931. Darth Vader wasn't the best father (understatement!), but his name is a wonderful jumping off point to discuss the origin of the word "father." Plus, we explain why I said he wasn't the "best" father and not that he wasn't the "better" father.
931. Darth Vader wasn't the best father (understatement!), but his name is a wonderful jumping off point to discuss the origin of the word "father." Plus, we explain why I said he wasn't the "best" father and not that he wasn't the "better" father.
| Transcript: https://grammar-girl.simplecast.com/episodes/darth-vader-and-the-word-father/transcript
| The "father" segment was written by Valerie Fridland. It is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article. Valerie is the author of the book “Like, Literally, Dude,” and you can find her at ValerieFridland.com.
| The "comparisons" segment was written by Bonnie Mills who has been a copy editor since 1996.
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[Darth Vader breathing.] I’m your pater, Luke. [Darth Vader breathing.] I’m your vater, Luke. [Darth Vader breathing.] I’m your dada, Luke.
[music]
Grammar Girl here. I’m Mignon Fogarty, and you can think of me as your friendly guide to the English language. We talk about writing, history, rules, and other cool stuff. This week, we’re going to talk about Darth Vader and the names for dad, and about how to use the words “better” and “best.”
But first, here’s a listener question:
"Hi, Mignon. I'm listening to your May 9 episode, and in talking about hunting dogs, you said ‘prow-ess.’ I was always taught ‘prow-iss.’ So now I'm curious. Maybe I'm wrong. It's Liz in Stamford, Connecticut."
Thanks, Liz. You are not wrong! All the US dictionaries say the pronunciation is “prow-is,’ with the emphasis on the first syllable. The Oxford English Dictionary lists the way I pronounce it, “prow-ess,” with the emphasis on the last syllable, as the third British pronunciation option. So it does seem like the way I have been pronouncing it is — if not out and out wrong — quite unusual! Thanks for the call.
by Valerie Fridland
Movie legend has it that the identity of Luke Skywalker’s father was always hiding in plain sight – well, at least through a subtle naming clue. “Darth Vader” does, after all, have a distinct paternal ring to it linguistically. Indeed, had the big reveal been “I am your fader,” it would have made a nice play on the heavy-breathing villain’s name with a nod to an old Dutch term for “father.”
The true origin story of Vader’s moniker is not as cool as the myth. (Apparently, George Lucas gave him the name before he decided Vader would be Luke’s father.) But as someone who studies the origins of words, I see the story providing an example of something that is real: the universality of the names used for fathers across all languages.
Considering that dads played a key part in populating the dawn of civilization, it is perhaps not that surprising that a label for the dude we call “dad” would emerge early in the development of languages. But, whether it’s “papa,” “dada” or “vater,” what is striking is the cross-cultural bias in the words used to describe him – and how the same names have stuck around over millennia.
Tracking the linguistic evolution of the modern word “father,” we find it as far back as written English goes – with references to “feadur” or “fadur” or “fædor” in Old English texts from the seventh to 11th centuries. In Old Dutch there was “fader”; in Old Icelandic we find “faðir”; in Old High German, a precursor to modern German, it was “fater” – now “vater”; and, finally, in Old Danish, it’s spelled “fathær,” which might be pronounced “fil,” I’m not sure, but it looks like “father.”
This uniformity strongly suggests this word was found in the languages’ early Germanic parent – that is, the source language from which all these Germanic languages descended.
But the similarity in terms used for “father” doesn’t stop with this Germanic forefather. Related words are found across the entire Indo-European language tree – a large group of distantly related languages that stretches over most of Europe and a good bit of Asia. For instance, we find closely matching terms in Latin with “pater,” Sanskrit’s “pitar” and in Greek with “patér” – all older languages that developed separately from the Germanic line.
This means that the word “father” likely came from a long-dead source language, estimated to date back some 6,000 years. This single parent language – known as Proto-Indo-European – spawned all these later languages and their shared word for paters.
But how did the “p” in “pater” morph into the “f” found in all the Germanic “father” words"?
Historical linguists have reconstructed the most likely sounds that were used in this hypothesized parent language. Since Ancient Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit all have “p,” “t,” and “k” sounds, their Indo-European source also probably had these, or closely related, sounds.
But as Germanic languages formed their own branch of the family tree, this “p” turned into an “f.” This explains why there is a “p” in Latin-based words like “Pisces,” “podiatry” and “patriarchy,” but “f” in the Germanic descended equivalents like “fish,” “foot” and “father.” This sound change wasn’t random but followed what came to be called Grimm’s law, named for the very same brother Grimm who brought us "Hansel and Gretel.”
Grimm noted a pattern of sound correspondences across Indo-European languages that suggested a series of regular changes must have occurred as Indo-European split into daughter languages. These changes likely started out as dialect variants that became more distinct as groups of speakers were separated and new languages evolved – with the shifted sounds.
One might expect closely related languages to share words for fathers, but even across languages in which there is no known evidence of a common ancestry the words for “dad” sound strikingly familiar.
Languages as distinct as Sino-Tibetan Chinese and Native American Washo use “baba.” In Nilo-Saharan Maasai, spoken in Kenya and Tanzania, it’s “papa,” and, in the Semitic language Hebrew, “abba.”
