This Sunday is Mother’s Day. It will be a day of flowers, crowded cafés and, for many of us, a guilty phone call to our mothers apologising for not ringing more often.
“Mother” is considered one of the oldest words in human language (along with “father”). Words for mother are remarkably similar across many languages. English has mother, German Mutter, Dutch moeder, Latin mater, Greek mētēr and Sanskrit mātṛ.
English, Hindi, Persian, Irish and Russian all belong to the same broad Indo-European linguistic family. Outside the Indo-European languages there are similar forms again — Mandarin uses māma, Swahili has mama, Quechua in the Andes uses mama, and Arabic has umm.
English inherited the word through Old English mōdor. Before that came Proto-Germanic mōdēr, and further back still the reconstructed language known as Proto-Indo-European (PIE), spoken perhaps 5,000 to 7,000 years ago.
No written examples of PIE survive, of course. Linguists reconstructed the language by comparing related languages and identifying systematic sound correspondences between them. The postulated PIE word for mother is written as méh₂tēr.
Latin “mater” produced a large family of English words — including maternal, maternity and matron. It also contributed to “matrix”, originally meaning a breeding female or source. English uses “mother” to describe the source or origin of something as in “mother tongue” and “mother country”.
Mother before history
Some linguists have proposed even deeper ancestral relationships between language families. A Proto-Human language, also known as Proto-Sapiens or Proto-World has been postulated as a global proto-language from which all languages evolved.
It is the concept of monogenesis–all languages evolving from one original language. Alfredo Trombetti’s book L’unità d’origine del linguaggio (1905) estimated that the common language ancestor was spoken between 100,000 and 200,000 years ago. The theory remains controversial.
“Mother” sits near the centre of the debate because related forms occur across so many languages and language families.
First sounds
However, there is another interpretation. The linguist Roman Jakobson argued that similarities between words for mother and father arise because the sounds are among the easiest and earliest sounds that babies produce. In his 1962 paper, Why “Mama” and “Papa”?, he noted that babies can make the open vowel a and simple lip sounds like m and p before they can manage more complicated consonants.
Whether the similarities between languages arise from a common ancestral tongue or simply from the sounds babies find easiest to make, the result is much the same–across thousands of years and many cultures, children have begun speaking by calling for their mother.