| Today's Word: | *bher- |
| Translation: | to bear, to carry, to take |
| Related to: | Greek ferw (I carry) - an easy change of the initial consonant |
| Latin feró (I carry) | |
| Common Celtic *ber- (to carry)
> Old Irish beru, berim (I catch, I bring forth), Irish and
Scottish Gaelic beirim;
Welsh cymmeryd (to take, to accept), Breton kemeret - both come from *com-ber- (to take with oneself) |
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| Common Germanic *ber-, baer- (to carry, to bring) > Gothic baíran (to carry), Old English and Old High German beran, Old Norse bera | |
| Avestan baraiti (carries) - an ablaut in the stem | |
| Sanskrit bharati (carries) - again an ablaut causing -a- | |
| Thracian *bier / *ber- (must have
been like that);
> Albanian bie (I am bringing) |
|
| Phrygian eber (has brought), abberet (will
bring),
~ Armenian berem (I carry) |
|
| Baltic - not found | |
| Common Slavic *bero (nasal -o),
*brati (to take) - a vowel interchange in the stem of this
infinitive;
> Church Slavic birati (to take) (a very short -i-), Bulgarian bera (I take), Chekh Serbo-Croatian Slovene brati, Polish and Upper Sorbian braæ, Lower Sorbian bjeru (I take), Russian brat', beru, bremya (a burden) |
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| Notes: | This is a very easy stem, used practically in
every book about the comparative Indo-European studies. But does it become
less valuable or interesting?
It was a thematic verb in Proto-Indo-European, so it used thematic endings (-o instead of -mi in 1 pers. present) and a "thematic vowel" before it (e.g. bher-e-s, ebher-o-nt). The only case it turned into athematic verbs is Old Irish, where two parallel forms shown above existed together. Armenian also has it with -m ending - but it's everywhere in Armenian. The verb meant not only "to carry" and "to bring" but also was associated with giving birth to a child. In English and German the trend is still seen: to be born, gebären (to give birth). The very word "birth" is from that stem. This meaning is kept in a Russian word for "pregnant": beremennaya. Dutch has preserved draagbaar with the meaning "stretcher" - surely the same stem. Also English has to bear, latinisms to offer and to suffer, German Bürde (fem., a load), French has descending from Latin words like offrir (to offer), fertile and préférer (to prefere). |
