On another forum, I've been exploring the semantic qualities of the English
word 'barrow'. The oldest use means 'mound', 'artificial hill'; burial tumulus.
Outside of archaeological usage, this sense is is now largely
obsolete.
One interesting survival is 'barrow ditch'. This is the drainage ditch you
get on either side of a road, and since good roads tend to be built up from the
surrounding terrain, they can qualify as a kind of mound (the earth in the ditch
is used to build up the roadway). I'm told, in Southern US English, this is
pronounced 'bar ditch'. This sense is not documented in my dictionaries.
The main surviving sense is for a kind of cart, as with a one-wheeled
wheelbarrow, or two-or-four wheeled carts for transporting things such as
produce, by hand. This latter is mostly British, with 'pushcart' being the word
of choice in the US. The semantic space seems to be 'cart for mounding
things'. This is a fascinating semantic shift.
With -burgh/-borough, one has the same etymological pair you get in German,
that of burg/berg, tho' with different semantic properties. English burg[h] is
always a fort or town, never a hill or mountain except via contamination from
German loans and in modern English a borough has nothing whatsoever to do with
hills or forts.
I'm also wondering about 'burrow'. My dictionaries don't carry the word
back too far, but this looks related. To burrow is to create a barrow, i.e., a
pile of excavated dirt.
Mark.