You probably figured out what today’s word is.
Fry showed up in the late thirteenth century,
from the Old French frire (same meaning, so I guess they had fried food back then). I can totally see
why they changed that. Too many R’s in a row there. Anyway, before frire, there
was the classical Latin frigere, again, same meaning, and even
further back there’s the Proto Indo European bher-, cook or bake (among other things;
bher is the verse- of Proto Indo European, meaning it was everywhere, and so a
lot of English words stem from it). Yes,
it really did switch from b to f. That’s language for you.
Sources
University of Texas at Austin
Linguistic Research Center
