Within the field of historical-comparative linguistics today, it has become a well-established procedure to use typological data to evaluate the plausibility of reconstructions established through comparative and/or internal methodology. In short, “reconstructions which are typologically sound … should be more highly valued that competing reconstructions which … [are] not” (Shields 2011: 553). However, in some recent research of mine (Shields 2013, forthcoming), I argue that “instead of limiting the number of potentially viable reconstructions, linguistic typology can at times actually expand their number by bringing to light heretofore unrecognized explanatory formulations for phenomena in particular languages or linguistic stocks” (Shields forthcoming). That is, because “the degree of cross-linguistic similarity that recent studies have uncovered suggests that forces in language are pushing toward the selection of particular source material and movement along particular paths propelled by certain common mechanisms of change” (Bybee, Perkins, Pagliuca 1995: 17), “such paths of linguistic development can be sought in the prehistories of languages or linguistic stocks in which they may not, at first glance, be evident” (Shields 2013: 148). In this brief paper, I wish to provide another example of how linguistic typology can itself suggest a novel etymology – in this case an etymology for the Indo-European root *bheu-‘be.’

According to the traditional view, “words for ‘be,’ denoting existence and serving as the copula, are mostly derived from two IE roots” – *es-(cf. OPruss. asmai ‘am’, Hitt. Esmi ‘am’, Gk. esti ‘ is’, Skt. asti ‘is’) and *bheu-(cf. OPruss. bēi ‘was’, OE bēo ‘am’, OCS by ‘was’, Skt. bhavati ‘is’) – although some “other roots, meaning ‘remain, stay’, ‘stand’, or ‘sit’ have furnished some of the forms” which came to constitute the well-known suppletive paradigm (Buck 1949: 633; cf. also Mallory, Adams 1997: 53). On the basis of semantic evidence from dialects such as Greek, it is supposed (Buck 1949: 633) that *bheu-“evidently had the primary sense of ‘come into being, become’ “ (cf. Gk. phuomai ‘grow, become’).