தனிச்சொற்கள்
157
"Take for instance, such words as, to bear, burden, bier, and barrow. They all have the same constituent element, namely, br; they all have a meaning connected with bearing or carrying. Burden is what is carried; bier, what a person is carried on; barrow, in wheel-barrow, an implement for carrying things.
'No doubt, this is only prima facie evidence. We must not forget that we are dealing with a modern language which has passed through many vicissitudes. In order to institute truly scientific comparisons, we should have in each case to trace these words to their Anglo - Saxon, or even to their corresponding Gothic forms.
'But though it is necessary, before we institute comparisons, always to go back to the oldest forms of words which are within our reach, still for practical purposes it suffices if we know that such words as bear, burden, bier and barrow have all been proved to come from one common source.
"And more than this. As to bear is used in many languages in the sense of bearing children, we may safely trace to the same source such English words as birth, and bairn, a child.
'Nay, as the same expression is also used of the earth - bearing fruit, we can hardly be wrong in explaining, for instance, bar - ley, as what the earth bears or brings forth. In German Getreide, M.H.G. Getregede, literally, what is born, has become the name of every kind of corn. If we go back to Anglo - Saxon. we find boer - lic for barley, in which lic is derivative, while bere by itself meant barley. In Scotland more particularly bear continued to be used for barley and a coarse kind of barley is still called bear - barley. Barn also receives the explanation from the same quarter. For barn is contracted from bere - oern, which means barley - house, or, as also called, bere - flor.
'But now we shall be asked, What are those mysterious syllables? What is, for instance, that bar, which we discovered as the kernel of ever so many words?
"These syllables have been called roots, That is, of course, nothing but a, mataphorical expression....... In burden, den is formative; in birth, th is formative; in bairn, n is formative. In barn too, n is formative. but it is different from the n in bairn, because it is really a contraction of oern. Bere - oern meant a place for bar - ley, just as horsern meant a place for horses, a stable, sleepern, a sleeping place.
"There remains therefore bar with a variable vowel, and this we call a root, or an ultimate element, of speech, because it cannot be analysed any further.
