Journal Entry 5-12-13

Today I did a little research about the origin of the word "mother". I've always wondered about this because the word for mother is very similar in a lot of different languages. I found several interesting articles online about the origin of the word. First, I learned that the English word mother and Latin word mater and many other similar maternal words contain the same worldwide etymon ma, which means breast. That etymon is then added with the Indo-European agent suffix, "-ter". Because of this the etymological meaning of the word, mother can be interpreted literally as ‘breast-feeder.’ Breast-feeding is one of the most basic biological functions of a woman. Secondly, I also learned that Mamma is the formal English medical word for breast and that the word mamma is a reduplication of the much older Proto-Indo-European root ma, breast or mother. An interesting fact about the word ma is that it is not only the first sound uttered by many human infants, it may also be the most widespread word root in the world. There are many different possibly unrelated language families around the world whose word for mother is founded on the word Ma as a basis. Some of those languages are Latin, Greek, French, German, Russian, Icelandic, Sanskrit, Irish, Welsh, Arabic, Hebrew, Swahili, and Chinese. It is interesting to discover that ma is such a widespread word. The reason for this is because the sounds of m and a are among the easiest to make. The sounds of m and a are commonly found to be among the first sounds a human infant learns to produce vocally. The sound made by an infant's mouth sucking milk from the mother's breast can be heard similar as the sounds of m and a. Therefore, a natural association can be made between the sounds of m and a with pleasure. Infants learn to expect food and receive food and therefore receive pleasure in association with the some variant of ma-ma. After briefly reading about the origin of the word mother on the internet I feel like I am more knowledgable about why there is such a widespread similarity among various languages' word for mother.

Works Cited
Castleman, William. "Mother: Etymology of the Word from Bill Casselman's Canadian Word of the Day at Billcasselman.com." Web log post. Mother: Etymology of the Word from Bill Casselman's Canadian Word of the Day at Billcasselman.com. N.p., n.d. Web. 12 May 2013.
Manoochehr. "Origins of the Word “mother”." Weblog comment. Etymology. N.p., n.d. Web. 12 May 2013.