Reconstruction talk:Proto-Germanic/berô

Old Norse

Whence comes the Old Norse form bjǫrn and its descendants (björn, biorn > björn, bjørn) which obviously is related, if not from *berô? --Lundgren8 (t · c) 15:23, 29 May 2011 (UTC)

It's probably an early paradigm split. I think *berô had the stem *bern- rather than *beran-/berin-, so that would explain the Old Norse forms. I'm not sure what the Germanic situation was, however. —CodeCat 15:26, 29 May 2011 (UTC)

I see, thank you.--Lundgren8 (t · c) 16:11, 29 May 2011 (UTC)

The genitive plural at least should have been *bernōn, and the dative/instrumental plural (*bernumaz/)*bernumiz, which is an obvious source for the *bernu- stem since this form looks like it could equally belong to a u-stem *bernuz. (The accusative plural also happens to be weak in some ancient IE languages, but whether this situation can be reconstructed for PIE is unclear, and a weak acc. pl. would be unexpected from a structural point of view. Still, *bernunz would be an additional source for the creation of a u-stem *bernuz.) A parallel case is *arōn (check the declension table at *arô), the word for "eagle", which has a doublet still in OHG: aro vs. arn, from the strong vs. weak forms respectively. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 10:19, 17 June 2013 (UTC)

Etymology

I'd like to point out a newer alternative proposal for the etymology of *berōn: as an individualising derivation from the root *ǵʰṷer- – see *ǵʰwer- –, yielding "the fierce one" instead of the traditional "the brown one", both apparent taboo avoidance terms in any case. Given that there are further good etymologies (for example *bidjanan – see *bidjaną) requiring word-initial *b- where one would expect *gw- in Proto-Germanic, this is a definite possibility. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 10:34, 17 June 2013 (UTC)

I see this proposal is already mentioned at bear#Etymology 1 in the hidden "etymology notes" box. Didn't remember it was Ringe's proposal. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 11:04, 17 June 2013 (UTC)

We have barłóg and barłożyć in Polish (see here), which the Russian wiktionary and other academic sources relate to the bear's etymology. Please discuss Zezen (talk) 16:52, 16 January 2016 (UTC)

OTOH, this source claims it comes from another root, sorry. Zezen (talk) 16:55, 16 January 2016 (UTC)