"The trail begins with our verb to learn, meaning 'to acquire knowledge'. Moving backwards in language time, we reach the Old English leornian "to get knowledge, to be cultivated'. From leornian the path leads further back, into the fricative thickets of Proto-Germanic, and to the word liznojan which has a base sense of 'to follow or to find a track' (from Proto-Indo-European prefix leis-, meaning 'track'). To learn therefore means at root - at route - 'to follow a track'."
The Old Ways Robert Macfarlane
