My thanks are to Keith Ritchie, who in his comment on the previous post noted that in Scotland, trousers are still called breeches. Unintentionally, today’s word also begins with the letter b, as the italicized part of the title indicates, but it has nothing to do with clothes.
Such a woman would never have touched a hamburger.
Portrait of Anne, Countess of Chesterfield by Thomas Gainsborough. Public domain via Getty.
English speakers and speakers in the wide world know the German word burg from place names (Magdeburg, St. Petersburg, and so forth), though only hamburgers, or rather burgers, as they are called, made burg really famous. The closest English cognates (that is, related forms) of burg are all over the place but hidden in compounds and not always easily recognizable. Such are –bury (as in Canterbury), –borough (as in Scarborough and Gainsborough), and of course, –burg itself, as in Edinburgh, with its unexpected pronunciation of –burgh and the redundant h at the end. (But think of Pittsburgh, USA, and of Charles Lindbergh: they could not do without final h either!) Incidentally, the noun burrow “rabbit’s or fox’s hole” is, quite probably, also related to burg, so that Alice in Wonderland need not have been surprised to find the place so well-inhabited.
The word that interests us is one the most ancient and most often-discussed words in historical Germanic linguistics. It occurred in all the earliest texts of the Germanic family, including the fourth-century Gothic Bible. The Old English form was burg; –bury in place names is a relic of the now extinct dative case. As far as we can judge, the ancient burg ~ borg existed for protecting people. Therefore, it does not come as a surprise that the verbs bury and borrow are also derived from this root. Protection is a loose concept. Thus, borrow means “to take on pledge or credit.” Note: on pledge or credit!
The trouble with the origin of burg ~ borg is that we have a great lot of information and cannot always decide which bit of it to use. The nouns attested in the oldest Germanic languages and cited above meant “height, wall; castle; city.” The Gothic Bible was translated from Greek. The Greek word the translator saw was pólis “town,” but we do not know what exactly pólis meant in fourth-century Greek. (Note: we are dealing with Medieval, not Classical Greek!) “Town” is a loose concept. In the remote past, Germanic people did not live in towns. The German cognate of English town is Zaun “fence.” Greek pólis also takes us to “fortress, enclosed space on high ground, hilltop.” The beginning was the same everywhere.
Apparently, the early town was a place fenced in. Russian gorod “town” (as in Novgorod “new town”) also refers to a fence. Likewise, the Icelandic tún, a letter for letter cognate of town and Zaun, is a fenced, fertilized home meadow surrounding a farmhouse. Yet the idea that the initial meaning of all our words was “fence,” though defended by some reputable scholars, has little appeal. Likewise, the gloss Gothic baurgs (pronounced as borgs) ~ Greek pólis is less illuminating than it may seem at first sight, because in another Gothic text, baurgs renders the Greek word for “tower” (“stronghold to flee to”?). The German word Bürger did indeed mean “inhabitant of a town,” while its Gothic counterpart seems to have meant “citizen.” On the whole, despite the numerous unclear points, we may say that German burg once referred to “enclosure; protection; fortification.”
What then was the origin of this word? German (and Common Germanic) Berg “mountain” comes to mind as a possible cognate: berg and burg, if related, had different vowels by a regular rule. But were “burgs” built on mountains? If they were structures within an enclosure, mountains were a rather unlikely place for those “towns.” On the other hand, mountains gave people good protection from attackers. We also notice Latin burgus, a borrowing of Greek púrgos “tower, fortification.” Germanic tribes were Ancient Rome’s neighbors for centuries, and borrowed words went both ways. Many Latin words infiltrated Germanic and several other languages, while quite a few others went from Germanic to Latin. However, importing such a Germanic word to or borrowing it from Medieval Greek is improbable.
The Greek noun púrgos is of obscure origin, perhaps itself a loan from some neighboring language. Many of our readers have certainly heard about the famous Pergamon altar (see the header). Pergamon is a Greek place name, and the first syllable (perg-) sounds almost like berg-. In travels from Scandinavia to Greece, from Burgundy (note the place name!) to Pergamon and all the way to the ancient Hittite kingdom, one finds similar place names and similar (almost identical) words having the root berg– or perg– (vowels of course alternated according to the well-known rules : e ~ o ~ u), with the form berg/perg predominating, and all of them refer to fortresses and mountains.
It was therefore suggested long ago that we are dealing with a so-called migratory word, probably pre-Indo-European. In such situations, linguists often refer to the substrate, that is, some unknown ancient language of an extinct tribe. But a migratory word is not even a borrowing from a substrate: it is a term that travels all over the enormous continent (in this case of Eurasia). Of course, it had some source, but we can no longer discover it. Its vowels adapt to the rule of the “guest” language, and the words pretend to be native. They do become native, though they are, rather, naturalized foreigners. Isn’t it odd that a word like German Bürger goes back to an alien root?
As a final flourish, I would like to note that the trouble with the root b-r-g is as acute in Slavic as in Germanic. For example, Russian bereg means “bank; shore,” and bereg– is also the root of a verb meaning “to preserve; keep in safety.” Both words show some phonetic irregularities, and familiar hypotheses have been offered about their history. Cognates of the noun and the verb have been recorded all over the Slavic-speaking world. As far as I can understand, some link between the words in Germanic and Slavic has been recognized, but the borrowing by Slavic from Germanic does not look like a viable option. Nor do Slavic etymological dictionaries refer to substrates or migratory words. A hamburger is a relatively simple thing. All the rest is questionable and complicated.
Featured image: photo of the Pergamon Altar by Miguel Hermosa Cuesta. CC-BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
