Wednesday, September 4, 2019
Vocabulary :: essays research papers fc
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 omma from which we have the words akin to maternal, matter, and mother. By the late ice age the Semites had shortened omma to om. The Dravidians of India are Semites who migrated to India after the ice age. They still call mother goddess omm. Om is also the present day Arabic word for female and mother. Omma 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, modor in Old English (725), madre in modern Italian, and mother in modern English (1425), (R.K.Barnhant, 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)
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