[Blood in the classical languages]

In the linguistic area which is traditionally called "Indo-European", there are many words for "blood". The first recorded, as early as the second millenary B.C., has survived in Greek as a fossil (ear), as a ghost in archaic Latin (assir): the Hittite form is eshhar, the Sanskrit one asrk. The Greek haima, to judge by the group of morphologically analogous words, referred to a religious or mysterious nature allotted to the blood. The Latin sanguis contains the same element sans- as in sanies "corrupted blood", which is perhaps connected with assir. The Latin cruor is correctly the blood out of the body, running from wounds; words of the same origin are usual in various Indo-European languages with the meaning either of "blood" or "bloody flesh", with adjectives oriented towards the idea of "cruelty". The origin of Teutonic Blut (blood) is unknown.