7 thoughts on “rysc-bedd

  1. This looks as if bed in English it might relate to ‘bedd’, grave in Welsh. One of the terms given in Etymonline (http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=bed) is “sleeping place dug in the ground”. It may be that English ended up with ‘sleeping place’ and Welsh with ‘dug in the ground’. The welsh for bed is ‘gwely’, but I’ve no idea where that comes from.

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  2. Welsh ‘gwely’ (bed) is from the Proto IE root *legh- ‘lie down’ making it cognate with Latin ‘lectus’ (bed) and OE liċġan (lie). The descendants in Modern English are ‘litter’ (portable couch) and the verb ‘to lie’.

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    • Although many words in Welsh do start with “gwe-” for a variety of orthographic reasons, in the case of ‘gwely’ I think it represents a prepositional prefix present in early Brythonic Celtic *wo- (cognate with OE ufe- ‘on’) qualifying Proto Celtic *legjo (from PIE *legh) so the development would be: *wo-leg > *gwó-legh > *gwé-legh > gwel’gh > gwel’y.

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  3. Just looked up “bedd” in Holthausen’s Etymologies. Related words are Old Frisian bèdd, Old Saxon bèdd(i), Old High German bèt(t)i, Gothic badi, and Old Icelandic bèð-r.

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    • In modern English we still have the sense of of ‘bed’ in the notion of a ‘dug plot of land’ in the word ‘flower bed’ represented in the Germanic languages as German: Blumenbeet, Norwegian: blomsterbed, Dutch: bloembed etc.

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