Reconstruction talk:Proto-Indo-European/bʰer-

Are the Serbo-Croatian брати (to pluck) and the Russian брать (bratʹ) (to take) (1st person я беру) descendants? Bogorm 09:47, 19 January 2009 (UTC)
In my etymology dictionary of Russian the Sanskrit भरति and Latin fero are listed as cognates, therefore I am adding the Russian word. I am adding the Serbo-Croatian as well, they are too similar. Bogorm 09:51, 19 January 2009 (UTC)

Are you using the "Serbo-Croatian" terminology just to provoke me or what? There are no SC entries you can link to, all your Cyrillic-spelled SC additions resolve to Serbian, you know. --Ivan Štambuk 10:43, 19 January 2009 (UTC)

No, but if this is a historical language, which does not exist any more, as you believe, then it should be treated as such. Bogorm 11:24, 19 January 2009 (UTC)

No, it is not a "historical language" but an imaginary one maintained for political reasons. It does not have written history beside in the period the name was politically maintained, and even then you can speak of two "variants" being de facto Croatian/Serbian. --Ivan Štambuk 11:52, 19 January 2009 (UTC)

Two variants? I am astounded, I did not know that you may imply the ineptitude of the terms "Bosnian language", "Montenegrin language", which (ineptitude) I also profess. Bogorm 12:39, 19 January 2009 (UTC)

After all, this was the official language of Yugoslavia (together with Slovene and the Macedonian dialect) from the 50s up to 2002. Thus, you see, it is only 6 years since the language is no longer official... But for the previous 50 years, if the constitution of the country states that it exists and this country is widely recognised and admitted in the UN (which is not the case with the Republik of Skopje), then the existence should prove to be/have been/ incontestable as well. Bogorm 12:43, 19 January 2009 (UTC)

This "Bosnian" language (in the constitution of B&H is called "Bosniak", as it should be: bošnjački in Croatian and Serbian) was fabricated by the Muslims in the 1990s and does not exist. No person in the world claimed to have spoken bošnjački before the 1990s. As for the crnogorski - this imaginary language lacks grammar books, dictionaries...you know, all stuff that "real" languages have. Before the Đukanović seized power, nobody did speak of crnogorski jezik either. Yes, the "official" SC of Communist Yugoslavia existed in two "variants" - Eastern and Western. If you didn't know this..

Indeed was this "SC" the official language of post-SFRJ "Yugoslavia" (Serbia and Montenegro) but as such existed only as "Eastern variant"; after declaring independence Croats re-established their lexicographical/grammar tradition that was hindered back by almost 2 centuries of Serb-Communist propaganda/idealism. > 95% of world's countries recognise Republic of Macedonia, all except you Bulgarians and Greek who will for the next 500 years still speak of it of as "FYRM". Wake up once and for all. Greek nationalist concerns over Slavic presence in Greece are near-pathological. Most of them can't come to senses when presented with evidence of almost entire continental Greece being Slavicised in the C7-10 (thousands of Slavic toponyms all over the place..). Dialect ancestral to Macedonian language is separated from the dialect ancestral to Bulgarian language by phonological isoglosses that are at least 1000 years old (reflexes of Common Slavic *t', *d', *kt etc., occurring at the time of OCS writings), and in no way can these to be considered "the same" nowadays. Their close proximity caused convergence in many points - yes - but 1000 years ago there was no "Macedonian" or "Bulgarian" language either, just a bunch of mutually intelligible dialects all over the Slavdom. --Ivan Štambuk 16:18, 19 January 2009 (UTC)

Well, you judge on the language based on its cultural tradition. Well, you may have a point that Croation is a separate language from Serbian. But where have you ever encountered Macedonian literature before the fabrication of that language by the Comintern in the 20s? Any literary work in Macedonian before its grammar being concocted by the Macedonists in the 50s-60s? I shall recount you how this grammar was botched up (according to Prof. Bozhidar Dimitrov) - once the last grammar of the Bulgarian language had been issued by Acad. Lyubomir Andreychin they brought it in Skopje and ordered to the scholars in FYROM: "read this and make what you can in order to produce a disparate, dissimilar grammar" and they twisted it and fetched what is now known as Macedonian language. How else can you explain that in both Bulgarian language and its Macedonian dialect there is definite article and a rich variety of tenses whilst in all other Slavic languages there is no definite article and only three tenses? As for the Hellenic Republic, it does not use FYROM, it uses rather the term Republic of Skopje (Δημοκρατία των Σκοπίων) which I find ravishing and captivating and am going to adopt. But I suggest ceasing to ponder upon the Macedonism and concentrating on more important stuff. Bogorm 17:06, 19 January 2009 (UTC)

OK. I'll just end up with a mind-pondering quote: "A language is a dialect with an army and navy", and this map on the distribution of Slavic dialects in C10. --Ivan Štambuk 18:07, 19 January 2009 (UTC)

grammatical note ?

