The things you learn: хлеб

[pne]

So apparently Russian хлеб khleb “bread” is a loanword from Germanic, from a the ancestor of English loaf and German Laib.

I don’t think I would connected those three words off-hand. (Even though the English and German words at least mean the same thing! Perhaps because the word Laib is fairly rare in my speech; I usually talk about ein Brot rather than ein Laib Brot.)

Comments

[steorra]

When I was in my teens, I compiled a list of the Lord's Prayer in many different IE languages (mostly from A Panorama of Indo-European Languages, which was my first significant introduction to the I-E family; it had transliteration to Latin script for languages not written in Latin script.)

I also went through and picked out some key words like "bread" and "heaven" and "kingdom", and tried to group them into families of related words. I noticed that there was a resemblance between Old English hlaf and the Slavic word and wondered if they were related, and found out later that in fact they were.

I think it's easier to see the resemblance if you're looking at Old English or something similar (such as Gothic hlaifs) where the initial consonant is still there.

[pne]

I think it's easier to see the resemblance if you're looking at Old English or something similar (such as Gothic hlaifs) where the initial consonant is still there.

True.

I also didn’t know (or had forgotten) that lord and lady are both derived from “loaf, bread”: the loaf-ward and the loaf-kneader.