pewt-eyo-
“to keep reckoning, thinking”compute, repute, putative, dispute
Iterative yielding Latin putāre, English compute, repute, putative, dispute, amputate.
Discussion
The Proto-Indo-European form *pewt-eyo- is a causative-iterative derivative meaning "to keep reckoning, to think repeatedly," built on the root *pewt- "to reckon, to count, to consider" with the *-eyo- suffix. Pokorny (IEW 827) reconstructs the family under *peu-, *pou- centering on notions of cutting, striking, and reckoning — the conceptual link being the practice of cutting notches to keep count. Latin putāre "to think, to reckon, to prune" preserves both the concrete and abstract senses: a Roman gardener putāre-d his vines by cutting them back, while a Roman magistrate putāre-d his accounts by reckoning them up. From this dual inheritance, English acquired an extraordinary family of learned vocabulary: compute (literally "to reckon together"), deputy ("one reckoned as a substitute"), dispute ("to reckon apart, to disagree"), impute ("to reckon toward someone"), reputation ("a reckoning back, what is thought of someone"), putative ("reckoned, supposed"), and amputate ("to cut around," preserving the older pruning sense). Rix treats the verbal stem as reflecting the repeated cognitive act of assessment. Watkins connects the root to the broader field of striking and cutting, emphasizing that reckoning in preliterate societies was a physical act — scoring wood, cutting tallies, notching sticks. The root preserves the material origins of abstract thought itself: before computation was mental, it was manual, and the Latin verb that gave us both "to think" and "to prune" remembers a time when counting and cutting were performed with the same hand holding the same blade.