Mother
An infant has a number of different kinds of cries, depending on what she wants. For example, she cries out la for milk, and ma for mother, and da for father. Unlike most human skills, these cries come factory-direct, pre-programmed, so that parents will know how to help the child. Why these sounds are chosen for these meanings, I don’t know — although in the case of la, it seems likely that if a child is crying and desperately trying to nurse at the same time, licking the air in forlorn hope, what you’ll get is la-la-la.
Be that as it may, ma is the root of the word mother in the Indo European language family, as it is in most languages around the world. Proto Indo European had mater, consisting of ma + ter, ter being a general suffix for kinship (also found of course in father, sister, brother, and daughter). Mater was handed down from Proto Indo European into Proto Germanic, Western Germanic, and English pretty straightforwardly — by Old English we have moder, and the d changed to th by the early 1500s.
Mother starts off appropriately enough with the “m” of manifestation, and then passes into a place of calm and serenity (short “u”). The ending is “th”, but note it is a voiced “th” — not the “th” of thin, but the “th” of that. This “th” — sometimes written as “dh” (Tolkien was fond of this spelling; you can find it in some of his names, for example Calenardhon, from Sindarin cale (green) nardh (realm) on (great), Great Green Province, the old name for Rohan) — has a slightly different meaning from “th”; instead of taking one down a perilous path, it has more of a sense of pointing or indicating, as in these, those, this, that. Nevertheless, a turbulent passage is indicated, just as the air is made turbulent between the tongue and the teeth when the sound is spoken. The final sound is a syllabic “r” — that is, “r” acting like a vowel, and taking up the whole syllable by itself, infusing the word with agentive energy. Being a mother, like being a farmer or a butcher or a preacher, is a calling, a profession.
It’s interesting to compare the moders of Old English with the mothers of today. In Old English times, the moder was the agent of manifestation (”m”) who provided energy that was well-rounded, whole, earthy (long “o”) and delivered the child to the doorway (”d”). Now, the manifestation is the same, but the mother provides a place of serenity (”u”) and ends by pointing out a perilous path (”dh”). Notably, this change happened around 1500 — just about the time in English history when societal change began to accelerate, and mothers no longer knew what kind of world their children would grow up in.
