*ber-m-

Maybe I should sum up:

In general, root extensions in IE morphology suck. They are added
all over the place, but no one has been able to determine what they
mean. In particular, no one knows what *-m- in *ber-m- means
(assuming we know *ber- meant something connected to 'side of river'
vel sim.).

Now if the root of those stems that have 'meaningless' extensions
were loans in PIE, the extension might have been meaningful in the
donor language.

In the case of -m-, one doesn't have to appeal to PFU *maGe- "land";
there's Germanic *mad- "meadow" too. But the whole formation would
be irregular in Germanic or IE.

So it seems one will have to conclude: *ber-m- is from some
substrate langage of (part of?) FU and North European IE.


Torsten