ok, I'm confused. PIE gheim -> heims -> winter, no?No. We have two different PIE roots:
1. *
gheim-- 'winter' > Latin
hiems > French
hiver.
2. *
kweid 'white, light (in color)' > English
white,
winter.
You're confusing the the meaning of a Latin word or PIE root (which is given in English) with the roots and words in other languages. The problem is one of those words we are discussing shows up both as a word the etymology of which we are discussing (e.g.,
winter) as well as the given meaning of the some foreign words (e.g.,
hiems,
hiver). I try in my posts to distinguish between the two different kinds of words by putting the roots under discussion in
italics and the meanings in 'single quotation marks' (actually foot signs for the nit-pickier than I).
The thing is that PIE *
gh- does not correspond to an English
w-, but to English
g-, as in the etymology for
go I posted in another thread. PIE *
kw- corresponds to Old English
hw- (by Grimm's law of stops turning into fricatives), which becomes
wh- in English. There is a problem with PIE *
kweid- (see
link in AHD) being the actual root that English
winter 'winter' came from, and that is what happened to the
h. That's why I hedged and said "some" trace English
winter back to PIE *
kweid- 'white'. The truth is more likely that we will never know. It is interesting that all many of the IE daughter languages, except for the Germanic, have survivals of the PIE root *
gheim- 'winter': e.g., Baltic, Slavic, Greek, Italic, Indic.
