father

英文詞源

father

father: [OE] Father is the English representative of a general Indo-European family of words for ‘male parent’. Its ancestor is Indo-European p?tér, which probably originated (like the words for ‘mother’, and indeed like English daddy and papa and Welsh tad ‘father’) in prearticulate syllables interpreted by proud parents as words. Its multifarious descendants include Greek patér, Latin pater (whence French père, Italian and Spanish padre – borrowed into English in the 16th century – and English pater, paternal, patriarch, patrician, patriot, and patron), Irish athair, Armenian hayr, German vater, Dutch vader, Swedish and Danish fader, and English father.

A less obvious relation is perpetrate [16]; this comes ultimately from Latin perpetrāre, a derivative of the verb patrāre, which originally meant literally ‘perform or accomplish in the capacity of a father’.
=> paternal, patriot, patron, perpetrate

father (n.)

Old English f?der "he who begets a child, nearest male ancestor;" also "any lineal male ancestor; the Supreme Being," and by late Old English, "one who exercises parental care over another," from Proto-Germanic *fader (cognates: Old Saxon fadar, Old Frisian feder, Dutch vader, Old Norse faeir, Old High German fatar, German vater; in Gothic usually expressed by atta), from PIE *p?ter- "father" (cognates: Sanskrit pitar-, Greek pater, Latin pater, Old Persian pita, Old Irish athir "father"), presumably from baby-speak sound "pa." The ending formerly was regarded as an agent-noun affix.

My heart leaps up when I behold
A rainbow in the sky:
So was it when my life began;
So is it now I am a man;
So be it when I shall grow old,
Or let me die!
The Child is father of the Man;
I could wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety.

[Wordsworth, 1802]

The classic example of Grimm's Law, where PIE "p-" becomes Germanic "f-." Spelling with -th- (15c.) reflects widespread phonetic shift in Middle English that turned -der to -ther in many words, perhaps reinforced in this case by Old Norse forms; spelling caught up to pronunciation in 1500s (compare mother (n.), weather (n.)). As a title of various Church dignitaries from c. 1300; meaning "creator, inventor, author" is from mid-14c.; that of "anything that gives rise to something else" is from late 14c. As a respectful title for an older man, recorded from 1550s. Father-figure is from 1954. Fathers "leading men, elders" is from 1580s.

father (v.)

c. 1400, from father (n.). Related: Fathered; fathering.