If the world were put into one scale, and my mother into the other, the world would kick the beam.—Lord Langdale.
Names of the Mother.
In A Song of Life,—a book in which the topic of sex is treated with such delicate skill,—occurs this sentence: "The motherhood of mammalian life is the most sacred thing in physical existence" (120. 92), and Professor Drummond closes his Lowell Institute Lectures on the Evolution of Man in the following words: "It is a fact to which too little significance has been given, that the whole work of organic nature culminates in the making of Mothers—that the animal series end with a group which even the naturalist has been forced to call the Mammalia. When the savage mother awoke to her first tenderness, a new creative hand was at work in the world" (36. 240). Said Henry Ward Beecher: "When God thought of Mother, he must have laughed with satisfaction, and framed it quickly,—so rich, so deep, so divine, so full of soul, power, and beauty, was the conception," and it was unto babes and sucklings that this wisdom was first revealed. From their lips first fell the sound which parents of later ages consecrated and preserved to all time. With motherhood came into the world song, religion, the thought of immortality itself; and the mother and the child, in the course of the ages, invented and preserved most of the arts and the graces of human life and human culture. In language, especially, the mother and the child have exercised a vast influence. In the names for "mother," the various races have recognized the debt they owe to her who is the "fashioner" of the child, its "nourisher" and its "nurse." An examination of the etymologies of the words for "mother" in all known languages is obviously impossible, for the last speakers and interpreters of many of the unwritten tongues of the earth are long since dead and gone. How primitive man—the first man of the race—called his mother, we can but surmise. Still, a number of interesting facts are known, and some of these follow.
The word mother is one of the oldest in the language; one of the very few words found among all the great branches of the widely scattered Aryan race, bearing witness, in ages far remote, before the Celt, the Teuton, the Hellene, the Latin, the Slav, and the Indo-Iranian were known, to the existence of the family, with the mother occupying a high and honourable place, if not indeed the highest place of all. What the etymological meaning was, of the primitive Aryan word from which our mother is descended, is uncertain. It seems, however, to be a noun derived, with the agent-suffix -t-r, from the root ma, "to measure." Skeat thinks the word meant originally "manager, regulator [of the household]," rejecting, as unsupported by sufficient evidence, a suggested interpretation as the "producer." Kluge, the German lexicographer, hesitates between the "apportioner, measurer," and the "former [of the embryo in the womb]." In the language of the Klamath Indians of Oregon, p'gishap, "mother," really signifies the "maker."
The Karankawas of Texas called "mother," kaninma, the "suckler," from kanin, "the female breast." In Latin mamma, seems to signify "teat, breast," as well as "mother," but Skeat doubts whether there are not two distinct words here. In Finnish and some other primitive languages a similar resemblance or identity exists between the words for "breast" and "mother." In Lithuanian, móte—cognate with our mother—signifies "wife," and in the language of the Caddo Indians of Louisiana and Texas sássin means both "wife" and "mother." The familiar "mother" of the New England farmer of the "Old Homestead" type, presents, perhaps, a relic of the same thought. The word dame, in older English, from being a title of respect for women—there is a close analogy in the history of sire—came to signify "mother." Chaucer translates the French of the Romaunt of the Rose, "Enfant qui craint ni père ni mère Ne pent que bien ne le comperre," by "For who that dredeth sire ne dame Shall it abie in bodie or name," and Shakespeare makes poor Caliban declare: "I never saw a woman, But only Sycorax, my dam." Nowadays, the word dam is applied only to the female parent of animals, horses especially. The word, which is one with the honourable appellation dame, goes back to the Latin domina, "mistress, lady," the feminine of dominus, "lord, master." In not a few languages, the words for "father" and "mother" are derived from the same root, or one from the other, by simple phonetic change. Thus, in the Sandeh language of Central Africa, "mother" is n-amu, "father," b-amu; in the Cholona of South America, pa is "father," pa-n, "mother"; in the PEntlate of British Columbia, "father" is mãa, "mother," tãa, while in the Songish mãn is "father" and tan "mother" (404. 143).
Certain tongues have different words for "mother," according as it is a male or a female who speaks. Thus in the Okanak·ên, a Salish dialect of British Columbia, a man or a boy says for "mother," sk'õi, a woman or a girl, tõm; in Kalispelm the corresponding terms for "my mother" are isk'õi and intoop. This distinction, however, seems not to be so common as in the case of "father."
In a number of languages the words for "mother" are different when the latter is addressed and when she is spoken of or referred to. Thus in the Kwakiutl, Nootka, and Çatloltq, three British Columbia tongues, the two words for "mother" are respectively ât, abóuk; ãt, abEmp; nikH, tãn. It is to be noted, apparently, that the word used in address is very often simpler, more primitive, than the other. Even in English we find something similar in the use of ma (or mama) and mother.
In the Gothic alone, of all the great Teutonic dialects,—the language into which Bishop Wulfila translated the Scriptures in the fourth century,—the cognate equivalent of our English mother does not appear. The Gothic term is aithiei, evidently related to atta, "father," and belonging to the great series of nursery words, of which our own ma, mama, are typical examples. These are either relics of the first articulations of the child and the race, transmitted by hereditary adaptation from generation to generation, or are the coinages of mother and nurse in imitation of the cries of infancy.
These simple words are legion in number and are found over the whole inhabited earth,—in the wigwam of the Redskin, in the tent of the nomad Bedouin, in the homes of cultured Europeans and Americans. Dr. Buschmann studied these "nature-sounds," as he called them, and found that they are chiefly variations and combinations of the syllables ab, ap, am, an, ad, at, ba, pa, ma, na, da, ta, etc., and that in one language, not absolutely unrelated to another, the same sound will be used to denote the "mother" that in the second signifies "father," thus evidencing the applicability of these words, in the earliest stages of their existence, to either, or to both, of the parents of the child (166. 85). Pott, while remarking a wonderful resemblance in the names for parents all over the world, seeks to establish the rather doubtful thesis that there is a decided difference in the nature of the words for "father" and those for "mother," the former being "man-like, stronger," the latter "woman-like, mild" (517. 57).
Some languages apparently do not possess a single specialized word for "mother." The Hawaiian, for example, calls "mother and the sisters of the mother" makua wahine, "female parent," that being the nearest equivalent of our "mother," while in Tonga, as indeed with us to-day, sometimes the same term is applied to a real mother and to an adopted one (100. 389). In Japan, the paternal aunt and the maternal aunt are called "little mother." Similar terms and appellations are found in other primitive tongues. A somewhat extended discussion of names for "mother," and the questions connected with the subject, will be found in Westermarck (166. 85). Here also will be found notices of the names among various peoples for the nearest relatives of the mother and father. Incidentally it is worth noting that Westermarck controverts Professor Vambéry's opinion that the Turko-Tartar words for "mother," ana, ene, originally meant "nurse" or "woman" (from the root an, en), holding that exactly the reverse is the fact, "the terms for mother being the primitive words." He is also inclined to think that the Aryan roots pa, "to protect, to nourish," and ma, "to fashion," came from pa, "father," and ma, "mother," and not vice versâ. Mr. Bridges, the missionary who has studied so well the Yahgans of Tierra del Fuego, states that "the names imu and dabi—father and mother—have no meaning apart from their application, neither have any of their other very definite and ample list of terms for relatives, except the terms macu [cf. magu, "parturition">[ and macipa [cf. cipa, "female">[, son and daughter." This statement is, however, too sweeping perhaps (166. 88).