The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought by Alexander F. Chamberlain (read full novel txt) 📖

the subject of lullabies. But not cradle-songs alone have sprung from woman’s genius. The world over, dirges and funeral-laments have received their poetical form from the mother. As name-giver, too, in many lands, the mother exercised this side of her imaginative faculty. The mother and the child, from whom language received its chief inspiration, were also the callers forth of its choicest and most creative form.

 

Mother-Wit.

“An ounce o’ mother-wit is worth a pound o’ clergy,” says the Scotch proverb, and the “mother-wit,” Muttergeist and Mutterwitz, that instructive common-sense, that saving light that make the genius and even the fool, in the midst of his folly, wise, appear in folk-lore and folk-speech everywhere. What the statistics of genius seem to show that great men owe to their mothers, no less than fools, is summed up by the folk-mind in the word mother-wit. Jean Paul says: “Die Mütter geben uns von Geiste Wãrme und die Vãter Licht,” and Goethe, in a familiar passage in his Autobiography, declares:—

 

“Vom Vater hab’ich die Statur, Des Lebens ernstes Führen; Vom Mütterchen die Frobnatur, Und Lust zu fabulieren.”

 

Shakespeare makes Petruchio tell the shrewish Katherine that his “goodly speech” is “extempore from my mother-wit,” and Emerson calls “mother-wit,” the “cure for false theology.” Quite appropriately Spenser, in the Faerie Queene, speaks of “all that Nature by her mother-wit could frame in earth.” It is worth noting that when the ancient Greeks came to name the soul, they personified it in Psyche, a beautiful female, and that the word for “soul” is feminine in many European languages.

Among the Teton Indians, according to the Rev. J. Owen Dorsey, the following peculiar custom exists: “Prior to the naming of the infant is the ceremony of the transfer of character; should the infant be a boy, a brave and good-tempered man, chosen beforehand, takes the infant in his arms and breathes into his mouth, thereby communicating his own disposition to the infant, who will grow up to be a brave and good-natured man. It is thought that such an infant will not cry as much as infants that have not been thus favoured. Should the infant be a girl, it is put into the arms of a good woman, who breathes into its mouth” (433. 482).

Here we have father-wit as well as mother-wit.

 

Mother-Tongue.

Where women have no voice whatever in public affairs, and are subordinated to the uttermost in social and family matters, little that is honourable and noble is named for them. In East Central Africa, a Yao woman, asked if the child she is carrying is a boy or a girl, frequently replies: “My child is of the sex that does not speak” (518. XLIII. 249), and with other peoples in higher stages of culture, the “silent woman” lingers yet. Taceat mulier in ecclesiâ still rings in our ears to-day, as it has rung for untold centuries. Though the poet has said:—

 

“There is a sight all hearts beguiling— A youthful mother to her infant smiling, Who, with spread arms and dancing feet, And cooing voice, returns its answer sweet,”

 

and mothers alone have understood the first babblings of humanity, they have waited long to be remembered in the worthiest name of the language they have taught their offspring.

The term mother-tongue, although Middle English had “birthe-tonge,” in the sense of native speech, is not old in our language; the Century Dictionary gives no examples of its early use. Even immortal Shakespeare does not know it, for, in King Richard II., he makes Mowbray say:—

 

“The language I have learned these forty years (My native English) now must I forego.”

 

The German version of the passage has, however, mein mütterliches Englisch.

Cowper, in the Task, does use “mother-tongue,” in the connection following:—

 

“Praise enough To fill the ambition of a private man, That Chatham’s language was his mother-tongue.”

 

Mother-tongue has now become part and parcel of our common speech; a good word, and a noble one.

In Modern High German, the corresponding Mutterzunge, found in Sebastian Franck (sixteenth century) has gradually given way to Muttersprache, a word whose history is full of interest. In Germany, as in Europe generally, the esteem in which Latin was held in the Middle Ages and the centuries immediately following them, forbade almost entirely the birth or extension of praiseworthy and endearing names for the speech of the common people of the country. So long as men spoke of “hiding the beauties of Latin in homely German words,” and a Bacon could think of writing his chief work in Latin, in order that he might be remembered after his death, it were vain to expect aught else.

Hence, it does not surprise us to learn that the word Muttersprache is not many centuries old in German. Dr. Lübben, who has studied its history, says it is not to be found in Old High German or Middle High German (or Middle Low German), and does not appear even in Luther’s works, though, judging from a certain passage in his Table Talk, it was perhaps known to him. It was only in the seventeenth century that the word became quite common. Weigand states that it was already in the Dictionarium latino-germanicum (Zurich, 1556), and in Maaler’s Die Teutsch Spraach (Zurich, 1561), in which latter work (S. 262 a) we meet with the expressions vernacula lingua, patrius sermo, landspraach, muoterliche spraach, and muoterspraach (S. 295 c). Opitz (1624) uses the word, and it is found in Schottel’s Teutsche Haupt-Sprache (Braunschweig, 1663). Apparently the earliest known citation is the Low German modersprake, found in the introduction of Dietrich Engelhus’ (of Einbeck) Deutsche Chronik (1424).

