ḱerh₂-tó-₂
“growth, fleshy tissue”carnal, carnage, carnival, incarnate
Participial of *ḱerh₂- giving Latin carō/carnis, English carnal, carnage, carnival, incarnate.
Discussion
The PIE form *ḱerh₂-tó- (growth, fleshy tissue) is a verbal adjective from the root *ḱerh₂- (to grow, to increase), formed with the participial suffix *-tó- that typically creates past passive participles — here meaning "that which has grown," hence flesh, bodily tissue, the grown substance of a living creature.
Latin carō (genitive carnis, "flesh, meat") is the primary reflex and the source of an enormous English vocabulary: carnal (of the flesh), carnage (slaughter, destruction of flesh), carnival (originally carne levāre, "removal of meat" — the feast before Lent's fasting), carnation (flesh-coloured, the flower named for its pink tone), incarnate (made into flesh, embodied), and charnel (a house for flesh, i.e. a bone-house or ossuary). The medical term carcinoma (cancer, a flesh-growth) enters through a related but distinct Greek formation.
The semantic field is revealing: PIE speakers conceptualised flesh as "growth" — the body as something that grows, accumulates, and can be removed. This is the same conceptual framework that makes Latin crescere (to grow, from the same root *ḱerh₂-) the ancestor of crescent (growing, the waxing moon), increase, decrease, and concrete (grown together, solidified).
Greek preserves the root in Korē (Κόρη, "girl, maiden" — literally "the growing one"), an epithet of Persephone in the Eleusinian Mysteries. The connection between "growth" and "young person" appears independently in Latin adolescere (to grow up, whence adolescent) from a different root, suggesting the conceptual link between growth and youth was natural in IE thought.
The Celtic branch shows Old Irish coirthe (erected stone, pillar — something that has grown up or been raised) and possibly Welsh corff (body, from Latin corpus rather than directly from the PIE root).
The English word harvest, from Old English hærfest (autumn), is sometimes connected to *ḱerh₂- through the concept of "gathering the growth," though the phonological path is debated. More securely, the Greek compound Dēmḗtēr (Δημήτηρ, the goddess Demeter) may contain this root in its first element if interpreted as *deh₂-mḗtēr ("grain-mother" or "earth-mother"), though the traditional analysis derives it from *deh₂- (earth) + *méh₂tēr (mother).
The laryngeal *h₂ in *ḱerh₂- is reconstructed from the long vowel in Latin (carō with long ā in some forms) and from the a-colouring visible in Greek derivatives. The palatal *ḱ (as opposed to plain *k) is confirmed by the satem treatment in Indo-Iranian: Sanskrit śarad- (autumn, literally the time of ripening/growing) shows the expected palatalisation.