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Re: Father/Motherland

From:Carlos Eugenio Thompson (EDC) <edccet@...>
Date:Tuesday, May 23, 2000, 14:37
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