h₁wep-
“to call out, to weep”weep, cry, call
Root for weeping/calling, yielding English weep, Old English wepan.
Discussion
The root *h₁wep- carried the sense of calling out in lamentation, of vocal grief given full expression, and it survives most directly in English weep, from Old English wēpan. The Germanic reflexes are the clearest: Old English wēpan, Old Saxon wōpian, Old Norse ópa, and Gothic wōpjan all point to Proto-Germanic *wōpjaną with the consistent meaning of crying aloud. Some scholars have proposed a connection to Latin vōx ("voice") and vocāre ("to call"), though this remains debated. Pokorny (1149) reconstructed the root with the primary sense of calling out, and the semantic narrowing to grief appears to be specifically Germanic — or perhaps a preservation of the original emotional register that other branches generalized. The survival of *h₁wep- almost exclusively in Germanic gives it particular poignancy: while other great roots branched into dozens of learned derivatives, this one remained close to its origin, still doing in modern English precisely what it did six thousand years ago — giving voice to grief.
Notes
Pokorny 1149. Primarily Germanic.