The Language of Mother's Day

Mother's Day is much more than a holiday: it's a cultural package. There are special Mother's Day gifts and flowers and all sorts of fun cards and crafts, as well as Mother's Day recipes and treats. And then there's Mother's Day breakfast and brunch; parties, picnics, and cruises; poems, songs, quotes, and trivia. There is also a "Mother's Day language", a subset of vocabulary used more purposefully, it would seem, in the weeks preceding and culminating, in the US at least, on the second Sunday of May.

Here is a sampler of the language of Mother's Day along with its linguistic baggage.

birth: Once upon a time, there was a Germanic root, *ber- (descended from the Indo-European root *bher- , to carry, to bear), which gave birth, so to speak, to the Old Norse byrth; hence the Modern English birth. The ending -th indicates an act, a process; therefore, birth is the process of bearing (< Old English beran) offspring.

daughter: The word daughter goes all the way back to a reconstructed Indo-European form that would probably take way too many special characters to reproduce here. Through a Germanic descendant, daughter made its (her?) way to almost every Indo-European language, with the exception of the Romance (i.e. from Latin) and Celtic groups. Russian (doch'), Sanskrit (duhitar), Armenian (dustr) -- to mention just a few examples -- and of course the Germanic languages (Tochter, dochter, datter, daughter) still use variations of that one ancestral Indo-European formation.

family: The origins of family are humble and obscure. They go back to a Latin word, famulus (= servant). The Latin familia, therefore, meant "all the servants in a given household." Only very gradually did the meaning of family (< familia) expand to include the other members of the household. This semantic broadening was followed by a narrowing, i.e. family stopped meaning the entire household, but was restricted to those members of a household that were related to one another.

mother: Have you noticed how similar the words for "mother" are across the European languages? For example, we have mother and Mutter (German), moder (Danish) and madre (Italian, Spanish). There's also Latin mater (just picture a macron over the -a-) and ancient Greek meter (with a macron over each -e-). Basically, say ma and you'll be understood all over Europe (at least). Mother goes all the way back to a fertile Indo-European root, which also spawned mammal, matter, matrimony, and metropolis.

son: As in the case of daughter, the linguistic ancestor of son is both very old and prolific. The English son ultimately derives from an Indo-European root, *sunyu- (or *sunu-), which has given us Sohn (German) and zoon (Dutch), but also Russian syn and ancient Greek huios. The semantic adventure is interesting here: Originally, the *sun(y)u- root meant "birth", but then it gradually narrowed down to "offspring" and then some more to its current meaning of "male offspring".

Sunday: In May 1914, Mother's Day was established as a national holiday in the US, to be celebrated on the second Sunday of May. A bright occasion on the brightest of days. Literally bright, as Sunday means "sun's day". And this because the days of the week were named by Germanic-speaking peoples who translated the Roman names for the days word-for-word. So the Latin dies solis, the day of the sun, became Sunday (cf. German Sonntag).

Happy Mother's Day, everyone!

Source:
Merriam-Webster Online: http://www.m-w.com