leǵ-eyo-
“to keep gathering, choosing, reading”legend, lecture, elect, collect
Iterative of *leǵ- giving Latin legere, English legend, lecture, elect, collect, select, neglect.
Discussion
The Proto-Indo-European iterative formation *leǵ-eyo- derives from the verbal root *leǵ- "to gather, to collect," with the *-eyo- suffix indicating repeated or purposive action — "to keep gathering," hence "to choose selectively" and, by a semantic chain of remarkable cultural consequence, "to read." Pokorny (IEW 658) assembles an extensive cognate set, and Rix (LIV² 398) confirms the root's basic semantics as physical collection, with the more abstract meanings arising independently but convergently in the Italic and Greek branches. The trajectory from gathering to reading reflects a world in which written text was decoded by "gathering up" the letters into words, just as one might gather scattered objects into meaningful groups.
Latin legere embodies the full semantic range: "to gather" (olives, shells), "to choose" (a path, a senate), and "to read" (a text, an inscription). From its participial and compound forms English has inherited a lexical dynasty of extraordinary breadth. Legend descends from legenda "things to be read," originally the saints' lives read aloud in monastic refectories. Lecture traces to lectūra "a reading." The compound ēligere "to choose out" produced elect and eligible, while colligere "to gather together" gave collect. Dīligere "to single out with care, to esteem" yielded diligent, and the participial form of intellegere "to perceive, to understand" (literally "to choose between") gave intelligent.
Greek λέγειν (legein) traces from its Homeric sense of "to gather, to enumerate" through its classical meaning of "to say, to speak" — the logic being that speech arranges words as the hand arranges objects. Latin lēx (genitive lēgis) "law" — understood as "that which is gathered or laid down" — produced English legal, legitimate, legislator, and loyal (through Old French leial). Prīvilēgium "a law affecting one person" gave English privilege, while religiō, already associated by Roman authors with relegere "to gather up again carefully," gave English religion. The sheer number of English words traceable to *leǵ- testifies to the conceptual fertility of the root: from the physical act of gathering olives to the intellectual act of reading philosophy to the civic act of legislating for a republic, the descendants of this single Proto-Indo-European verb map the entire arc of Western cultural development from agriculture through literacy to law.