GENERAL WORDS FOR SEX AND KINSHIP 187 



from dorfgenossen to neighbours. In other words, the 

 purely sexual instinct leads us step by step to citizenship 

 and neighbourly feeling. As a fossil of the course of 

 evolution, we find the term bauer still used in Low 

 German as a feminine noun for a societas colonorum, any 

 small local club of yeomen or landed proprietors. In the 

 same Low German which uses bur and bitrschap for the 

 community, we have burrichte and burmdl, the court for 

 civil processes, and the freedom of the city ; burmester 

 for the burgomaster, and bilrsprake for the meeting of 

 the bur, or community at which old and new laws were 

 proclaimed in short, the parliament, or mahal, and its 

 mahlmann. An almost similar development may be 

 marked in the Norwegian bygge form of bu, with its by 

 for collection of houses, bygd 1 for district or parish, 

 bylag for union of inhabitants with their bygderet and 

 bygdeting. In short, we pass here, as in all the words we 

 have hitherto examined, from the simple sexual notion 

 to cohabitation (beiwohnen) and common meal ; and 

 lastly, to a wider conception of community among neigh- 

 bours and citizens. It is only in its degeneration that 

 the term used to mark an endogamic union for common 

 life and common tillage of the soil has been narrowed 

 down to this one meaning of cultivator of the land a 



o 



meaning emphasised in the earlier days by the use of 

 such words as lantbuari or feldbtiari. 2 



1 Like geburda, no doubt, originally it had the sense of the land under tillage 

 belonging to the clan or kin-group. 



2 An almost similar development to that of the bu-bauer series is that of tak, 

 Aryan root ttgo, procreate, which proceeds from the notions of generate, produce, 

 to make, contrive (as we shall also notice in md). Thus we have Sanskrit toka, 

 a child, and taJcsh, to form ; Greek r(K.reiv, generate, but re^xetv, make ; T^KVOV, a 

 child (to be compared with O.N". pegn, and M.H.G. degen), but TKTUV, a carpenter, 

 etc. , and so ultimately to rt'xy'n and the Greek notions of art. 



