Linguistic oddness

[lovefromgirl]

I swear this is on topic!

How is it that my whole life, I've heard "mother tongue" and "mother country", yet the watchword for good citizenship is "patriotism"? Why isn't it "matriotism", then?

[Patsy]

Well, there's "fatherland".

[kamcho_papio]

I don't think there can be a clear-cut reason, but here are a few explanations (yay, semantics!). It could be a linguistic survival from Germanic expressions (like Fatherland), but it might have something to do with the primary cultural means of subsistence: the more a culture relies on intensive agriculture, which requires things and institutions like formalized, non-consensus law, property rights and male-oriented genealogies, the more likely they are to have a distant patriarchal god. Agriculture also leads to state formation, so despite the nurturing of mother tongues and motherlands, "patriotism" for the fatherland is about formalized structures like national boundaries and so forth.

Or I might have way overthought it.

[lovefromgirl]

Point, Patsy. But listen to the opener of the Marseillaise: "Allons, enfants de la patrie." La patrie? The feminine is somehow also representative of the masculine?

[Patsy]

I actually thought of that too - aside from the fact that "la patrie" is feminine, "la France"? It's representing something feminine too. Conclusion: language is weird :lol:

[saraelise]

As I recall, Mothertongue is a Victorian construct. Like, it wasn't a natural part of language before the Victorians created it. And Victorians, like our favourite fundies, were really big on (middle and upper class) women staying at home and teaching their children so language was something that came from your mother. The Fatherland is male territory because it's public so that becomes a male focus.

[buddingmedievalist]

Patriotic comes from the Latin patria, which means father land. According to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), mother tongue comes from móður-tunga, which is Old Icelandic. My educated guess is that it's just a difference between Roman culture and the cultures of the Germanic tribes (since English and Icelandic belong to the same language group)

[deelaem]

I swear this is on topic!

How is it that my whole life, I've heard "mother tongue" and "mother country", yet the watchword for good citizenship is "patriotism"? Why isn't it "matriotism", then?

Because our society is a patriarchy.

[lovefromgirl]

[kicks the patriarchy in the wedding tackle]