> Roots undergo semantic shifts in their meaning. So English "deer" is cognate to German "Tier" despite the fact that Tier means animal in German, but only one

> Roots undergo semantic shifts in their meaning. So English "deer" is cognate to German "Tier" despite the fact that Tier means animal in German, but only one specific kind of animal in English. The German meaning is the original one for the root; in English it shifted to the more specific meaning. And if you go back and read Old English and Middle English texts you can actually see this happen! From https://ahdictionary.com/word/search.html?q=deer https://ahdictionary.com/word/search.html?q=deer > In Middle English texts one finds a fish, an ant, or a fox called a der, the Middle English ancestor of our word deer. In its Old English form dēor, the word referred to any animal, including members of the deer family, and continued to do so in Middle English, although it also acquired the specific sense "a deer." By the end of the Middle English period, around 1500, the general sense had all but disappeared.