| Today's Word: | *dhwer-, *dhwor- |
| Translation: | a doorway, a door |
| Related to: | Greek qura (a door) - feminine a-stem noun |
| Latin foris (a door), foras (out the house) - the initial f- proves it used to be *dh-, not *d- | |
| Common Celtic *dwor- (a door)
> Insular Celtic *doressuh - a suffix -est- was
added;
> Welsh Breton dor, Old Irish dorus, Irish Gaelic doras, Scottish Gaelic dorus or dorust (dialect), Old Cornish dor, Cornish daras. |
|
| Common Germanic *dur- (a doorway)
with a semi-vowel replacing a root vowel;
> Gothic dauro (gate), Old English duru (a door), Old High German turi, Old Norse dyrr |
|
| Hittite - not found | |
| Sanskrit dva'r (a door, gate) | |
| Thracian dur, dero- (a fence)
> Albanian dere" (a gate) |
|
| Old Baltic *duaris (gate) > Lithuanian durys (plural for "doors"), Latvian duris, Old Prussian dwaris (gate), Sudovian *dvaris (gate) | |
| Common Slavic *dueris (gate) > Slovene duri (plural - doors), Chekh dveri, Polish drzwi, Upper Sorbian durje, Lower Sorbian z'urja (doors), Ukrainian dveri, Russian dverj (a door), Belorussian dzwery (doors) | |
| Notes: | The noun was feminine and i-stem, though
later in some groups (Indic, Greek) it migrated into a-stems.
Some scientists think (and we share) that the plural form is so frequent because of the meaning "doors": two halfs of the gate. It had dual number, and such a fact is still shown in Russian where the word for "gate" is vorota, the former dual form. English has its door from Middle English dore form; also some anglicized Latin words exist such as forum, foreign. German has Tor, a neuter noun for "gate", and Tu"r, a feminine for "door". Dutch shows deur, Frisian daor, Danish Swedish Norwegian do"r. French inherited a strange word from Latin represented in the set expression au fur et a` mesure (gradually). Other Romance language keep words like fuera in Spanish and fora in Galician both meaning "out, outside, out the door" |
