h₂yeh₂ǵ-mn̥-
“sacred thing, sacrifice”sacred, saint, sacrilege, sacrifice
Nominal giving Latin sacer, English sacred, saint, sacrilege, sacrifice, sacrosanct.
Discussion
The Proto-Indo-European form *h₂yeh₂ǵ-mn̥- is reconstructed as a neuter *-mn̥- derivative from the verbal root *h₂yeh₂ǵ- "to worship, to perform a sacred act, to sacrifice," denoting the sacred thing itself — the object, rite, or substance set apart from profane use by the act of consecration. Pokorny (IEW 501) treats the root under *i̯ag̑-, and Rix (LIV² 261) confirms the verbal base with its characteristic double laryngeal coloring.
The Latin reflexes of this root have permeated English religious and legal vocabulary to a degree matched by few other PIE etyma. Latin sacer "sacred, set apart for the gods" — which Émile Benveniste influentially analyzed as carrying both positive consecration and negative taboo — produced English sacred and its derivative sacrilege, literally the "gathering up" (legere) of sacred things, hence theft from a temple. The related form sacrificium "the making of a sacred thing" (sacer + facere) gave English sacrifice, while the verb sancīre "to make sacred by ritual act" yielded sanctus "holy," the source of saint, sanctify, and sanctuary. The prefix form cōnsecrāre "to make sacred together" produced consecrate.
Watkins draws attention to the cultural stratum this root illuminates: a society in which the boundary between sacred and profane was maintained by specific ritual acts whose terminology was sufficiently fixed to leave cognate traces across millennia. The Latin development is particularly instructive, for sacer encompassed both the divinely blessed and the ritually accursed — homo sacer was the man who could be killed by anyone without legal consequence, precisely because he had been surrendered to the gods. This ambivalence, preserved in the etymological record from *h₂yeh₂ǵ- through sacer to the modern English derivatives, encodes a theology of radical separation: what belongs to the gods is removed from human commerce entirely, for good or for ill.