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Talk:Borr

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Borr's Mother

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Was Borr's mother a goddess or a giant? Drake 567 (talk) 03:39, 19 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Unfortunately, the Old Norse corpus provides no data about a potential mother for Borr. All we know is that he was Búri's son. I've added a bit highlighting this fact. :bloodofox: (talk) 23:56, 16 January 2019 (UTC)[reply]

The etymology is incorrect. First off, I think the person who wrote it meant to write 'borne' and not 'born' (there is a difference), as borne is the past participle of 'bear', which the ON lemma could conceivably be related to. Also, the Skt verb is bharati < PIE *b^her- (whence also Goth past ptcp. baurans (not baurs as is written on this page, which doesn't occur in Gothic at all...), Gk φέρω, Lat ferō, OIr beirid, ON bera), not bâras (?), which is impossible as PIE voiced aspirates > Skt voiced aspirates. Whereas generally, names are exceedingly difficult to etymologise, this name is most likely unrelated to the 'bear' root entirely, and instead related to the 'bora' root (De Vries 1977:51). De Vries (loc. cit.) includes an etymon 'borr' to mean borer (i.e., driller). I don't understand how a non-linguist (Lindow), and a 170 year-old text (Thorpe), can be the best sources for an etymology. Having said that, it's obvious that this is just shoddy research at best, and academic vandalism at worst (as seems to be rampant in mythology-related article for some reason) as this term isn't even in the cited Thorpe pages (Thorpe 1851:4, 141-2), and Lindow just says "the word bur is a poetic noun meaning 'son'" (which is false, but I guess that's to be expected from a non-linguist). I am removing the etymology and replacing it with what De Vries says, i.e., 'borer' (which is a seemingly appropriate name for a dwarf). I implore whoever is going around and doing this kind of terrible 'research' to stop.

Vindafarna (talk) 05:22, 8 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]