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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.

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: su̯erbh-, also su̯er-? 'to turn, sweep, swerve'

Semantic Fields: to Turn; to Sweep

Indo-European Reflexes:

Family/Language	Reflex(es)	PoS/Gram.	Gloss	Source(s)
English
Old English:	sweorfan, swearf, swurfon, sworfen	vb	to rub, scour, file, wipe away	W7/ASD
Middle English:	swerven	vb	to swerve	W7
English:	swarf	n	metallic particles removed by cutting/grinding tool	AHD/W7
	swerve	vb	to deviate, turn aside	AHD/W7
W-Germanic
Old Frisian:	swerva	vb	to go, move	ASD
Dutch:	zwerven	vb	to rove, wander	ASD
Old Saxon:	swerban	vb	to wipe	ASD
Old High German:	swerban	vb	to wipe off	W7
N-Germanic
Old Norse:	svarf	n	file (tool) dust	W7
Icelandic:	sverfa	vb	to file	ASD
E-Germanic
Gothic:	af-swairban	vb	to delete, wipe out	ASD
	bi-swairban	vb	to wipe	ASD
Hellenic
Greek:	syrein	vb	to drag	W7

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

Abbrev.		Meaning
n	=	noun
vb	=	verb

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)
LRC	=	Linguistics Research Center, University of Texas, Austin
W7	=	Webster's Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary (1963)

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