Proto-Indo-European Roots
| Root/Stem: | *ger- |
| Meaning: | crane |
| Cognates: | |
| Hellenic | Greek geranos 'crane' |
| Italic | Latin grs, gen. gruis 'crane' |
| Celtic | Welsh & Cornish & Breton garan 'crane' |
| Armenian | Armenian kerunk 'crane' |
| Germanic | Common Germanic *kranaz 'crane' > Old High German krano, Middle Dutch crne, Old English cran |
| Baltic | Common Baltic *gerav- 'crane', *geran-
'stork' > Lithuanian garns 'stork', gerve. 'crane', Latvian dzerve 'crane', Old Prussian gerwe |
| Slavic | Common Slavic *z'erv, *z'eravj 'crane' >
Ukranian zhuravel', Belorussian zhorov, Russian zhuravl', Bulgarian & Serbo-Croatian & Czech z'erav, Slovak z'erjav |
| Notes: | The crane lives all over Eurasia, and was obviously known by
Proto-Indo-Europeans. The word, however, does not exist in Indo-Iranian, which can be
maybe explained by the fact that a lot of names for animals and birds were borrowed from
aboriginal languages of Asia. The initial consonant is a pure *g, not a palatal variant: only in Slavic, it was turned into z' [zh] due to the palatalization law in the Common Slavic language. |