2185: Words for 'Proud' Dec 8, 2020

The majority of Indo-European languages use the same basic pattern for words for 'proud', with both negative and positive senses. The pattern tends to be a compound with words for 'more' or 'over', and words for 'mood', 'thought' or sometimes 'appearances'. Some examples of this would include the Old English 'ofermodig' (over-moody) and 'heahheort (high-heart), or the Greek υπερήφανος 'hyperephanos' (over-appearing). In certain other cases there is a physical sense of being swollen or inflating such as the Welsh 'balch'.