sprachbund

The story

1. Proto-Indo-European · derived from*bʰendʰ-“to bind”
2. Proto-West Germanic · derived from*sprāku“language; speech”
3. German · borrowed fromSprachbund
4. English todaysprachbund

Borrowed from German Sprachbund (literally “language alliance, language association”), from Sprache (“language; way of speaking, speech”) (ultimately from Proto-West Germanic *sprāku (“language; speech”)) + Bund (“alliance”) (from binden (“to bind, to tie up”), ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *bʰendʰ- (“to bind”)). The German word was coined by Russian linguist Nikolai Trubetzkoy (1890–1938) in a paper he presented to the inaugural International Congress of Linguists in 1928 as a calque of the Russian term языково́й сою́з (jazykovój sojúz, literally “language union”), which he had introduced in a 1923 article.

Words from the same roots