| Today's Word: | *wiro- |
| Translation: | a man, a husband, a human |
| Related to: | Greek hros (a hero), aristos (the best) are thought sometimes to have derived from the same stem, as Indo-European *w disappeared in Greek. The first word is more probable. |
| Latin vír (a man, a husband) -
the 2nd declension noun, from o-stems; virtus (virtue)
> French viril, virtu, Portuguese varao (a man) - doubt? |
|
| Common Celtic *viro-, *vero- (a man) > Old Irish fer, Irish and Scottish Gaelic fear, Manx Gaelic fer, Old Welsh gur, Welsh gwr, Cornish gur, Breton gour | |
| Common Germanic *vero- (a man,
a warrior) > Gothic wair, Old High German, Old English, Old
Swedish and Old Frankish wer, Old Norse verr
Modern: English world (from *wer-ald "man's age, lifetime"), German Werwolf ("man-wolf"), Welt (world), Dutch wereld (world), Frisian wráld |
|
| Avestan vîra- (a man, a slave, a human being) - the word was contrasted with "cattle" | |
| Sanskrit vora (a man) - obviously
ablaut in stem, because we see:
> Gujarati wer (a man, a husband). Also Sanskrit veera (a hero) > Bengali, Hindi veera |
|
| Albanian burri (a husband) - we are not sure this comes from the same stem | |
| Common Baltic *víro- (a man) > Lithuanian vyras, Latvian virs, virietis, Old Prussian wîrs, Sudovian vîras | |
| Slavic - not found | |
| Notes: | In Proto-Indo-European there were several words
for "a man", but they all seemed quite different to its speakers because
the exact meanings differed: this very word meant "a human", contrasted
with animals, non-speaking creatures. This is easily seen in Avestan, but
the semantic meaning was lost in most other languages. The antonym for
this term was *pek'u- "cattle".
The word was o-stem masculine noun, which was preserved practically in all Indo-European branches. |
