In Hebrew awareness is gained with emotion (put heart) - שים לב
Any native speakers of other languages able to chime in? Sapir-Whorf revived?
Edit: used word awareness to clarify what is being gained.
Awareness is gained by that action that differs between languages.
It is interesting the degrees noted. In Hebrew there's the sense of investing your desire, which goes beyond effort to controlling what it is you want. People will naturally expend effort toward things they desire.
tl;dr: In English awareness is gained with effort (not money). It is a trade.
If that's a literal translation (I realize you said "rough"), "devote" connotes to me more along the lines of "devotion" such as a "devoted husband" or "devoted follower of <X> religion."
In Hindi it is just "ध्यान देना", i.e. "giving attention".
This is what's wrong with applications of Sapir-Whorf -- it's always used to argue for evidence of some preexisting prejudice. If you really want to test it, you'd have to look at a language and make predictions about the people who speak it before meeting them.
"Friends, Romans, countrymen: lend me your ears."
but pay https://www.etymonline.com/word/pay#etymonline_v_10195
has roots before and outside of currency
To the point:
1. Obviously the meaning of words change over time.
2. If this difference in metaphors has real bearing on how people act than the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, at least in its weak form, stands. That is something worth paying attention to....
now maybe "pay attention" emerged recently, that is based on the material/financial connotation, or maybe the idiom came before
And, like another poster pointed out, this information is not gained with money, the "paying" is a metaphor and the currency is your attention itself. You give your attention away for the value of receiving the information.
On top of that there isn't just 1 metaphor in English (and I suspect other languages as well) for even the word "attention". You can fix your attention to something, or direct your attention, we speak of attention spans, etc.
How does anyone gain awareness of anything, then? Surely not by ignoring it?
I'd urge you to sit in the forest for a day (or the prairie or the desert -- anyhow, in nature, away from buildings and cars and phones) and pay attention. What do you gain from doing so?
You will find you simply notice different and new things if you spend the time (again, pay/spend... interesting). Perhaps you'll be able to codify this into "information". I'd be interested to see your notes.
That would match the current German version below and makes sense as languages evolved from same tree.
In Finnish, one could say "Keskity!" and since "keski" is "center" it has some idea of centering oneself? But this is more like, "Focus!" Or you could say, "kiinnittää huomiota" -- to fasten your attention?
I guess when I initially wrote I was thinking more from the position "обращайся" which has more interact flavor and made more sense vis a vis attention.