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Re: confession: roots

From:Muke Tever <alrivera@...>
Date:Monday, May 7, 2001, 4:49
From: "Andreas Johansson" <and_yo@...>
> We should perhaps add that the word root is often used for things that once > worked like Oskar describes, but nowadays is only recognized as such by > diachronic linguistics. For example, PIEists (/pai.ists/!) will tell you > that 'guest' and 'hostile' is derived from the same PIE root (*ghost- > "foreign" I think), but the average modern English-speaker certainly feels > the two words to be completely unrelated.
And there are even closer cases than that that generally go unnoticed, such as English 'to bear (a child)' / 'to be born'... And there's a question for the list, which I forgot if I've asked already. Is there a simple active verb in English meaning 'to be born' ? I have been, lately, [in interlinears] using <nate> which is a probably-ill-formed borrowing from Lat. <nasci> [and parallel to <cognate>, <natal>, <native>, etc., to bring back to the topic of the post...] but has the advantage of being short... *Muke!

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Nik Taylor <fortytwo@...>