deh₃-

The root *deh₃- reconstructs to a primary meaning of "to give" and is reflected across the major branches of Indo-European with considerable regularity. The laryngeal *h₃ colours the preceding vowel to *o in certain environments and is responsible for the long vowel observed in several daughter-language reflexes. Latin dare ("to give"), with its perfect dedī (showing reduplication inherited from PIE), is the most transparent continuation. From dare descend data ("things given," originally legal usage), date (ultimately from the formula epistula data, "letter given [on a certain day]"), donate, tradition (trāditiō, "a handing over"), render (through Vulgar Latin *rendere from reddere, "to give back"), and the legal term mandate (mandāre, from manus + dare, "to give into the hand"). Greek dídōmi (δίδωμι, "I give") preserves the reduplication of the present stem, a feature traceable to the PIE present *dédh₃-ti. Derivatives include dose (δόσις, "a giving"), antidote (ἀντίδοτον, "given against"), and anecdote (ἀνέκδοτα, "unpublished things," literally "not given out"). Sanskrit dádāti ("gives") shows the same reduplicated present as Greek, confirming the PIE morphological pattern. The nominal form dāna ("gift, charity") is a key term in Hindu and Buddhist traditions, yielding the proper name Dānā and the practice of dāna as religious giving. The Slavic reflex appears in Old Church Slavonic dati ("to give"), Russian datʹ, Czech dát, and Polish dać. Lithuanian dúoti and Latvian dot continue the Baltic reflex. These forms consistently show the long vowel expected from *eh₃. A notable feature of this root is the near-universal preservation of its core meaning across branches. Unlike many PIE roots that undergo significant semantic drift, *deh₃- maintains the sense of "giving" in virtually every attested continuation. This semantic stability makes it one of the most reliable cognate sets in comparative Indo-European linguistics.