Comment by troad
23 days ago
Interestingly, the -fere in interfere comes from the Latin ferīre, meaning 'to hit', 'to strike', etc. My first guess would have been something like facere/fāre or -fer, but that quickly falls apart on reflection (to do across? between-bearer?).
Inter + ferire = to strike one another. Makes sense.
Bonus point: the aforementioned -fer ('bearer', like conifer or aquifer) is distantly related to ferīre, as it is to English to bear, Greek phérō ('to carry'), Slavic brat ('to take'), Sanskrit bhárati ('to carry'), etc. I suppose ferīre itself must be the result of semantic drift along the lines of 'to carry/bear' -> 'to bring forth [blows]' -> 'to strike/hit'.
> Inter + ferire = to strike one another. Makes sense.
I guess, but I don't really think of interfering as a mutual thing. I see interfere more like intervene or interpose, where the subject of the verb inserts himself between two other things. (As, in the example above, "my" neighbor places himself into the middle of the relationship between me and my television.)
If I'm interfering with you, it is not necessarily the case that you are also interfering with me. And it certainly couldn't be said that "we are interfering [end of sentence]" in the same way that it could be said "we are fighting".
The use of with to mark an indirect object does tend to suggest that the sense of the verb was more mutual at an earlier point, though.