The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought - Alexander F. Chamberlain (best way to read an ebook txt) 📗

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.

To this stock of words our babe, with its diminutive baby, seems not akin. Skeat, rejecting the theory that it is a reduplicative child-word, like papa, sees in it merely a modification (infantine, perhaps) of the Celtic maban, diminutive of mab, “son,” and hence related to maid, the particular etymology of which is discussed elsewhere.

Infant, also, is a loan-word in English. In Latin, infans was the coinage of some primitive student of children, of some prehistoric anthropologist, who had a clear conception of “infancy” as “the period of inability to speak,”—for infans signifies neither more nor less than “not speaking, unable to speak.” The word, like our “childish,” assumed also the meanings “child, young, fresh, new, silly,” with a diminutive infantulus. The Latin word infans has its representatives in French and other Romance languages, and has given rise to enfanter, “to give birth to a child,” enfantement, “labour,” two of the few words relating to childbirth in which the child is directly remembered. The history of the words infantry, “foot-soldiers,” and Infanta, “a princess of the blood royal” in Spain (even though she be married), illustrates a curious development of thought.

Our word daughter, which finds cognates in Teutonic, Slavonic, Armenian, Zend, Sanskrit, and Greek, Skeat would derive from the root dugh, “to milk,” the “daughter” being primitively the “milker,” —the “milkmaid,”—which would remove the term from the list of names for “child” in the proper sense of the word. Kluge, however, with justice perhaps, considers this etymology improbable.

A familiar phrase in English is “babes and sucklings,” the last term of which, cognate with German Säugling, meets with analogues far and wide among the peoples of the earth. The Latin words for children in relation to their parents are filius (diminutive filiolus), “son,” and filia (diminutive filiola), “daughter,” which have a long list of descendants in the modern Neo-Latin or Romance languages,—French fils, fille, filleul, etc.; Italian figlio, figlia, etc. According to Skeat, filius signified originally “infant,” perhaps “suckling,” from felare, “to suck,” the radical of which, fe (Indo-European dhe), appears also in femina, “woman,” and femella, “female,” the “sucklers” par excellence. In Greek the cognate words are [Greek: titthae], “nurse,” thaelus, “female,” thaelae, “teat,” etc.; in Lithuanian, dels, “son.” With nonagan, “teat, breast,” are cognate in the Delaware Indian language nonoshellaan, “to suckle,” nonetschik, “suckling,” and other primitive tongues have similar series.

The Modern High German word for child is Kind, which, as a substantive, finds representatives neither in Gothic nor in early English, but has cognates in the Old Norse kunde, “son,” Gothic -kunds, Anglo-Saxon -kund, a suffix signifying “coming from, originating from.” The ultimate radical of the word is the Indo-European root gen (Teutonic ken), “to bear, to produce,” whence have proceeded also kin, Gothic kuni; queen, Gothic qvêns, “woman”; king, Modern High German König, originally signifying perhaps “one of high origin”; Greek genos and its derivatives; Latin genus, gens, gigno; Lithuanian gentis, “relative”; Sanskrit janas, “kin, stock,” janús, “creature, kin, birth,” jantú, “child, being, stock,” jâtá, “son.” Kind, therefore, while not the same word as our child, has the same primitive meaning, “the produced one,” and finds further cognates in kid and colt, names applied to the young of certain animals, and the first of which, in the slang of to-day, is applied to children also. In some parts of Germany and Switzerland Kind has the sense of boy; in Thuringia, for example, people speak of zwei Kinder und ein Mädchen, “two boys and a girl.” From the same radical sprang the Modern High German Knabe, Old High German chnabo, “boy, youth, young fellow, servant,” and its cognates, including our English knave, with its changed meaning, and possibly also German Knecht and English knight, of somewhat similar import originally.

To the same original source we trace back Greek [Greek: genetaer], Latin genitor, “parent,” and their cognates, in all of which the idea of genesis is prominent. Here belong, in Greek: [Greek: genesis], “origin, birth, beginning”; [Greek: gynae], “woman”; [Greek: genea], “family, race”; [Greek: geinomai], “I beget, produce, bring forth, am born”; [Greek: gignomai], “I come into a new state of being, become, am born.” In Latin: gigno, “I beget, bring forth”; gens, “clan, race, nation,”—those born in a certain way; ingens, “vast, huge, great,”—“not gens,” i.e. “born beyond or out of its kind”; gentilis, “belonging to the same clan, race, tribe, nation,” then, with various turns of meaning, “national, foreign,” whence our gentile, genteel, gentle, gentry, etc.; genus, “birth, race, sort, kind”; ingenium, “innate quality, natural disposition”; ingeniosus, “of good natural abilities, born well-endowed,” hence ingenious; ingenuus, “native, free-born, worthy of a free man,” hence “frank, ingenuous“; progenies, “descent, descendants, offspring, progeny”; gener, “son-in-law”; genius, “innate superior nature, tutelary deity, the god born to a place,” hence the genius, who is “born,” not “made”; genuinus, “innate, born-in, genuine“; indigena, “native, born-there, indigenous”; generosus, “of high, noble birth,” hence “noble-minded, generous“; genero, “I beget, produce, engender, create, procreate,” and its derivatives degenero, regenero, etc., with the many words springing from them. From the same radical gen comes the Latin (g)nascor, “I am born,” whose stem (g)na is seen also in natio, “the collection of those born,” or “the birth,” and natura, “the world of birth,”—like Greek [Greek: phnsis],—for “nations” and “nature” have both “sprung into being.” The Latin germen (our germ), which signified “sprig, offshoot, young bud, sprout, fruit, embryo,” probably meant originally simply “growth,” from the root ker, “to make to grow.” From the same Indo-European radical have come the Latin creare, “to create, make, produce,” with its derivatives procreare and creator, which we now apply to the Supreme Being, as the “maker” or “producer” of all things. Akin are also crescere, “to come forth, to arise, to appear, to increase, to grow, to spring, to be born,” and Ceres, the name of the goddess of agriculture (growth and creation), whence our word cereal; and in Greek [Greek: Kronos], the son of Uranus (Heaven) and Gæa (Earth), [Greek: kratos], “strength,” and its derivatives (“democracy,” etc.).

Another interesting Latin word is pario, “I bring forth, produce,” whence parens, “producer, parent,” partus, “birth, bearing, bringing forth; young, offspring, foetus, embryo of any creature,” parturio, parturitio, etc. Pario is used alike of human beings, animals, birds, fish, while parturio is applied to women and animals, and, by Virgil, even to trees,—_parturit arbos_, “the tree is budding forth,”—and by other writers to objects even less animate.

In the Latin enitor, “I bring forth or bear children or young,”—properly, “I struggle, strive, make efforts,”—we meet with the idea of “labour,” now so commonly associated with child-bearing, and deriving from the old comparison of the tillage of the soil and the bearing of the young. This association existed in Hebrew also, and Cain, the first-born of Adam, was the first agriculturist. We still say the tree bears fruit, the land bears crops, is fertile, and the most characteristic word in English belonging to the category in question is “to