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Indo-European Lexicon

PIE Etymon and IE Reflexes

Below we display: a Proto-Indo-European (PIE) etymon adapted from Pokorny, with our own English gloss; our Semantic Field assignment(s) for the etymon, linked to information about the field(s); an optional Comment; and Reflexes (derived words) in various Indo-European languages, organized by family/group in west-to-east order where Germanic is split into West/North/East families and English, our language of primary emphasis, is artificially separated from West Germanic. IE Reflexes appear most often as single words with any optional letter(s) enclosed in parentheses; but alternative full spellings are separated by '/' and "principal parts" appear in a standard order (e.g. masculine, feminine, and neuter forms) separated by commas.

Reflexes are annotated with: Part-of-Speech and/or other Grammatical feature(s); a short Gloss which, especially for modern English reflexes, may be confined to the oldest sense; and some Source citation(s) with 'LRC' always understood as editor. Keys to PoS/Gram feature abbreviations and Source codes appear below the reflexes; at the end are links to the previous/next etyma [in Pokorny's alphabetic order] that have reflexes.

Fans of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings may appreciate the source & meaning tips that pop up when the mouse pointer hovers over a non-obvious word or name that he coined from Indo-European (usually Old English or Old Norse) stock. But only reflexes of PIE etyma can be included, and these tend to concentrate in the vocabulary of Rohan and the Shire.

All reflex pages are currently under active construction; as time goes on, corrections may be made and/or more etyma & reflexes may be added.

Note: this page is for systems/browsers with Unicode^® support, but fonts for only the Unicode 2.0 character set (including combining diacritics). Versions of this page rendered in alternate character sets are available via links (see Unicode 3 and ISO-8859-1) in the left margin.

Pokorny Etymon: mēlo-, smēlo- 'small animal'

Semantic Field: Animal

Indo-European Reflexes:

Family/Language	Reflex(es)	PoS/Gram.	Gloss	Source(s)
Celtic
Old Irish:	mīl	n	animal	GED
English
Old English:	smæl	adj	small, narrow	LRC
Middle English:	smal	adj	small	W7
English:	small	adj	of relatively little size	AHD/W7
	Smallburrow	prop.n	hobbit surname in Tolkien: The Lord of the Rings	LRC
W-Germanic
Old Frisian:	smel	adj	small	GED
Dutch:	maal	n	young cow	GED
Old Saxon:	smal	adj	small, narrow	ASD
Old High German:	smal	adj	small	GED
N-Germanic
Old Icelandic:	smali	n.masc.pl	small domestic animals, esp. sheep	GED
Icelandic:	small	n	sheep, small cattle	ASD
	smár	adj	small, narrow	ASD
E-Germanic
Gothic:	*smals	adj	small	GED
Italic
Oscan:	mallom	n.neut	evil	GED
Latin:	malus	adj	bad, evil	GED
Old French:	māla	n	cow	GED
Slavic
Old Church Slavonic:	malъ	adj	small, young	GED
Hellenic
Greek:	μη̃λον	n.pl	small animals, sheep	GED
Armenian
Armenian:	mal	n	sheep, ram	GED

Key to Part-of-Speech/Grammatical feature abbreviations:

Abbrev.		Meaning
adj	=	adjective
masc	=	masculine (gender)
n	=	noun
neut	=	neuter (gender)
pl	=	plural (number)
prop	=	proper

Key to information Source codes (always with 'LRC' as editor):

Code		Citation
AHD	=	Calvert Watkins: The American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots, 2nd ed. (2000)
ASD	=	Joseph Bosworth and T. Northcote Toller: An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary (1898)
GED	=	Winfred P. Lehmann: A Gothic Etymological Dictionary (1986)
LRC	=	Linguistics Research Center, University of Texas, Austin
W7	=	Webster's Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary (1963)

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