Why does оставлять/оставить mean to leave when it literally means 'to put around'?

Question

According to my understanding the aforementioned verbs have two related meanings like the English word 'to leave'.

a) to misplace. This makes sense somewhat because in order to misplace something you have to have put it someplace else. The prefix 'о-' meaning 'around/about' may have a sense of approximate (e.g. 'I approximately placed my keys somewhere over...')

b) to depart. This meaning does not make sense. If you are departing from someplace, why would you use the verb оставлять? You know where you are going, there is no sense of approximation. What are you putting away? Is using this verb wrong when referring to people, because it would seem more fitting when referring to objects only.

c) Why would оставлять and оставаться be antonyms? They have the same prefix and the same root. Why would they have contrasting meaning and what is their morphological relationship with the verb ставить?

Answer 1

(a) Оставить does not mean "misplace". It can of course mean a related thing, forgetting/abandoning/leaving something behind, but that's not the same as "misplacing". You remember the location; you just forgot to go through with the action of retrieving the object.

(b) This is a rare and somewhat obsolete meaning of оставить. Покинуть is the natural word to use here.

In any case, you are misconstruing the meaning of the prefix. O-sta- is a very old combination of prefix and root that occurs in most if not all Slavic languages with the meaning of "remain" (and a host of related concepts, including "last"). It can perhaps be thought of as a new root that's greater than the sum of its parts. Here, we're dealing with older and harder-to-interpret meanings of the prefix than the ones you can intuit in present-day Russian.

(c) It's a little bit strained to construe оставлять and оставаться as antonyms, but supposing we do, the answer is really fairly obvious. Because one is transitive and the other reflexive. "Leaving behind" a place and "leaving yourself behind" are as antonymous, in context, as antonymous gets. Or consider that to leave a thing is to make it remain — which is one way you can get "remain" and "leave" to be somewhat synonymous despite their intuitive antonymy which we keep getting reminded of in these pre-UK referendum days.

Answer 2

So, since (a) makes sense to you, I am going to skip it :) (even though, "o-" isn't a prefix here: "оста" is the root).

(b) to depart. If I was asked what "оставлять" means without any context, my first thought would be "to leave behind" (which is why I felt compelled to write an answer to this question: it does not at all mean to "to put around"). You mentioned "to leave", so, I guess, this is close to your understanding. When you leave something behind, you must be departing from somewhere in some sense, so, I am guessing, that's why someone has translated it like this. I, probably, would not in most cases, but it does make some sense.

(c) "оставлять" vs. "оставаться". If someone leaves you, then you are left. This is the same kind of distinction. "Я оставляю вещи в номере" means "I leave my luggage in the room", "Мои вещи остаются в номере" - "my luggage is left in the room". In other words: если ты остаешься, значит, кто-то тебя оставляет.