Secrets of the Words You Know
Blog Post 22: *bh, and the secrets of ‘blanch’ and ‘black’
(i) *bh at the start of a word
Roots in *bh- are by contrast with *b very well represented in PIE.
One of the more widespread set of derivatives across almost all Indo-European languages is from the root *bher-, to carry or to give birth, senses still maintained in English ‘to bear’. ‘Bairn’, once much more widely used in English as the standard word for ‘child’ but now largely restricted to Northern dialects, notably Scots, reflects the second meaning. Both show that English has maintained the change of PIE*bh to Proto Germanic *b that we would expect under Grimm’s Law.
In Latin, where initial *bh always yields ‘f’, the core verb derived from *bher- was combined with a large number of prefixed prepositions/preverbs to provide a wide range of concepts, some seemingly only loosely related to either carrying or giving birth, such as ‘differ’, ‘offer’, prefer’, ‘refer’ and ‘suffer’. ‘Fertile’ has however kept the link to giving birth more directly.
Similarly in Greek, while ‘Christopher’ shows the meaning of ‘carry’ directly and ‘pheromones’ carry messages to members of the species, words like ‘euphoria’ draw on the core meaning less literally, much as we might use ‘carried away’. Yes, that’s a ‘metaphor’…
Sanskrit has kept the original *bh, which is visible for example in the Hindi name for India, ‘Bharat’ from the name of a mythical emperor, with a sense of ‘the maintainer’.
As for Celtic, Brittonic place names like Aberystwyth and Aberdeen show the expected shift of *bh>b in words from this root. ‘Aber’ is made up of the elements *ad (usually ‘to’) and *ber-, and thus to denote the mouth of a river: the waters of the rivers Ystwyth and Don or Dee (sources differ on which of these local rivers is to be preferred) are being ‘carried to’ the sea. In Scots Gaelic, a slightly different construction is used, combining *ber with *in, rather than *ad, so giving names like ‘Inverness’, with a ‘mutation’ of b>v after the ‘n’.
Other inherited English words beginning with ‘b’ which have doublets from Latin [spelt ‘f’] or Greek [spelt ‘ph’] include:
- ‘Brother’ versus ‘fraternal’, from *bhrāter- (also Romani ‘pal’ from Sanskrit bhrātar: notice the ‘l’ for PIE *r as an example of the varied treatment of *l and *r in Sanskrit and its descendants, mentioned in Blog posts 14 and 15)
- ‘Brew’ versus ‘ferment’, from *bhreu- (to brew). ‘Bread’ similarly comes from this root, showing that it was typically leavened.
- ‘Beacon’ versus ‘fantasy’, ‘photo’ and ‘phenomenon’, from *bheH- (to shine, appear), with various suffixes
- ‘Bit’ and ‘Bite’, which we met in Blog 10, versus ‘Fission’, from *bheid- (to split). ‘Pizza’ is thought to be from a related Old High German ‘bizzo’ or ‘pizzo’, meaning ‘morsel’, borrowed into Italian.
- ‘Blow’ and ‘inflate’ from *bhleH- (to blow)
As noted earlier, we can also expect *bh to develop to ‘b’ in Persian, and we can show this in the borrowing ‘cummerbund’, whose second element comes from a PIE root *bhendh- (‘to bind’). This root is, remarkably, the source of four common English words divided only by their vowel: ‘bend’, ‘band’, and ‘bond’, in addition to ‘bind’ itself.
In the case of this root, Hindi, following Sanskrit, also shows a plain unaspirated ‘b’, which is visible in English through two borrowings:
- ‘bund’ to describe an earthen embankment
- ‘bandanna’ (perhaps via Portuguese).
The reason for this loss of aspiration is that Sanskrit routinely loses the aspirate in the first consonant of roots with two aspirated consonants, thus *bhendh>bandh – another good example of dissimilation.
The most famous example of this ‘loss of the first aspirate’ is the Buddha (rather than *Bhuddha), or ‘enlightened one’ from a root *bheudh- meaning roughly ‘be aware’ or ‘perceive’. Greek shows a similar dissimilation in the same circumstances, but (as we shall see under *dh), to a voiceless stop.
Germanic does not share this dissimilation, so the English descendants of *bheudh- show the expected Grimm’s Law shifts in ‘bid’ (in the sense of make an offer, as ‘bid at an auction’, or to tell someone to do, or not to do (forbid), something). This is quite a shift in meaning, and as we shall see under *gʷh is further complicated by the fact that sound changes have delivered an identical word with a not totally dissimilar meaning from a quite different root!
A root with many descendants in English, mostly borrowed, is *bheH-, ‘to speak’, the a-coloured laryngeal giving in practice *bhā- as the effective form of the root. The main word inherited by English from this root may seem a bit strange. It is ‘ban’, the logic being that a ban is a formal proclamation, which is a sense we can also see in the words ‘banns’ for a formal announcement of a marriage and ‘banish’ for officially exiling someone, similarly from this root though via Old French borrowings from a Germanic source.
Borrowings from Latin include ‘fate’, ‘fable’ and ‘infant’ (‘not yet talking’), and from Greek ‘aphasia’ (‘unable to talk’) and ‘prophet’ (‘speaking out’). An *m-suffix yields ‘fame’ and related words from Latin as well as ‘euphemism’ from Greek, while the o-grade *bhō- with an *n suffix is the origin of our many borrowings from Greek with the element ‘phone’ (the Greek for ‘voice’), from ‘symphony’ to ‘telephone’.
