Cennan

Part of speech: verb

Definitions

1. Old English verb meaning to give birth to or beget a child ; to announce, proclaim or make publicly known something
2. An archaic verb for bearing or producing offspring ; a older sense of declaring or revealing information to others
3. Used in Old English for begetting or bringing forth young ; also used for making a matter known or telling it openly

Etymology: Its surprising feature is that it is a causative: "cennan" means "to cause to know," and so "to make known, declare, or tell." It is built on the Old English verb "cnāwan," "to know," which is the ancestor of modern "know." The "-n" ending that makes it causative is the same grammatical pattern found in pairs like "fall" and "fell," where one verb is the action and the other is the act of causing it. Modern English has no direct descendant of "cennan" as a common verb. Its close relative survives instead in "kenning," borrowed from Old Norse "kenning," a noun formed from "kenna," which means "to know, teach, or make known" and is cognate with the Old English verb. A kenning in the Norse sense is a poetic circumlocution, such as "whale-road" for the sea, which tells you something indirectly, so the word keeps the sense of making something known.