seh₁-

Root for sowing, yielding Latin serere (to sow), English seed, sow, season.‌​‍​‍​‌​‌​‌​‍​‌​‌​‍​‍​‍​‍​‌​‌​‌​‍​‌​‍​‍​‌​‌​‍​‌​‍​‌​‍​‍​‍​‌​‍​‌

Discussion

The Proto-Indo-European root *seh₁- meant "to sow, to plant seed" and is one of the fundamental agricultural roots in the reconstructed lexicon.‌​‍​‍​‌​‌​‌​‍​‌​‌​‍​‍​‍​‍​‌​‌​‌​‍​‌​‍​‍​‌​‌​‍​‌​‍​‌​‍​‍​‍​‌​‍​‌ Its presence confirms that the Proto-Indo-European speakers practised agriculture — a fact with important implications for dating the proto-language and locating the homeland. The laryngeal *h₁ is reflected in the vowel length of certain derivatives.

In Germanic, the root produced Old English sāwan "to sow", the direct ancestor of modern English sow (the verb, unrelated to the noun sow meaning a female pig). The word seed is a related derivative, from Old English sǣd "that which is sown". Both words preserve the agricultural meaning with minimal semantic drift, testifying to the continuity of farming practice from the Proto-Indo-European period through to the modern era.

Latin serere "to sow, to plant" (from the zero-grade *sh₁-) gave English a large family of learned words: season (originally "sowing time", the period appropriate for planting, later generalised to any division of the year), seminary (a seed-bed, hence a place of nurture), seminar (related to seminary), seminal (relating to seed, hence "foundational, influential"), disseminate (to scatter seed, hence to spread widely), and inseminate. The concept of a "seminal work" preserves the agricultural metaphor perfectly: an influential text is one that scatters seeds of thought.

Greek has no well-established reflex, though some scholars have proposed connections. Old Church Slavonic sěti "to sow" and Lithuanian sėti "to sow" confirm the Balto-Slavic branch. Old Irish sīl "seed" is a Celtic cognate.

The root *seh₁- embeds in the vocabulary a fundamental human transition: the shift from foraging to farming. When the Proto-Indo-European speakers named the act of sowing, they encoded the agricultural revolution itself in their language. The semantic extension from "sowing time" to "season" shows how the farming calendar structured their understanding of time — the year was defined not by astronomy but by when one planted.

Notes

Pokorny 889-891. English seed, sow, season, seminary.