Before we leave initial *bh, let’s just pause on one other root, *bherĝh-, which means ‘high’.
This is familiar from the many German mountains with the element ‘berg’. In English, the same root gives us ‘barrow’ in the archaeological sense of a small mound. (As mentioned in Blog 8, the final letter in this word is an example of Old English *g becoming w after ‘o’ or ‘a’, as in ‘saw’, ‘bow’ and ‘tow’.) ‘Barrow’ was once a more generic word meaning ‘hill’, which is the origin of many placenames from Whitbarrow (a limestone hill near Kendal) to Barrow in Furness.
A high place can be a strong point that acts as a defence. It would attract people and become a settlement. Thus English ‘borough’ (or abbreviated ‘-burgh’ and ‘-bury’), also from this root, developed the sense of ‘important town’.
(As an aside, the odd pronunciation of ‘-bury’ as if it were ‘berry’ is an example of the dialectical variability in Old English. The spelling reflects what would have been the Wessex dialect, with a ‘u’ sound, but in the case of this word, the Kentish dialect, which had developed an ‘e’ sound, has prevailed – perhaps a tribute to the status of Canterbury?)
A Celtic derivation from the same root gives us the name of a goddess of pre-Christian Ireland, the ‘exalted’ Brigid, again showing the expected ‘b’ for *bh. And the first element of the name of the English county of Berkshire may go back to a Celtic ‘barrog’, from the same root, reflecting the high downs along the line of the prehistoric Ridgway.
So the ‘sound-code’ for initial ‘b’ is:
English initial ‘b’ in an inherited word = PIE *bh = Indic bh = Latin, Greek, Celtic, Balto-Slavonic, Persian and Germanic b.
However, as we will see, in a relatively small number of cases, English b may also go back to PIE*gʷh.
(ii) *bh elsewhere
In medial position, as you can see from the little word list in Blog 9, English ‘seven’ contrasts with German ‘sieben’, or ‘starve’ with ‘sterben’. This is because English shows ‘v’ for Proto Germanic *b (usually from PIE *bh) between vowels or voiced consonants.
In blog post 20 I mentioned that we would cover two cases where the distinctions between different types of consonants are overridden in English and other Germanic languages. The first one applies to labials and velars before *s and *t. All labials shift to *f in these situations, so, to take a couple of examples with PIE *bh:
- The PIE root * ghabh-, to which we will return under *gh, yields English ‘give’ but also ‘gift’
- The root *webhH- yields English ‘web’ but also ‘weft’.
(iii) The secrets of ‘blanch’ and ‘black’
Why do the words ‘blanch’ and ‘black’ look rather similar (first two consonants identical) when more or less opposite in meaning?
Both go back ultimately to a PIE root *bhel-, with the meaning of ‘shine’ or ‘burn’, these two core meanings spawning a remarkable array of words you know.
On colours alone, this root lies behind ‘black’ and ‘blush’ (inherited) but also ‘blue’, ‘blond’ and even ‘blanch’ (all three seemingly Germanic words brought into French, and from French back into English) – so literally ‘from black to white’. The logic varies from ‘burnt black’ to ‘shining white’. Familiar words from Irish (the Spring light or fire festival of ‘Beltain’) and Russian (the great white sturgeon ‘beluga’, and ‘Belarus’ or ‘White Russia’) show how Celtic and Slavic have similarly converted PIE *bh to ‘b’. The expected Latin ‘f’ is seen in the name ‘Flavia’ or ‘golden-haired’.
‘Bleach’ and ‘bleak’, also from this root, form another Old English and Old Norse doublet, one of the less obvious. The Old Norse word that gives us ‘bleak’ originally meant ‘white’ or ‘shining’, and then in English ‘pale’; but by the 16th century the word had acquired its present meaning of ‘bare’ and later also ‘cheerless’. The colour reference may well have been lost because of the near-identity in sound of the near-opposites in meaning ‘bleak’ and ‘black’.
In Blog post 10 we discussed some of the implications of ‘vowel gradation’ and suffixes in the PIE root system. There’s a good example of both from our present root *bhel-. With an added velar the extended root *bhle/og- is the source, in o-grade, of inherited ‘black’ (already mentioned) and Greek-derived ‘phlox’ (with its flame-like flowers). From the zero grade *bhl̥g- Latin offers us ‘fulgent’ and ‘fulminate’, and also ‘flame’, ‘flammable’ and, from its colour, ‘flamingo’ (as we shall see under *g below, Latin loses a ‘g’ before ‘m’). Less obviously fiery is our borrowing from Greek ‘phlegm’, originally one of the ‘humours’ of the body, but so-named as being associated with inflammation.
(iv) What’s an inherited English word from another PIE root beginning with *bh?
Our chosen root is another root *bhel-. In form, it is identical to the one just discussed, but its meaning seems to be ‘to blow or swell’. Two borrowings are:
- From Latin, ‘folly’ (which goes back to a Latin word meaning ‘bellows’ – itself a derivative of an extended form of this root – and so presumably from the idea of a ‘windbag’)
- from Greek, ‘phallus’.
What might be an English noun inherited from the basic version of this root?
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