Word Mother example essay topic

Introduction One of the most fascinating aspects of words is that they all have a past. Some words in English, for example, can be shown to have been in place for more than 5000 years (P. Baldi, 1999). Ordinarily we pay little attention to the words we articulate; we concentrate instead on the meaning we intend to express and we are seldom conscious of how we express that meaning. Only if we make a mistake and we have to correct it or we have difficulty remembering a word we become conscious of our word. This means that most of us do not know where the word we use come from and how they come to have the meaning they do. English words come from several different sources.

They developed naturally over the course of centuries from ancestral languages, they are also borrowed from other languages and we create many of them by various means of word vocabulary available to us today. History and morphology of the word Mother The idea of the mother goddess was invented in early ice age, some 25,000-30,000 years ago. She and her life giving breasts were called om ma from which we have the words akin to maternal, matter, and mother. By the late ice age the Semites had shortened om ma to om. The Dravidians of India are Semites who migrated to India after the ice age. They still call mother goddess o mm.

Om is also the present day Arabic word for female and mother. Omm a became ma among the Iranians, meaning the female breast. From ma we have the Iranian maman. Also, we have the Iranian ma-Dar (earlier ma-tar) meaning breast which became mater in Latin, mod or in Old English (725), made in modern Italian, and mother in modern English (1425), (R.K. Barnhart, 2000). Collocation There are several words that fit together with the word mother. Mother Country Mother Nature Mother Figure Mother Tongue Mother Board Connotation The word mother has a positive connotation as it describes maternal tenderness and affection although in American English mother could also mean motherfucker which carry a negative and vulgar meaning (Chambers, 1994).

Semantic field relation The following are some semantic field relations to the word mother. Father Son Daughter Semantic usage REGISTER Mother Very Formal British English Mum Informal British English Mummy Informal British English mainly used by children Mom Informal American English Mommy Informal American English mainly used by children Ma Informal expression American and British English working class (often used with any much older woman) Mam Informal North England English and Welsh (working class) Mammy Informal Scottish English and North England English (working class) Mama Old expression used by upper class children Momma Informal American English Source: McArthur (1981) Synonyms and antonyms Synonyms Antonyms Female Parent FatherGenetrix Mater Familias Idioms There are several idioms related to the word mother, the following are the most used". Mother's boy" may have a positive or a negative connotation. It has a negative shade if it stands for a boy or man whose character and conduct is too much marked by maternal influence. On the other hand it has a positive nuance if it connotes a boy who has been the indisputable favourite of his mother". Like mother like daughter" it is used when a girl behaves like her mother".

Mother tongue" means the language somebody first learned to speak as a child". Mother Country" stands for the country where somebody was born. Derivatives There are several words whose origin comes from the word mother: Maternity Motherhood Maternal Motherless Motherly Pragmatic "A real mother of a car" This is a colloquial expression referring to something very large and usually very good. "Please, do not be a mother!" Colloquial expression mainly used between youngsters with a slightly negative meaning.

Bibliography

Baldi, P (1999) Words on Word History, BaldiBarnhant, RK (2000) Dictionary of Etymology, Chambers Cowie, AP and Mackin, R (1990) Oxford Dictionary of Current Idiomatic English, Oxford University Press Crystal, D (1996) Cambridge Encyclopaedia of the English Language, CUP McArthur, T (1981) Lexicon of Contemporary English, Longman Chambers (1994) The Chambers Dictionary, Chambers Warren, H (1997) Oxford Learner's Dictionary of English Idioms, Oxford University Press.