By Patreon request! This year, N7 day is a Friday, so we've got Shepard. I'm Word Family Friday, and this is my favorite Indo-European root on the Citadel.
This root appears in many forms in Germanic and Balto-Slavic, but has only marginal/uncertain presence outside those two branches.
(Family …
read moreIn each Hellenic, Indo-Iranian, and Italic the word for "thousand" is derived from Proto-Indo-European *ǵʰéslo-—apparently "handful"?—but in different forms.
Greek χίλιοι khílioi (kilo-) seems to derive from *ǵʰesliyoy, possibly a plural adjective form?
In Indo-Iranian it's prefixed with *sem- as *sm̥-ǵʰéslom, which could be translated as …
read moreProto-Indo-European *h₂endʰ-: "to bloom" is represented almost entirely by Greek ἄνθος ánthos, but there's just enough smattering across other branches to demonstrate that it's not something the Greeks picked up after they split from the rest of IE.
anthology, chrysanthemum, Ianthe
barrel, metaphor, Veronica, amphora, offer, Lucifer, ferret, wheelbarrow, tidal bore, birthday
Latin Mercury is fairly mysterious. Mercury as a god of commerce seems obviously related to merx: "merchandise, commodity", and in Faliscan and possibly Oscan votive tablets, a cognate to merx (or rather its dative mercii as expected in context) appears as a divine name: Mercui, Mirikui. But in Latin …
read moreProto-Indo-European *h₂ew: "away from, since, again" cannot be formally tied to *h₂epó: "off, away", but the similarity is suggestive. Perhaps Pre-Proto-Indo-European *b became either *p (by fortition) or *w (by lenition) in almost all cases, accounting for the paucity of *b in PIE.
In any case, the later (re …
read morecook, cook, coach, quiche, cake, kitchen, culinary, abrecock, Pepsi-Cola, biscuit, Budapest
terahertz, Britain, Sanskrit, Paris, Jakarta
The particle *me meaning "with, at, between" is probably the origin of *médʰyos: "middle"—in turn the origin of many, many words.
I wonder if *meh₁-: "to measure" and *meh₁d-: "to consider, to give advice, to heal" isn't also from *me. Germanic *midlą for example sometimes means "middle" but …
read morealbino, auburn, daub, oaf, elf, Alfred, Oberon, Elbe, Arpad, Alps
work, work, energy, George, liturgy, surgeon, organic
I've been doing Word Families for 5 years! In that time, I have made 150 families! So this week is *pénkʷe: "five".
The *p-kʷ sequence in *pénkʷe leads to a set highly divergent forms. *kʷ is a highly variable sound on its own, becoming /kw/, /w/, /ʍ/, /k/, /t …
read morePeculiar fellow, that cyclops.
fee, feudal, peculiar, fellow, cyclops, fight, Shadowfax
Beirut in my thoughts today.
Beirut, "memory", "epicenter"
economy, vicinity, village, New York, sandwich
This is quite a large family with a number of borrowings into other language families. Because, it turns out, the Indo-European speakers' relationship with wheels is pretty important in a lot of people's history, like the Sumerians' relationship with reeds.
There is also a root *wel(h₁)-: "to turn …
read moreProto-Indo-European has *gʷṓws: "cow, cattle" and possible *woḱéh₂: "(female) cow".
And some other likely descendants of (the same?) Central Asian substrate words for "cattle": Sino-Tibetan *ŋwa: "cattle, ox", West Semitic *baḳar-: "cattle, ox"
cow, butter, botany, beef, vaccine
I get a little speculative here, if not downright provocative. There are words for dog all over Eurasia that recall each other. These could be onomatopoeic, but they do not much resemble the common forms you find in words that actually used as dog sound …
read moreI'm in the process of expanding this family, after merging the original Proto-Indo-European *bʰleh₃-: "flower" with Proto-Indo-European *bʰelǵʰ-: "to swell" (originally under title word a href="/word-family-budget.html"Budget/a)—and putting both under Proto-Indo-European *bʰel-: "to blow, to swell up".
In which dryad and druid are basically the same word, trust and tryst, trees and truce. Plus horse racing history.
tree, true, true, endure, druid, dryad, larch, derby, tray, tray
Ankylosaurus! And as an unexpected bonus, I found Azhdarchid pterosaurs deep in the family, too. Pterosaurs are probably my very favorite Mesozoic animals (stay tuned for next week!). Also in this family: various spiders and snakes and fears and sins in various languages.
I …
read morestegosaur, tile, thatch, thatch, deck, deck, toga, detective, thug
bleach, blank, black, blue, beluga, flame, Baltic, pool
Tying Minoan (Cretan) Phaistos and Greek Hephaestus in to this family is speculative, but not as wild a reach as it first looks like.
Hephaestus and Phaistos, Crete:
We usually represent the name as Hephaestus in the Roman alphabet, after Roman transliteration traditions, but (as …
read moreBonus word family for Halloween by special request from my 4 year old: witch from *weyk-: "to separate, to choose, to consecrate".
*weyk- looks like an extended root implying *wey-, but I can't find any clear evidence for that root. If it is an extension of *wey-, a zero-grade …
read moresleep, avalanche, avalanche, lip, lobe, lick, lichen
complete, supply, full, poly-, folk, filbert
column, excel, hill, Celsius, Stockholm, Sherlock Holmes
hall, cellar, eyelid, color, hell, apocalypse
June's theme is linguistic influence early Iron Age Celtic. The rest of the month will focus on words that were borrowed from Gaulish into Latin (more things like the aside in today's families that the very iconic Latin word gladius being borrowed from Gaulish …
read moremother, material, Manchester, mammal
stun, tornado, detonate, Thor, thunder, blunderbus
This is the family that no matter how long I work on it, it's never done. That's what I get for trying to explore the possibility that two extremely important and productive roots may be connected: *h₂er-, related to cosmic order, and *h₃reǵ-, related to societal …
read moreether, Aidan, edifice, anneal, estivation
brew, broil, breed, ferment, burn, bourbon whiskey, broth, bread
Avon, Punjab, island, Scandinavia, aquarium, sewer, sober
It is the right and proper state of a people or nation to be free, generous, honorable, hairy, libertine, and liberal children and vegetables.
liberty, deliver, Loðbrok, Luther
Celtic *windos: "white, bright", which may be a zero-grade nasal infix of *weyd-: "to see", and thus "visible, bright".
Fiona, Jennifer, Guinevere, penguin, Vienna, wiener
This is a tricky one—another of these mysterious wanderwords coming out of the steppe. My current best hypothesis, based on the distribution in time and space, is that the Scythians/Northern Iranians picked it up somewhere and spread it around.
Another theory connects …
read morehippopotamus, equestrian, zebra, alfalfa, Azores
mirror, admire, miracle, Miranda, smile