Re: Father/Motherland

On Last Sun of Tenderness, Vasily Chernov wrote:

> >On Sun, May 21, 2000 at 06:54:23PM -0400, John Cowan wrote:
> >> Raymond Brown scripsit:
> <...>
> >> I always thought it would be interesting to construct a table of
> >> "fatherland" languages (e.g. German), "motherland" languages (e.g.
> >> Russian), and either-or languages (e.g. English).
>
> Actually, Russian has *two* equivalents of 'fatherland' (_otechestvo_ and
> _otchizna_, both sounding a bit pathetic) and no litteral equivalents of
> 'motherland' or 'homeland'. But the most common (and stylistically
> neutral) word (_rodina_) translates literally as 'birthland' or 'native
> land'; the traditional translation is 'motherland' - perhaps, because
> 'birth' is more usually associated with maternity.
>
> I am not really fluent in Polish, but I kinda remember that it has the
> equivalent of _otchizna_ (_ojcizna_, IIRC; luckily, no  diacritics this
> time ;) ).
>
In Spanish the word is _patria_ with shows it relationship with _padre_
(father).  Then I thing it could count as a fatherland language.  The world
_patria_ is also used in the phrase _patria potestad_ which is the right the
father and/or the mother has on their children... pretty used in the recent
happenings in South Florida.

-- Carlos Th