Sunday, May 9, 2010

Happy Mother's Day!!!!!!

 Me and my mommy at the hospital! Love ya, Mom!

I thought it would be fun to post about the etymology of the word mother. It's a classic word like brother and father in the sense that its etymology can be traced back to Indo-European *mater- (asterisk means no historical documentation has been found for this word, but historical linguists have been able to determine what its likely form was).

Different forms of mother in various related and unrelated languages:

1.Old English: modor
2. Old Saxon: modar
3. Middle Dutch and Dutch: moeder
4. Old High German: mouter
5. Old Icelandic: modhir
6. Gaulish: Matrebo
7. Old Irish: mathir
8. Latin: mater
9. Oscan: Maatreis
10. Umbrian: matrer
11. Greek: meter
12. Lithuanian: motyna
13. Latvian: mate
14. Old Slavic: mati

 Love language; it's fascinating! Hope you enjoyed some Mother's Day trivia!

All information was taken from Chambers Dictionary of Etymology. The mother words do not contain their proper accents/dashes, etc due to not having them on my computer or my inability to figure out how to do it!

3 comments:

  1. Language is amazing, endlessly amazing.

    Al

    Publish or Perish

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  2. All of those words really sound a lot like the English word mother today! Very interesting thank you for sharing this!

    XOXO~ Renee

    ReplyDelete
  3. Such a cute pic! Happy Mother's Day :)

    ReplyDelete

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