Something of a like nature, perhaps, attaches to the bear-ceremonials among the Ainu and other primitive peoples of northeastern Asia, with whom that animal is held in great respect and reverence, approaching to deification.
Of Pó-shai-an-k'ia, "the God (Father) of the Medicine Societies, or sacred esoteric orders of the Zuñis," Mr. Gushing tells us: "He is supposed to have appeared in human form, poorly clad, and therefore reviled by men; to have taught the ancestors of the Zuñi, Taos, Oraibi, and Coçonino Indians their agricultural and other arts; their systems of worship by means of plumed and painted prayer-sticks; to have organized their medicine societies, and then to have disappeared toward his home in Shi-pä-pu-li-ma (from shi-pa-a = mist, vapour; u-lin, surrounding; and i-mo-na = sitting-place of; 'The mist-enveloped city'), and to have vanished beneath the world, whence he is said to have departed for the home of the Sun. He is still the conscious auditor of the prayers of his children, the invisible ruler of the spiritual Shi-pä-pu-li-ma, and of the lesser gods of the medicine orders, the principal 'Finisher of the Paths of our Lives.' He is, so far as any identity can be established, the 'Montezuma' of popular and usually erroneous Mexican tradition" (424. 16). Both on the lowest steps of civilization and on the highest, we meet with this passing over of the Father into the Son, this participation of God in the affairs and struggles of men.
CHAPTER V.
THE NAME CHILD.
Liebe Kinder haben viele Namen
[Dear children have many names].—German Proverb.
Child or boy, my darling, which you will.—Swinburne.
Men ever had, and ever will have, leave
To coin new words well-suited to the age.
Words are like leaves, some wither every year,
And every year a younger race succeeds.—Roscommon.
Child and its Synonyms.
Our word child—the good old English term; for both babe and infant are borrowed—simply means the "product of the womb" (compare Gothic kilthei, "womb"). The Lowland-Scotch dialect still preserves an old word for "child" in bairn, cognate with Anglo-Saxon bearn, Icelandic, Swedish, Danish, and Gothic barn (the Gothic had a diminutive barnilo, "baby"), Sanskrit bharna, which signifies "the borne one," "that which is born," from the primitive Indo-European root bhr, "to bear, to carry in the womb," whence our "to bear" and the German "ge-bären." Son, which finds its cognates in all the principal Aryan dialects, except Latin, and perhaps Celtic,—the Greek [Greek: yios] is for [Greek: syios], and is the same word,—a widespread term for "male child, or descendant," originally meant, as the Old Irish suth, "birth, fruit," and the Sanskrit sû, "to bear, to give birth to," indicate, "the fruit of the womb, the begotten"—an expression which meets us time and again in the pages of the Hebrew Bible. The words offspring, issue, seed, used in higher diction, explain themselves and find analogues all over the world. To a like category belong Sanskrit gárbha, "brood of birds, child, shoot"; Pali gabbha, "womb, embryo, child"; Old High German chilburra, "female lamb"; Gothic kalbô, "female lamb one year old"; German Kalb; English calf; Greek [Greek: delphus], "womb"; whence [Greek: adelphus], "brother," literally "born of the same womb." Here we see, in the words for their young, the idea of the kinship of men and animals in which the primitive races believed. The "brought forth" or "born" is also the signification of the Niskwalli Indian ba'-ba-ad, "infant"; de-bád-da, "infant, son"; Maya al, "son or daughter of a woman"; Cakchiquel 4_ahol_, "son," and like terms in many other tongues. Both the words in our language employed to denote the child before birth are borrowed. Embryo, with its cognates in the modern tongues of Europe, comes from the Greek [Greek: embruon], "the fruit of the womb before delivery; birth; the embryo, foetus; a lamb newly born, a kid." The word is derived from eu, "within"; and bruo, "I am full of anything, I swell or teem with"; in a transitive sense, "I break forth." The radical idea is clearly "swelling," and cognates are found in Greek [Greek: bruon], "moss"; and German Kraut, "plant, vegetable." Foetus comes to us from Latin, where it meant "a bearing, offspring, fruit; bearing, dropping, hatching,—of animals, plants, etc.; fruit, produce, offspring, progeny, brood." The immediate derivation of the word is feto, "I breed," whence also effetus, "having brought forth young, worn out by bearing, effete." Feto itself is from an old verb feuere, "to generate, to produce," possibly related to fui and our be. The radical signification of foetus then is "that which is bred, or brought to be"; and from the same root fe are derived feles, "cat" (the fruitful animal); fe-num, "hay"; fe-cundus, "fertile"; fe-lix, "happy" (fruitful). The corresponding verb in Greek is [Greek: phuein], "to grow, to spring forth, to come into being," whence the following: [Greek: phusis], "a creature, birth, nature,"—nature is "all that has had birth"; [Greek: phuton] "something grown, plant, tree, creature, child"; [Greek: phulae, philon] "race, clan, tribe,"—the "aggregate of those born in a certain way or place"; [Greek: phus], "son"; [Greek: phusas], "father," etc.
In English, we formerly had the phrase "to look babies in the eyes," and we still speak of the pupil of the eye, the old folk-belief having been able to assert itself in the every-day speech of the race,—the thought that the soul looked out of the windows of the eyes. In Latin, pupilla pupila, "girl, pupil of the eye," is a diminutive of pupa (puppa), "girl, damsel, doll, puppet"; other related words are pupulus, "little boy"; pupillus, "orphan, ward," our pupil; pupulus, "little child, boy"; pupus, "child, boy." The radical of all these is pu, "to beget"; whence are derived also the following: puer, "child, boy"; puella (for puerula), a diminutive of puer, "girl"; pusus, "boy"; pusio, "little boy," pusillus; "a very little boy"; putus, "boy"; putillus, "little boy"; putilla, "little girl,"—here belongs also pusillanimus, "small-minded, boy-minded"; pubis, "ripe, adult"; pubertas, "puberty, maturity"; pullus, "a young animal, a fowl," whence our pullet. In Greek we find the cognate words [Greek: polos] "a young animal," related to our foal, filly; [Greek: polion], "pony," and, as some, perhaps too venturesome, have suggested, [Greek: pais], "child," with its numerous derivatives in the scientifical nomenclature and phraseology of to-day. In Sanskrit we have putra, "son," a word familiar as a suffix in river-names,—Brahmaputra, "son of Brahma,"—pota, "the young of an animal," etc. Skeat thinks that our word boy, borrowed from Low German and probably related to the Modern High German Bube, whence the familiar "bub" of American colloquial speech, is cognate with Latin pupus.