Researched using duckduckgo AI.
Greek πίστις / πιστεύω (pistis / pisteuō) (“faith / believe”) is etymologically related to πείθω (peithō) (“to persuade / to be persuaded”).
The usual scholarly explanation is that peithō is the root underlying the semantic family:
peithō →
pistis →
pisteuō. In other words, pisteuō (“believe”) develops from the “persuade/be convinced” family represented by peithō, and the meaning difference is that
pisteuō focuses on the resulting “trust/confidence” that persuasion produces. cf. Abarim Publications
A lot of Greek verbs with -εύω (-eúō / -eu-) are derived verbs meaning something like:
- to do / to act as / to make/do something related to the base noun/adjective
- sometimes to practice or to behave in a certain way (especially in -εύω verbs derived from nouns forroles) … such as pistis
Example pattern (conceptually): a noun/adjective base → -ευω verb meaning “to have that role / to do that thing”.
So in these, -ευ- generally affects lexical meaning by turning the base into an “agentive/act” verb.
Hence, I am suggesting that pisteuo would be a morphological derivative from peitho I persuade >>> peitheuo >>> pisteuo meaning I behave as one persuaded.