*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 …
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 …
I was preparing a family this week that I thought included the English word wall. But as I researched it, I found that Germanic *waigaz: "wall" connects to that family, but English "wall" is from the unrelated Germanic *wallą from Latin vallum: "wall, rampart".
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 …
June's theme is linguistic effects of the Celtic Hegemony of the early Iron Age. The rest of the month will focus on words that were borrowed from Gaulish into Latin (things like very iconic Latin word gladius being borrowed from Gaulish, which appears in …
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 …
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.