*ksweyb- is a _very_ weird root. It has too many consonant, and way too many in the onset. It has a /*b/ which is an unusual/marginal phoneme in PIE. It is related to a number of …
Latin words munio: "fortifiation" (English munitions) and murus: "wall" (English mural) appear to come from a *mey- root, so could be related, but are more likely connected to *mewtʰi- which gives various words about "pole, stick, post, picket"
The Celtic word *dūnom: "hill fort" was borrowed into Germanic twice, once as "hill" and once as "fort".
The first time was borrowed before the completion of Grimm's Law, so Grimm's Law changed the *d to *t for Germanic *tūną: "enclosure", which eventually gave English "town …
This word for "guest"/"host" is restricted to the Late Northwest Indo-European languages, appearing—as far as I know—only in Balto-Slavic, Germanic, and Italic, plus a single personal name in Lepontic (Celtic). It seems to be cognate to a word for "to eat" which is …
For the end of my architecture theme month, I've put together a collection a few small-but-interesting families with architecture words that I did preliminary research on, before concluding each was too small to a weekly family on its own.
Apologies for the sketchy nature. This one exploded on me in several different ways.
Prior to working on this family, I knew that "ambassador"/"embassy" was from Gaulish via Latin, and I had connected that to the story Livy tells about the Battle of …
Proto-Indo-European *h₂éwis: "bird" and Proto-Indo-European *h₂ówis: "sheep" appear to be umlaut variants, presumably through the more sparsely attested root *h₂ew-: "to put on clothes, to cover". *h₂éwis: "bird" would be from a passive participle, "a clothed (in feathers)". *h₂ówis: "sheep" from an active participle, "a clother (in wool)".
Germanic really went to town with this root, creating a bunch of morphological forms that aren't attested in any other branches, and in a few cases I can't even relate them to any standard derivational forms I know in either PIE or Proto-Germanic.
