mother - podictionary 819

Today’s podictionary word brought to you by GoToMeeting. Try it free for 30 days by following the link www.gotomeeting.com/podcast I sometimes say that a common human experience breeds a word that is common across cultures and changes little over time. There isn’t much in the world that’s more common to human experience than having a mother, nor anything that means quite as much to most people.  So it should come as no surprise that this word has come down to us almost unchanged for as far back as we can see into the history of words. And also that it is one of the words that spans the entire width and breadth of Indo-European languages. Evidently we only started writing the TH in mother back in the early 1500s but may have been pronouncing it that way for some time beforehand. The Indo-European root was mater. Not too different for five to seven thousand years. Also, languages from Latin to Gaelic, and Greek to Russian share this maternal legacy. This is a word we n...