454.)
GROWTH: –noun 1. the act or process, or a manner of growing; development; gradual increase. 2. size or stage of development: It hasn't yet reached its full growth. (biology) the process of an individual organism growing organically; a purely biological unfolding of events involved in an organism changing gradually from a simple to a more complex level
GRASS
General Germanic: O.E. græs, gærs "herb, plant, grass," from P.Gmc. grasan (cf. O.N., Ger., Goth. gras), from PIE*ghros- "young shoot, sprout," OFris. gers, gres, OS.gras, MDu. gras, gars , gers, mod.Du gras, gars, gers, mod.Du. gras, OHG.( MHG., mod. Ger.) ON ( Sw. gras, Da. græs) Goth. gras.
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Andis Kaulins replied:
The reconstructed proto-Indo-European etymology for "grass" "grow" and "green" is totally faulty.
The root for "grow, increase" is the correctly determined hypothetical proto-Indo-Europan *aug- which is STILL a major word and root in Latvian (see here ) and led to forms such as augl-/augr- "fruit, grow, cultivate", which led to the term "grow". The American Heritage Dictionary at Bartleby writes:
"Appendix I
Indo-European Roots
ENTRY: aug-
DEFINITION: To increase. Oldest form *2eug-, colored to *2aug-. Variant *2weg- becoming *(a)weg-.
Derivatives include nickname, auction, and auxiliary.
1. eke1, from Old English acan, can, to increase; b. nickname, from Old English aca, an addition. Both a and b from Germanic *aukan. 2. Variant (metathesized) form *weg- (from *weg-), extended to *wegs- (o-grade *wogs-). a. wax2; woodwaxen, from Old English weaxan, to grow, from Germanic *wahsan; b. waist, from Old English *wæst, growth, hence perhaps waist, size, from Germanic *wahs-tu-. 3. Form *aug--. auction, augend, augment, author, authorize, from Latin augre, to increase. 4. augur; inaugurate, from Latin augur, diviner (< "he who obtains favorable presage" < "divine favor, increase"). 5. august, from Latin augustus, majestic, august. 6. Suffixed form *aug-s-. a. auxiliary, from Latin auxilium, aid, support, assistance; b. auxin, auxesis, from Greek auxein, auxanein, to increase. (Pokorny aeg- 84.)
The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition. Copyright © 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Published by the Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved."
I posted about this already at LexiLine at http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/LexiLine/message/1216 as follows:
"[T]he Latvian word "aug" meaning "grow" is a root
alleged to be original in Indo-European even by the mainstream
linguists and has many cognates in Latvian, e.g. "augums"
meaning "stature, physical size", or "augli" meaning "fruits, the
growth of the fields and the harvest", and augsts ("high, tall").
All of these can be traced to the root word aug (by the way, we have
this word in English as "high" and in German as "hoch"). I need not
go to Latin augere "to increase" (whence English grow) to find the
root aug, it is already located in the Latvian language. Quite the
contrary, Latin can go to the Latvian to find the root for augere
since the actual root AUG had disappeared from Latin.
The list is endless. There is no need in Latvian to look to Greek or
Latin or any other language for the roots of these words."
In this regard, the Arabic word for "grow, increase" is tarbiyy, allegedly from Arabic root raba (to grow, increase), which is the same as the Latvian root darb- "work, activity" as rooted in dariba "doings". German has lost the D and has the word Arbeit = Latvian darbot "to be be busy". In other words, in Arabic it was not the increasing "height" of something that gave the concept of "growth" but rather the idea of "activity" in the sense of increase.
The idea that there is a root *ghr in Indo-European for the color green is absurd and supported mostly only in Germanic. In Latvian ALL the "colors" are similar and very little dissimilated, showing a very ancient far more original status for color words. I have written about this at length in talking about the hair color of Sumerians:
"Orientalists hold to an unfounded misconception based on a misreading of Sumerian writing, that the Sumerians were "black-haired" invaders.
Sumerian Hair Color
Krishna = Reddish and Blonde Hair
ALL of the indigenous peoples in the Fertile Crescent have Black Hair, so they would not call immigrant Ubaidian Sumerians "black-haired". This is nonsense. An ancient word having another meaning has simply been mistranslated.
We can demonstrate on the basis of the Indo-European
words for COLOR, that red and blonde have been confused with black and blue.
These terms are e.g. Latvian KRASAINS "bright, MANY-colored",
allegedly found also as Sanskrit KRSNA "black, dark" (incorrect and a similar source of error in Sanskrit translation),
Russian KRASNYJ "the color red"
Old Church Slavic KRASINU, Latvian KRASNS "beautiful".
The description of the hair of the Sumerians by indigenous peoples clearly meant "blonde, red-haired, colored hair", i.e. in CONTRA-DISTINCTION to the black hair of the native inhabitants of the more southerly regions
(As Shakespeare wrote, these are the sun-burned races of the South
- this is not a racial disparagement, it just means that
pigmentation increases with increasing exposure to solar radiation,
which is why the hair of humans gets darker as you go South
- it is a normal adaptation we also find in many life forms.)
The KR- word root is found in English CL- (CoLor),
i.e. the well-known conversion R//L although the KR- forms
have already lost the interceding vowel. In Latvian the words for blue, green and yellow differ only as to the internal vowel (ZIL, ZAL, ZEL) showing a particularly ancient form of the Indo-European proto-language (the text color corresponds to the color being discussed below).
We find the basic root KR / CL in
Latvian ZIL- "blue" - also the
word for "pupil" of the eye
and the blue-grey "forest"
Latvian ZAL- "green" - also the word for grass
Latvian ZEL- "gold, yellow-colored" and DZEL- "yellow" (Latvian)
ZILumas - "grey" (in Lithuanian)
Latvian SARkans - "red"
AZUL- AZUR- "blue" in many languages
ZELenyj "green" (Russian)
ZELtyj "yellow" (Russian)
ZAIRita "yellow" (Avestan)
CAERULeus "blue" (Latin)
SAR- "red" (Latvian)
SORt "black" (Danish)
SVARt "black (Swedish)
KR- "color" (Latvian)
GRey KELainos - "black, dark color"
to which Old Hindic KALA "black"
GALanos - "blue"
but Lithuanian GELtonas "yellow"
XILos - "grass", XL- "green"
CHR- as in CHRoma "color"
It is quite clear from the above examples that all of these terms
derive from a single "color" root-word which was then adapted
in various only slightly dissimilated forms to distinguish the varies shades of "color" in the "color-system".
As the great German thinker Goethe wrote in his Color Theory
about the color-perception of the ancients:
"Their denominations of colours are not permanently and precisely defined, but mutable and fluctuating....Their yellow, on the one hand, inclines to red, on the other to blue; the blue is sometimes green, sometimes red; the red is at one time yellow, at another blue.... If we take a glance at the copiousness of the Greek and Roman terms, we shall perceive how mutable the words were, and how easily each was adapted to almost every point in the colorific circle."
Note as below that the white-black-grey(brown) system
of black and white color has a different root which is BL- viz. BR-.
BL- viz BR- forms are:
PELEKS "grey" (Latvian) duBLI "mud" Sumerian DUB "dried mud writing tablet"
whence Old Irish DUB "black"
BLACK "black" (English)
BLUE "blue" (English)
i.e. our modern "blue" derives from steel blue-grey
BLONDE "white" (English) - note BALTS "white" (Latvian)
from Latvian BALINATS (bleached) = BLONDE
BRown "brown"
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