Nowadays Muttersprache is found everywhere in the German book-language, but Dr. Lübben, in 1881, declared that he had never heard it from the mouth of the Low German folk, with whom the word was always lantsprake, gemene sprake. Hence, although the word has been immortalized by Klaus Groth, the Low German Burns, in the first poem of his Quickborn:—

 

“Min Modersprak, so slicht un recht, Du ole frame Red! Wenn blot en Mund ‘min Vader’ seggt, So klingt mi’t as en Bed,”

 

and by Johann Meyer, in his Ditmarscher Gedichte:—

 

“Vaderhus un Modersprak! Lat mi’t nöm’n un lat mi’t rop’n; Vaderhus, du belli Sted, Modersprak, da frame Red, Schönres klingt der Nix tohopen,”

 

it may be that modersprak is not entirely a word of Low German origin; beautiful though it is, this dialect, so closely akin to our own English, did not directly give it birth. Nor do the corresponding terms in the other Teutonic dialects,—Dutch moederspraak, moedertaal, Swedish modersmål, etc.,—seem more original. The Romance languages, however, offer a clue. In French, langue mère is a purely scientific term of recent origin, denoting the root-language of a number of dialects, or of a “family of speech,” and does not appear as the equivalent of Muttersprache. The equivalents of the latter are: French, langue maternelle; Spanish, lengua materna; Italian, lingua materna, etc., all of which are modifications or imitations of a Low Latin lingua materna, or lingua maternalis. The Latin of the classic period seems not to have possessed this term, the locutions in use being sermo noster, patrius sermo, etc. The Greek had [Greek: ae egchorios glossa ae idia glossa,] etc. Direct translations are met with in the moderlike sprake of Daniel von Soest, of Westphalia (sixteenth century), and the muoterliche spraach of Maaler (1561). It is from an Italian-Latin source that Dr. Lübben supposes that the German prototypes of modersprak and Muttersprache arose. In the Bôk der Byen, a semi-Low German translation (fifteenth century) of the Liber Apium of Thomas of Chantimpré, occurs the word modertale in the passage “Christus sede to er [the Samaritan woman] mit sachte stemme in erre modertale.” A municipal book of Treuenbrietzen informs us that in the year 1361 it was resolved to write in the ydeoma maternale—what the equivalent of this was in the common speech is not stated—and in the Relatio of Hesso, we find the term materna lingua (105 a).

The various dialects have some variants of Muttersprache, and in Göttingen we meet with moimen spraken, where moime (cognate with Modern High German Muhme, “aunt”), signifies “mother,” and is a child-word.

From the mother-tongue to the mother-land is but a step. As the speech she taught her babe bears the mother’s name, so does also the land her toil won from the wilderness.

 

Mother-Land.

As we say in English most commonly “native city,” so also we say “native land.” Even Byron sings:—

 

“Adieu, adieu I my native shore Fades o’er the waters blue;

 

*

 

My native land—good night!”

 

and Fitz-Greene Halleck, in his patriotic poem “Marco Bozzaris,” bids strike “For God, and your native land.”

Scott’s far-famed lines:—

 

“Breathes there a man with soul so dead, Who never to himself has said, This is my own, my native land!”

 

and Smith’s national hymn, “My country,‘tis of thee,” know no mother-land.

In the great Century Dictionary, the only illustration cited of the use of the word mother-land is a very recent one, from the Century Magazine (vol. xxix. p. 507).

Shakespeare, however, comes very near it, when, in King John (V. ii.), he makes the Bastard speak of “your dear Mother-England,” —but this is not quite “mother-land.”

In German, though, through the sterner influences which surrounded the Empire in its birth and reorganization, Vaterland is now the word, Mutterland was used by Kant, Wieland, Goethe, Herder, Uhland, etc. Lippert suggests an ingenious explanation of the origin of the terms Mutterland, Vaterland, as well as for the predominance of the latter and younger word. If, in primitive times, man alone could hold property,—women even and children were his chattels,—yet the development of agriculture and horticulture at the hands of woman created, as it were, a new species of property, property in land, the result of woman’s toil and labour; and this new property, in days when “mother-right” prevailed, came to be called Mutterland, as it was essentially “mothers’ land.” But when men began to go forth to war, and to conquer and acquire land that was not “mothers’ land,” a new species of landed property,—the “land of the conquering father,”—came into existence (and with it a new theory of succession, “father-right”), and from that time forward “Vaterland” has extended its signification, until it has attained the meaning which it possesses in the German speech of to-day (492. 33, 36).

The inhabitants of the British colonies scattered all over the world speak of Britain as the “mother country,” “Mother England”; and R. H. Stoddard, the American poet, calls her “our Mother’s Mother.” The French of Canada term France over-sea “la mère patrie” (mother fatherland).

Even Livy, the Roman historian, wrote terra quam matrem appellamus,—“the land we call mother,”—and Virgil speaks of Apollo’s native Delos as Delum maternum. But for all this, the proud Roman called his native land, not after his mother, but after his father, patria; so also in corresponding terms the Greek, [Greek: patris], etc. But the latter remembered his mother also, as the word metropolis, which we have inherited, shows. [Greek: Maetropolis] had the meanings: “mother-state” (whence daughter-colonies went forth); “a chief city, a capital, metropolis; one’s mother-city, or mother-country.” In English, metropolis has been associated with “mother-church,” for a metropolis or a metropolitan city,