quword 趣词
Word Origins Dictionary
- raid[raid 词源字典]
- raid: [15] Raid and road are doublets – that is to say, they have a common ancestor, but have diverged over the centuries. In this case the ancestor was Old English rād ‘riding’, hence ‘hostile incursion on horse-back’, a relative of ride. South of the border this developed to road, and lost its predatory connotations (although they are preserved in inroads), but in Scottish English it became raid. This had more or less died out by the end of the 16th century, but Sir Walter Scott revived it at the beginning of the 19th century, and it has gone from strength to strength ever since.
=> ride, road[raid etymology, raid origin, 英语词源] - road
- road: [OE] Road comes from the same ultimate source as ride – and indeed in the Old English period it meant either simply ‘riding’ or ‘hostile incursion on horseback’ (a sense preserved in inroads [16] and also in raid, which is historically the same word as road). By the 14th century the sense ‘sheltered anchorage’ (now represented by the plural roads) had emerged, but the central modern meaning ‘track for traffic’ did not put in an appearance until the late 16th century (hitherto the main words for expressing this concept had been way and street).
=> inroads, raid, ride - be (v.)
- Old English beon, beom, bion "be, exist, come to be, become, happen," from Proto-Germanic *biju- "I am, I will be." This "b-root" is from PIE root *bheue- "to be, exist, grow, come into being," and in addition to the words in English it yielded German present first and second person singular (bin, bist, from Old High German bim "I am," bist "thou art"), Latin perfective tenses of esse (fui "I was," etc.), Old Church Slavonic byti "be," Greek phu- "become," Old Irish bi'u "I am," Lithuanian bu'ti "to be," Russian byt' "to be," etc. It also is behind Sanskrit bhavah "becoming," bhavati "becomes, happens," bhumih "earth, world."
The modern verb to be in its entirety represents the merger of two once-distinct verbs, the "b-root" represented by be and the am/was verb, which was itself a conglomerate. Roger Lass ("Old English") describes the verb as "a collection of semantically related paradigm fragments," while Weekley calls it "an accidental conglomeration from the different Old English dial[ect]s." It is the most irregular verb in Modern English and the most common. Collective in all Germanic languages, it has eight different forms in Modern English:
BE (infinitive, subjunctive, imperative)
AM (present 1st person singular)
ARE (present 2nd person singular and all plural)
IS (present 3rd person singular)
WAS (past 1st and 3rd persons singular)
WERE (past 2nd person singular, all plural; subjunctive)
BEING (progressive & present participle; gerund)
BEEN (perfect participle).
The paradigm in Old English was:
| SING. | PL. |
1st pres. | ic eom ic beo | we sind(on) we beoð |
2nd pres. | þu eart þu bist | ge sind(on) ge beoð |
3rd pres. | he is he bið | hie sind(on) hie beoð |
1st pret. | ic wæs | we wæron |
2nd pret. | þu wære | ge waeron |
3rd pret. | heo wæs | hie wæron |
1st pret. subj. | ic wære | we wæren |
2nd pret. subj. | þu wære | ge wæren |
3rd pret. subj. | Egcferð wære | hie wæren |
The "b-root" had no past tense in Old English, but often served as future tense of am/was. In 13c. it took the place of the infinitive, participle and imperative forms of am/was. Later its plural forms (we beth, ye ben, they be) became standard in Middle English and it made inroads into the singular (I be, thou beest, he beth), but forms of are claimed this turf in the 1500s and replaced be in the plural. For the origin and evolution of the am/was branches of this tangle, see am and was.
That but this blow Might be the be all, and the end all. ["Macbeth" I.vii.5]
- inroad (n.)
- 1540s, "hostile incursion, raid, foray," from in- (2) "in;" second element is road in the obsolete sense of "riding;" related to raid. Related: Inroads.