2026 — modern english
present english
mother
/ˈmʌð.ə(ɹ)/
a female parent. the one in whose body you began.
c. 1100 – 1500 — middle english
eight hundred years ago middle english
moder
/ˈmoː.dər/
the th-sound has not yet hardened into the word. chaucer would have said it like this.
c. 700 – 1100 — old english
a thousand years ago old english · ænglisc
mōdor
/ˈmoː.dor/
spoken in the time of beowulf. the long ō still rings; the bare bones of the modern word are already here.
c. 500 bce – 500 ce — proto-germanic
two thousand years ago proto-germanic · reconstructed
*mōdēr
/ˈmoː.deːr/
no one ever wrote this word down. it is reconstructed from the descendants — every germanic language pointing back to one shape.
c. 4500 – 2500 bce — proto-indo-european
six thousand years ago proto-indo-european · the common ancestor
*méh₂tēr
/ˈmeh₂.teːr/
a word spoken on the steppe, by people whose faces we will never see. from this single shape descend nearly half the words for mother used on earth today.
before language was written — the babble beneath
before time as we measure it the root
*méh₂-
the syllable an infant can make before any other
strip away the suffix -ter — the agent ending, the doer-of — and what remains is the easiest sound a human mouth can produce. ma. the first word, and possibly the only one we did not have to invent.
every word in every language
has a descent like this one.
most of them lead, eventually,
to a sound a child made
before anyone taught them how.
plate ii of the word tree · *méh₂tér-