Should we add a note saying that the verb is heteroclite and seems (at least in its greco-latine primitive forms) to be somehow strictly imperfective, perfect being borrowed from other verbs (greek enêkta, latin tetuli, sanscrit ?, slavic vzít).

--Diligent 13:59, 21 April 2011 (UTC)

Follow Pokorny?

Pokorny's IEW lists 7 (seven) entries "bʰer-", in the following order:

1. "bear, carry"
2. "well up, boil" (whence fretus, braten (also bread) and may others)
3. "incise, split" (whence pharynx, forma, etc.)
4. "hum, buzz" (a number of onomatopoeic verbs)
5. "gleaming, brownish" (brown, bear, beaver, bright, ...)
6. "bake, cook, roast" (but via "boil" from no. 2? bread also under this one)
7. "plait, weave"

Now Pokorny is a standard reference, but he was also a lumper, and includes lots of "root-extensions" under these entries. Needless to say, Porkorny's exact arrangement is far from being universally accepted, but the same will be the case with any alternative. --Dbachmann (talk) 11:27, 12 March 2012 (UTC)

Pokorny's dictionary is also rather old... —CodeCat 13:00, 12 March 2012 (UTC)

Homophone?

Doesn't this need another entry for *bʰer meaning "brown" or "shiny"? I looked up this page because I was wondering if there was a connection to bardhë. Ardric47 (talk) 22:39, 29 September 2014 (UTC)

Apparently the existence of such a root (which would seem to be supported by Lithuanian bėras and Latvian bērs, though strictly speaking these presuppose a *bēr- with long vowel) has been discredited by Ringe (see *berô). However, bardhë is derived from a different root anyway. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 00:05, 18 December 2016 (UTC)

Descendants

Why in the Descendants>Other formations section are the languages arranged in a manner that suggests Armenian gave rise to Old Armenian, and Old Armenian to Celtic, et al. ? Leasnam (talk) 16:26, 20 July 2015 (UTC)

Because an IP and CodeCat are fighting. --Vahag (talk) 16:29, 20 July 2015 (UTC)

This IP has been adding bad/nonsense stuff for years now. A notable trait is removing the * in front of unattested terms, or adding unattested terms to translation tables. First it was Germanic, now they've spread to other languages. They refuse to communicate at all, and just continue to press their edits through even if reverted many times. Often "Errors" is the only edit summary they leave, even if they aren't correcting any errors. Blocking hasn't helped, they just come back under another IP range. The IPs all seem to originate from France though, which is about all we know about them. If you see this user making edits that are even slightly dubious or which you do not have the knowledge to verify (i.e. adding terms in a script you can't read), please don't hesitate to revert all of it. Or, if you're willing to put in the extra time, revert everything you can't personally verify. Edit summaries are probably not relevant, your motivations will be ignored anyway. —CodeCat 17:28, 20 July 2015 (UTC)

Roger that. Leasnam (talk) 17:32, 20 July 2015 (UTC)

Slavic acute

@JohnC5 Slavic indeed has an acute accent, revealed by the accent of Russian -eré- rather than -ére-. So this requires the presence of a laryngeal, as odd as it seems. —CodeCat 15:49, 16 September 2016 (UTC)

@CodeCat: If the Sanskrit भरीमन् (bhárīman) is related, then should we suggest an extended root (because the normal root certainly does not have a laryngeal given its ablaut behaviors)? Though, I have some formal questions about Sanskrit's appurtenance. —JohnC5 16:00, 16 September 2016 (UTC)

There's another thing that has me suspect a laryngeal in Slavic. The verb *bьrati has a zero grade followed by a vowel in the infinitive, which suggests a pre-form *bʰr̥H-eh₂-. If the laryngeal weren't there, you'd get *brati instead. This isn't a watertight argument of course, as levelling could have inserted ь into the zero grade. —CodeCat 16:09, 16 September 2016 (UTC)

Derksen seems fine with *bʰér-e-ti for *bьrati, for whatever reason. I should study more Balto-Slavic stuff, but I can read a lick of any one of those languages. On a side note, the LIN ascribes *bèrmę to *bʰḗr-men-, pointing also to Sanskrit भार्मन् (bhā́rman, “a board for bearing or holding, a table”). That seems really weird to me though. —JohnC5 16:48, 16 September 2016 (UTC)

Slavic infinitives occasionally have different stems from the present tense, and this happens particularly often with simple thematic verbs. The Slavic infinitive derives from the -ti- action noun, so the infinitive of this particular verb has its origins in *bʰér-ti-s ~ *bʰr̥-téy-s. I believe that it was the dative or similar oblique case form that gave rise to the infinitive, though this process was probably incomplete in Proto-Balto-Slavic. Old Prussian has an infinitive based on the -tu- noun instead. —CodeCat 17:05, 16 September 2016 (UTC)