From: G&P
Message: 62454
Date: 2009-01-11
>>… it would help
me to
>understand how the
same verb can mean both "offer" and "command",
>which seem
completely unrelated to me and which has always boggled my
>mind.
Perhaps modern German can illustrate this: anbieten and verbieten mean respectively “offer” and “forbid”. So here is a modern language where two of the putative meanings of *bheudh are felt to be within the orbit of the same word, tweaked, of course, by the prefix. The basic meaning of the verb is to put forward, or put in front of someone. I see no problem (and presumably the Germans saw no problem) with the movement from that meaning to “order” or “forbid”.
Peter