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I sometimes say that a common human experience breeds a word that is common across cultures and changes little over time.

There isn’t much in the world that’s more common to human experience than having a mother, nor anything that means quite as much to most people.  So it should come as no surprise that this word has come down to us almost unchanged for as far back as we can see into the history of words.

And also that it is one of the words that spans the entire width and breadth of Indo-European languages.

Evidently we only started writing the TH in mother back in the early 1500s but may have been pronouncing it that way for some time beforehand.

The Indo-European root was mater.

Not too different for five to seven thousand years.

Also, languages from Latin to Gaelic, and Greek to Russian share this maternal legacy.

This is a word we not only all have in common, it is also a word we all use with great regularity.  Words like that just can’t change because there are too many people around who know the word and will correct you if you start to pronounce it wrong or use it with a meaning that is just too far from their understanding of what it should mean.

So again it is no surprise that we didn’t get mother from Latin or French, but from the oldest Old English.

I mentioned Sir Robert Cotton yesterday in my episode on the word mildew at the Oxford University Press blog.  While the meaning of mildew has changed a lot, the word mother has its first citation in the same document set I mentioned yesterday from Sir Robert’s library.

The Cotton Library is an important resource for people studying Old English.

Unfortunately back in 1731almost a quarter of the ancient collection went up in smoke.  The documents had been brought together around the time of Shakespeare by Sir Robert Cotton and then had been moved in the early 1700s to the ironically named Ashburnham House.

The librarian was understandably an enthusiast when it came to ancient documents and he had quite a pile of them in his own house nearby when tragedy struck.  In the dead of night his house burned down and destroyed numerous irreplaceable old manuscripts.

An eyewitness—the headmaster of the school where this all took place—reported the panic stricken librarian stumbling out through the smoke in his nightshirt with bundles of old documents tucked under his arms.