Brothers and sisters

The readers of this blog may have noticed that I usually try to stay away from the oldest words in English, those with ancient Indo-European roots. I do so, because, when it comes to such words, I seldom have any ideas worth sharing, that is, such as cannot be found in easily available sources. (Incidentally, considering the richness of the Internet, this is not always an easy task!) I feel more comfortable with baffle, pebble, and peevish (see the latest two posts about them) and among adzes, heifers, and pimps, all done to death in my etymological dictionary. But perhaps someone among our readers is especially interested in the hoary antiquities? If so, write me a note. In any case, today’s post is about the words brother and sister. Both are very old, really as old as the most ancient hills around us. The question is the same as always: Why do those words mean what they mean to us today? I wish they were sound-imitative, but unfortunately, they are not.

Brother is an especially amazing word, because its multiple cognates have practically the same form, the predictable phonetic differences notwithstanding, all over Indo-European: English brother, Latin frater, Russian brat, and so forth (an extremely rare case). The Indo-European protoform must have begun with bh-. We can state with confidence only one thing: namely, that brothers received their name not because they were the sons of the same parent(s). Rather, they were members of a certain unit, a fraternity, asit were. For instance, the Ancient Greek phrāter belonged to a phrātria, “a brotherhood,” a social, political, and religious group that had nothing to do with kinship. This is not surprising. In the remotest past, males were responsible for hunting and warding off enemies. Being the offspring of the same parents mattered less or not at all. Of course, such was no longer the situation in recorded history and in Greece, where boys did know their fathers, and the word for “brother” in our sense existed (Greek adelphós “from the same womb”; as regards the root of the word, think of Delphi, literally “womb,” the seat of Apollo’s famous temple in a gorge).

Ancient “brothers” must have belonged to a certain group. What group was it millennia ago? If we could discover the answer, the etymology of the word brother would have become clear. According to a very old suggestion, the root of brother is the same as in the verb bear. But brothers did not receive their name because they were the sons of the same parent. That’s the whole point. And reconstructing some root beginning with br– takes us nowhere.

Even the most detailed etymological dictionaries offer only lists of cognates for brother and state flatly: “Origin unknown.” Yet I might mention at least one hypothesis, to illustrate the state of the art. Jost Trier (1894-1970), a German linguist, believed that many words of Indo-European had been coined in the process of weaving, making fences, and so forth. In his time, Trier had an enthusiastic following. A few of his etymologies look plausible; others are fanciful. He reconstructed the ancient root bher “to weave, plait,” which he detected in numerous words, including brother and bride. To be sure, “connecting, binding” is a concept that underlies both kinship and marriage, but as always, it is the details that count. A bird’s eye view of kinship terms rarely pays off. The etymology of both bride and brother is enveloped in total obscurity, and comparing two words of unknown origin in an attempt to kill two evasive birds with one little stone (“pebble”) is a risky endeavor.

Such then is the sad end of the first part of today’s essay. By this time, it must have become clear why I choose to stay away from the depths of Indo-European. As a pearl-diver, I don’t like to come to the surface empty-handed.

Despite numerous disagreements among scholars, the etymology of the word sister seems to be less opaque. Before citing the solution that one can find in all recent dictionaries, I may mention a curious detail. We seem to be wandering in darkness, and yet some ancient kin terms are amusingly transparent. For instance, Old Norse (that is, Old Icelandic) lifri is one of several words for “brother,” and it means “of the same liver.” Also, in Old Icelandic, we find blóði, literally “blood brother,” hlýri “brother, (!) friend,” literally, “of the same cheek.” The already cited Greek adelphós means “of the same womb” (no connection with Adolph, despite its misleading ph at the end: Adolph is a German name meaning “old wolf”), and the Sanskrit word for “brother” had the same inner form. But as we have seen, brother did NOT mean “of the same womb,” and we are at a loss to decipher it.

We can assume that millennia ago, people coined words that were fully transparent to the speakers, but with time those words changed beyond recognition, and we are hard put to reconstruct the original form. Or the association that was once clear to everybody has been lost. The Germanic designations of “sister” are similarly all over the map: Gothic swistar, Old English sweostor, and so forth. (Gothic, it will be remembered, has come down to us in a fourth-century translation of the New Testament from Greek. Later Gothic is all but unknown.)

It is now usually believed that the oldest Indo-European word for “sister” was a compound containing the elements swe- “one’s own” and sōr “woman,” the reference being to the woman of one’s own extended family, in contrast to such terms of kinship as Latin uxor “woman from outside the extended family.” The competing etymology, explaining sister as “being of one’s own blood,” has been rejected or ignored by most specialists in Indo-European kinship terminology.

Old Germanic was full of words designating various family groups. For instance, in the Gothic translation of the New Testament, we find the noun broþrahans. It renders the usual Greek plural of the word for “brother” but presumably meant “those dealing with one another in a brotherly manner.” To us the text in Mark XII: 20 hardly suggests such a nuance (“Now there were seven brethren; and the first took a wife, and dying left no seed”). Be that as it may, the odd-looking suffix has secure counterparts in Icelandic and elsewhere.

To repeat: few words are harder to interpret than the terms of kinship in the languages of the world. The Modern English system is simplicity itself: grandmother, brother, sister, cousin, uncle, in-laws, and so forth, but even we have monsters like cousin twice removed. The old system was intricate and to us mind-boggling. So let us stay with moms and dads and make merry.

Editor’s note: for administrative reasons, The Oxford Etymologist’s column will not appear next week, July 29. The next post will be on August 5.

_{Featured image: Image by Jason Hu via Pexels. Public domain.}