Wurdahuzdą: Proto-Germanic dictionary

noun neuter a-stem bone leg Of uncertain origin. Securely Proto-Northwest Proto-Germanic as a noun meaning ‘bone’, later also ‘leg’ in some descendants. (Urban 2015) makes a persuasive argument using cross-linguistic typological data to determine the dominant directionality of semantic change (bone > leg vs. leg > bone). He found that across the world's languages, there is a strong, recurrent metonymic pathway where words for ‘bone’ naturally shift to mean ‘leg’ or ‘limb’ (often via intermediate senses like ‘shinbone’ or ‘thighbone’). Conversely, languages very rarely take a broad word for ‘leg’ and narrow it down to mean ‘bone’. An interesting, though speculative, recent analysis by Pentangelo 2021 posits the source as a blend of the b- ‘body-related’ phonestheme common in Proto-Germanic (e.g., English back, bare, beard, belly, bile, bite, bladder, blister, blood, brow, brain, breast, butt, etc. with *stainaz ‘stone’ meaning ‘body stone’. However, this is problematic morphologically, as *stainaz is a masculine a-stem, whereas the *bain- variant securely meaning ‘bone’ is a neuter a-stem, which would seem to negate the possibility of being the word used for the proposed blend. Proposed Indo-European derivations from *bʰeyh₂- ‘strike’, *bʰeh₂-(‘to shine’), or from a formation related to ON beinn ‘straight’ are semantically difficult and remain unproven.