Re: bildung

>
> > Or is it perhaps *bheid, findere, making two out of one?
>
> The potential cognates are a little obscure. They include Celtic

*bili-

> 'good' and Gk. pHílos 'dear, friendly', cf. OE bil(e)-wit 'merciful,
> gentle', OHG bil-li:h 'convenient' (Mod.Ger. billig 'cheap').

<Bild>

> reflects the corresponding PGmc. abstract noun

*Biliþo: 'pleasantness'

> (hence, 'a pretty sight, form, picture'). Underlying all of these

is PIE

> *bHilo- with some kind of 'pleasing' semantics, no doubt to be cut
> morphologically as *bHi-lo- and so presupposing a root like *bHei-,

but

> I know of no other obvious derivatives, and the root meaning is

highly

> uncertain.

I remember Benveniste (Indoeuropean Language and Society) had trouble
with the Greek pHil- root; pHilos can also mean "own", as in "one's
own knee". Suppose the sense was "of one's (own) house", then PIE(?)
*bHu- and *bHi- (that's how I prefer to write the roots) would be i/u
variants like Lat. *luber > liber and the river name Luppia > Lippe
and the Germanic *-il/*-ul and *-ing/*-ung suffixes, and somehow
*bHi-dhlo -> *bHi-lo-.

The fact that it has Semitic cognates makes it possible that *bHudH-
is not native IE.

http://www.angelfire.com/rant/tgpedersen/bHudH.html



Torsten