Dr. Crippen, Call Your Office

In regard to the cross-linguistic ambiguity [1] of the word "gift," a reader who is acquainted with yet another Germanic language tells me that in Norwegian, the noun gift means "poison" but the verb å gifte ("to gift") means to marry someone or be married to someone.

The great Swedish sinologist Bernhard Karlgren [2], in his very instructive little 1923 handbook Sound and Symbol in Chinese (p. 30 in my first edition), tells us that:

Just as a Swede at once distinguishes by the melody gìftet (the marriage) from gíftet (the poison), the Chinese distinguishes his words by their tones. 

So now I am speculating idly on this Scandinavian  connection between marriage and poison.  This is the region that produced August Strindberg [3], right?  And Henrik Ibsen [4]?  Hmmm.

(Do people still remember Dr. Crippen?  The peelers have written him up here [5].)