| Today's Word: | *wed- / *wod-, *wad-r- |
| Translation: | wet, water |
| Related to: | Greek udwr (water) |
| Latin unda (a wave) - a nasal consonant infixed in Latin | |
| Common Celtic *ud-s-kio- (water)
- the suffixed zero-grade of the word *ved-;
> Old Irish usce - -d- was completely lost; Irish uisce, Scottish uisge |
|
| Common Germanic *wadar (water)
- *-d- soon became *-t- according to common
Germanic shifts;
> Gothic wató, Old English w[ae]ter, Old Norse vatn, Old Frankish weter, Old Swedish watar, Old High German wazzar |
|
| Hittite wetenas' (water), watar (gen.sg. of water) - mutations in nom. sg. | |
| Sanskrit udan (water) | |
| Thracian utus (a river);
> Albanian uj (water) - a simple stem with a mutated *-d- |
|
| Phrygian vedu- (water), Armenian get (a river) - we do not know the exact ties but they are related | |
| Old Baltic *vand- (water) - an
infix like in Latin; maybe the Proto-vowel was nasal?;
> Old Prussian wundan (water), Lithuanian vanduo (water), vandens (gen.sg. of water), Zhemaitian unduo |
|
| Common Slavic *woda - *-a-
became *-o- in Slavic; the word went into a-stems
> Russian Ukrainian Belarussian Bulgarian Serbo-Croatian Slovenian Chekh Slovak Polish Sorbian woda |
|
| Notes: | The noun was sooner masculine than feminine
or neuter; but we still doubt even to which stems it belonged in Proto-Indo-European.
Look for yourself: in Germanic it is neuter and a-stem; in Baltic
it is masculine and n-stem; in Slavic it is feminine and a-stem.
But the stem was strong enough to appear in majority of modern and ancient languages, sometimes even in several forms (stem or suffixed). The very stem meant just "something wet", but suffixes *-r-, *-n- and other made it a noun "water". English still keeps words water, wet, some derivatives. German is conservative and has preserved Wasser, the old High German form. French has taken another stem for "water", but preserved from the Latin for "wave" onde (f). |
