I say "dear" to mean expensive all the time, that's just what I say... I didn't realise it was odd until some friends pointed out to me that nobody else said it and they only knew what I meant because they were used to me...
Not in South Africa. Perhaps you're thinking of the Afrikaans word "duur" which means expensive but not dear. I've never heard dear used in English to mean expensive in this part of the world.
Should it really considered a homonym when one usage of a word is metaphorical and directly based on the other usage? For example, to "ape" someone means they are acting like an ape in copying them. That's like saying "killed" is a homonym based on "We killed in basketball last night" and "He killed the clerk in cold blood."
Every reality show has very calculated editing, but apparently producers of The Apprentice frequently had to completely reverse engineer story lines to be more congruent with DJT's capricious and often totally baseless boardroom decisions about who to fire.
Yeah, that one seemed like a stretch to me but I eventually got that one by focusing on the art part. I was typing in things like wall and mezzanine and balcony and whatever else I could think of, I mean you can kind of put art anywhere depending on what it is.
The hardest one for me was plunder/fire. Here in America, "sack" is very rarely used to describe anything other then, say, a successful medieval siege. I have heard it in English (UK) language before but took a long time for my brain to find that association.
I've never heard of "fence" being used to describe the seller, but rather the verb. "He fenced that car stereo to earn the money" no one would say " He went to seen the fence about the stolen car stereo"
I was sure "coward" was a type of bird too, turns out I was thinking of cowbird, which lays its eggs in others' nests like a cuckoo. I don't think these etymologies are spurious.
in the english language it has evolved from from something valuable (to you) to someone that you care for (so still has a high value to you) in some places like american english this new meaning has allmost entirely replaced the old meaning. In other places both are used. (I do believe it is used a lot in scotland the people i ve seen allways say dear instead of expensive)
Isle of Wight, if it's not too dear."
It would be sweet (lieve) in dear Chris. And someone is dear to me, i guess would become someone is important (belangrijk) to me or means a lot to me (betekend veel voor me) or I care (a lot) for (geef (veel) om)
"Every summer we can rent a cottage/In the Isle of Wight if it's not too dear."
Example: "Every summer we can rent a cottage In the Isle of Wight, if it's not too dear"
The hardest one for me was plunder/fire. Here in America, "sack" is very rarely used to describe anything other then, say, a successful medieval siege. I have heard it in English (UK) language before but took a long time for my brain to find that association.
I've never heard of the first definition used.