BEAR, BURDEN, BAIRN, FERTILE, SUFFER

All these words, whole or just a part of them, ultimately derive from the Indo-European (IE) root *BHER-, meaning “to carry” or “to bear children”, according to the Indo-European Roots Index of The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000. www.bartleby.com/61/. [05/11/08]. This root became *BER- in Germanic (Gmc). The change in the initial consonant was explained by Grimm: the IE voiced aspirate */bh/ > Gmc voiced fricative*/ß/ > Old English (OE) voiced plosive*/b/. This is the reason why bear, burden and bairn have an initial /b/ = . However, IE */bh/ became /f/ in Latin (Lat), that is, we find FER- in Lat, whence the words fertile or suffer, which are not of Gmc stock, but from Lat. The verb suffer was borrowed from Anglo-Norman (AN), the French dialect of Normandy as was spoken in England after the Norman Conquest. The AN verb suffrir, of course, descends from Lat sufferre, which is made up of the prefix sub- and the verb ferre “to carry”, that is, the meaning was “to bear from underneath”. The verb suffer today keeps the original meaning with which it was employed in 1225 in the important medieval work Ancrene Wisse, or Guide of Anchoresses in Modern English (ModE): “to endure, to undergo”. The second Lat word, the adjective fertile, was borrowed two centuries later from Old French (OFr) fertile and ultimately comes from Lat fertilis, which in turn derives from the verb ferre “to carry”. According to the Oxford English Dicationary Online, 2008. http//dictionary.oed.com [o5.11/2008], the adjective fertile was first used in English in 1460, with the meaning it still has today, "bearing or producing in abundance; fruitful, prolific", and it was Sir John Fortescue, a lawyer appointed chancellor of England, who first employed it in a book about the English monarchy (see Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia, s.v. John Fortescue). As for the semantic relationship holding between the three Germanic words, bear, burden and bairn, they all denote “carrying”: the verb bear (from OE beran) means “to carry”, the noun burden (from OE burþen) means “that which is carried or borne”, and the noun bairn (from OE bearn “child”) at bottom means “the baby borne in the womb”. However, bairn is not used in standard Present Day English (PDE) anymore. It has survived, though, in the Englishes spoken in Scotland and northern England. Other surviving words from the same IE root *BHER- are birth, barrow, bier and bring, from Gmc, and afferent, circumference, confer, defer, differ, efferent, infer, offer, prefer, proffer, refer, suffer, transfer, vociferate, from Lat.