Odp: girls

----- Original Message -----

From: Stephanie Budin

To: cybalist@egroups.com

Sent: Friday, October 08, 1999 5:24 PM

Subject: [cybalist] girls

Greetings, All! To promote e-flow <g>, please allow me to ask a question that has been on my mind for some time now. Is there an I-E or P-I-E word for "girl"? In the majority of I-E languages which I know or at least know of, there is no specific word for "girl," but either diminutive forms of "woman" (such as the German "maedchen" and "fraeuline"), or feminine forms of words for "boy" (Spanish "chica" "muchacha"; Latin "puella"), or the term for daughter (French "jeune fille"). Only English ("girl"), Greek ("kore") and possibly Irish ("colleen") seem to have words which specifically refer to a young woman. By contrast, all of these languages have specific words for "boy": garcon, knabe, bube, puer, etc... So, is there an I-E form for "girl," and if not, where does the English word come from? Also, if not, does this perhaps contribute to the idea of the I-Es as somewhat patriarchal? I remember reading a while back that the Iroquois, a matrifocal society, had several words for "girl" and "woman," but none for "boy." Many Thanks! Stephanie L. Budin University of Pennsylvania

 

Well, is there a known PIE word for 'boy'? There seems to have been one for 'young man': *xjuho:n, Gen. *xjuhn-os (reflected e.g. in Sanskrit yuva:, yu:nah). What looks like its diminutive form (originally adjectival), *xjuh@..., underlies Latin iuvencus 'young man; bullock' and English young (the g is from Verner's Law). Similarly, iuventus is virtually the same as English youth. The ultimate IE base of all these forms is *xoju, Gen. xjou-s (Skt. a:yu, yoh) 'life, vitality, vigour [not to mention various secondary meanings]', and the words cited so far comprise only a small part of the lexical family derived from it (my fellow Slavs on CyBaList would not forgive me if I forgot to mention juny, junost', junak etc.). Individual languages have various feminine derivatives from *xjuho:n. I have the vague feeling (though I cannot check it at the moment) that Sanskrit had one (yu:ni:? -- does anyone on CyBaList have a good Skt. dictionary within easy reach?); and Latin certainly had iuvenca 'young woman; young cow, heifer'. It is impossible to say how ancient these derivatives are (in particular, whether they can be projected onto PIE), because they are part of highly productive word-formation patterns.

 

At its earliest reconstructible stage, PIE had no feminine gender as a grammatical category. When the old two-way system of noun classes (animate : inanimate) was replaced with a three-way one (masculine : feminine : neuter), former "animate" nouns often split into specifically masculine and specifically feminine cognates. It was normally the feminine that was morphologically "marked" with respect to its masculine counterpart (in that it took on a special feminine suffix), but I can't say if that means that the IEs were patriarchal. I don't know, either, if the oldest meaning of *xjuho:n was 'young man' or 'young/vigorous human being'. Its morphological structure leaves both possibilities open.

 

"Girl" and "boy" are relatively new words in English; dictionaries classify them as "words of obscure origin". Tentative connections with some Scandinavian and Low German words have been drawn, but there are no credible Proto-Germanic etymologies. Perhaps "boy" and "girl" come from some kind of Early Middle English slang and are quite literally words with no ancient past. Their Old English equivalents, as you probably know, were maegden and cniht, both of which have shifted semantically (> maiden, knight). In Chaucer's language, boy meant 'knave, rascal', and gerl~girl still had its original meaning, which was... 'a young person of either sex'! Terms from this semantic domain may evolve very quickly (I ignore here lass, lad etc., but they are an additional factor of complication), and this is also true of languages other than English (see how many different Romance items there exist). There is no reason to suppose that the earlies IE dialects were exceptional in this respect.

 

Piotr Gasiorowski