Inheritance and passing property on

The third entry is la capacité de tester, and the verb inside it is not the one an English reader will assume. Here tester means to make a will, and it comes straight from the Latin testari, to call somebody to witness, built on testis, a witness. That root runs through English as well, once it is recognised, since « testament », « testator », « testify », « testimony », « attest », « contest » and « detest » all carry the same witness inside them, and so does « intestate », the twentieth entry of this list. Then French acquired a second tester, spelled and conjugated exactly like the first, meaning to test a machine or a hypothesis, and that one was taken from English in the last century. The odd part is that « test » had itself set out from French, where test named the little earthen cup in which an assayer melted metal, from the Latin testa, an earthen pot, which also gave la tête. The two verbs are therefore strangers. Before a notarial text, read tester as « to make a will » and expect no laboratory anywhere near it.