Re: Father/Motherland

On Mon, 22 May 2000 01:19:18 -0500, Ed Heil <edh@...> 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).
>Russian and Polish "motherland" vs. German "fatherland" are some of
>the terms that Anna Wierzbicka examines in her book on "cultural
>keywords."
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 ;) ).

Unfortunately, I haven't read that often-quoted book by
[v_jeZb_jít_ska], but I suppose her analysis somehow made account of
all those words... ;) (since Polish is her L1, and some Russians who
met her told me her Russian was good).

If she does classify Russian as a 'motherland' language, her
reasoning must have been less straightforward: there does exist a
*cultural* association between 'homeland' and motherhood (and a
standard collocation _rodina-mat'_, lit. 'Homeland-the-Mother').
Besides, of the three synonyms two (_rodina_ and _otchizna_) are
feminine nouns, one (_otechestvo_) is neuter, and none is masculine.


Basilius