Secrets of the Words You Know
Blog Post 21: PIE Stop Consonants *b
In most respects, the labial stop consonants are what I would call ‘well-behaved’. That is to say, that in almost all cases a PIE labial sound is still a labial sound today, even if it has shifted say from a voiced aspirate (*bh) to a fricative such as ‘f’ or ‘v’ or to an unaspirated stop like ‘b’. Why not ‘in all respects’ then? It’s because of a strange tendency to disappear. As we have just observed, the sound *b seems to have more or less ‘gone missing’ in PIE, at least in initial position; and one language group has lost inherited *p completely. (Coincidentally, Arabic also has no ‘p’ sound.)
(i) *b at the start of a word
This sound is conspicuous by its apparent absence, particularly in initial position, making it something of an anomaly in the otherwise quite symmetric system of stop consonants in PIE. We’ll start by looking at a couple of possible examples of initial *b.
One often-discussed example is a conjectured root *bel-, meaning roughly ‘large’ or ‘strong’. There is no Germanic legacy of this root, but possible descendants of such a root are visible in English in ‘debilitated’, a borrowing from Latin, where the ‘de-’ element negates the next element (so ‘not strong’), and the borrowing from Russian of ‘Bolshoi’ (‘big’ or ‘great’) as in the Bolshoi Ballet or the Bolshevik Party of the Revolution (so called because they were the majority party among the revolutionaries). Other potential matches, not visible in borrowings into English, exist in Sanskrit and Greek.
Another possible case is a conjectured root *bak- which would bring together our borrowings from Latin ‘bacillus’ and Greek ‘bacteria’, both of which come from words meaning ‘walking stick’ (from the shape of these phenomena in early microscopes), and English ‘peg’. ‘Peg’ itself is probably borrowed from Dutch, as otherwise the final ‘g’ would have developed to ‘y’, as we saw in Blog post 8.
Even if *bel- and/or *bak- (and one or two other ‘possibles’) are genuine PIE roots, it is clear that the number of PIE roots beginning with *b is extremely small. Some have suggested that the sound may have merged with either *m or *w before the stage of PIE that we can observe.
An important consequence of the complete or near-complete absence of an initial PIE *b is that there are virtually no words beginning with *p in Proto-Germanic, and those that do exist – give or take the ancestor of ‘peg’ and a very few other possible cases – are borrowings. One example is the ancestor of ‘path’, which is thought to be from Iranian (as we will see under *p in a later blog post). It also means that almost none of the many English words you know that begin with the letter ‘p’ is inherited in a direct line from PIE.
(ii) *b in the middle or end of a word
Even in other positions, roots including *b seem surprisingly few. Possible examples, not accepted by all, include:
- *leb-, meaning ‘lick’ or ‘lip’, as in English ‘lip’ and its borrowing, from Latin, ‘labial’, as we saw under *l. A Hittite match ‘lipp-’ (‘lick’) gives this example additional support.
- *dheub-, from which English inherits ‘deep’. This root also gives the Celtic word for ‘world’ dubno-, which we saw under *w is the first element of the name ‘Donald’. It seems however that there was a parallel form of the root in which the final consonant was *bh rather than *b. This version is the origin of the name of the Greek mythical monster Typhon.
- *treb– (‘building’), visible in English in the Old Norse borrowing ‘thorpe’ (‘village’ – another case of metathesis involving an ‘r’: Technical Note 3 Box 1), and with Celtic connections as well, celebrated in the rhyme ‘By Tre, Pol and Pen, You may know the Cornish men’. ‘Tre’ in Cornish means ‘homestead’. It’s closely related to Welsh ‘tref’ with similar meanings, including also ‘town’. The ‘f’ in Welsh, lost in Cornish, is, like the ‘p’ of ‘thorpe’, a reflex of that original *b. Our borrowing ‘tavern’ from Old French is believed by some to be from the same root. The argument is that a proto-Latin ‘*traberna’ lost the first of its two ‘r’s to become Latin ‘taberna’ (originally meaning ‘hut’ and later ‘shop’ or ‘tavern’) – a case of dissimilation (Technical Note 3, Box 7).
Whatever the true position in PIE, we shall therefore find very few matches under this sound, and I certainly cannot offer you any material showing significant diversity of meaning among phonetically-related w