A similar bent is found in English, where children use the more intimate “papa,” “dad,” or sometimes “daddy” as an alternative to the more formal “father,” especially when in trouble or getting bailed out of jail.
‘Dad’ and ‘Daddy’ have grown in popular usage in recent decades:
This tendency toward similar vocabulary words suggests that something pretty universal must be driving it. And though at first “d” and “p” and “b” might not seem to be all that similar sounding, they are all part of a class of what are called “stop consonants” in linguistics. Stop consonants are sounds made with a short but complete obstruction of airflow through the mouth during their articulation.
Why does this matter to pops everywhere? Because stop sounds, along with vowels, are the earliest and most frequent sounds babies tend to babble – which means “pa,” “ta,” “ba” and “da” are all early infant babbles.
Also, repetition is a feature of both baby babble and what parents babble back. As a result, this specific babbling bent makes “dadas,” “babas” and “papas” – along with “apas” and “abas” – very popular things for little Carlos or Keisha to say while hanging out in the crib.
So, when dad happens by and hears what he interprets as his call sign, a celebratory first word commemoration commences, regardless of whether Junior actually intended it that way or not.
And this circles back to the origin story of the word “father.”
Linguists theorize that, at some early point in the development of the Indo-European language, the sound sequence “pa” – babbled in early speech and wishfully interpreted as referring to good ol’ dad – was combined with a suffix such as “ter,” (“pa-ter”) possibly denoting a kinship relationship.
Looking at the evolution of language more generally, linguists can’t say with certainty whether modern languages inherited the word from an undiscovered original early human language – likely African – or if this process occurred several times over the course of language history.
But what it does suggest is that dads have clearly been important enough throughout the history of humankind to merit special designation. And, unlike so many other words that have been shifted and reshaped or replaced over time by inherent linguistic pressures and language contact, the fondness for “dadas,” “dads,” “fathers,” and “papas” seems to be unusually resistant to change.
So, whether you call him your papa, your baba, or your abba, just be sure to call him, and let him know how well he, and his title, have stood the test of time.
That segment was by Valerie Fridland. It originally appeared on The Conversation and appears here through a Creative Commons license. Valerie is the author of the book “Like, Literally, Dude,” and you can find her at ValerieFridland.com.
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Last week, we talked about when to use “more” and “most” or the suffixes “-er” and “-est” to make comparisons using adjectives and adverbs. This week, we’ll go a little bit more in-depth about comparisons.
by Bonnie Mills
When you’re comparing items, you need to notice if you’re comparing two things or more than two things.
When you compare two items, you’re using what’s called a comparative, so you use the word “more” before the adjective or the suffix “-er” on the end of it. You can remember that comparatives are for two things because “comparative” has the sound “pair” in it, and a pair is always two things. It's not spelled like “pair” but it sounds like pair.
When you compare three or more items, you’re using a superlative, so you use the word “most” or the suffix “-est.” You can remember that superlatives are for more than two things because “superlative” has the word “super” in it, and when you want a whole bunch of something, you supersize it.
So to think about it loosely, use a comparative when you have a pair of things and a superlative when you have a supersized group (at least more than two).
Now, if you listened to the other show about comparisons, you know when you’re supposed to use which one. But a quick refresher is that one-syllable adjectives use the suffixes “-er” or “-est” on the end of the adjective. Adjectives with three or more syllables use “more” or “most” in front of the adjective. And adjectives with two syllables have different rules. Sometimes you have to use the suffixes, other times you have to use “more” or “most,” and in some cases you can use either. You’ll need to rely on your ear and your dictionary to figure it out.
Now, here's how you would use comparisons and superlatives.
If you want to brag that you now have more knowledge about grammar than you used to, you’re comparing now and then, which is two items. So you might say, “I’ve been listening to Grammar Girl for a while, so my grammar is better than it used to be.” The comparative is “better.”
If, on the other hand, you’re comparing yourself with your six cousins, you’re comparing seven people — definitely more than two. So you might say, “I am the best speller in the family.” Here, the superlative is “best.”
A few errors crop up with comparisons. One common mistake is using a superlative form when you’re comparing only two items. For example, it would be incorrect to say, “It was the tallest of the two buildings.” You are comparing just two buildings, so you should use a comparative, “taller,” not a superlative, “tallest.” A quick and dirty tip to help you remember which suffix goes with which number of items is that “-er” has two letters, and it is for comparing two things; “-est” has three letters, and it is for comparing three or more things.
Sometimes, though, an error of this kind sounds more natural than the traditionally grammatically correct version. Take this sentence: “Which house of Congress has the better attendance record?” That technically correct sentence sounds odd to me. I’m not sure why, but I would prefer to say, “best attendance record” even though there are only two houses of Congress. (1) Perhaps it’s because “best” is becoming more common than “better.” Garner’s Modern English Usage puts the use of “best” for “better” at stage four on his language change index, meaning it’s ubiquitous. (2)
And you’ll hear, and probably say, “Put your best foot forward.” Which Garner calls “idiomatic” — another way of saying “that’s just the way it is.” Of course we have only two feet, so we should really say “better foot,” but that sounds weird. Maybe we say “best” because we are speaking figuratively, as in “Do the best you can”; we’re not really talking about actual feet. But we also say, “May the best team win,” usually when only two teams are playing.
So “better” versus “best” is a bit of a conundrum. Sometimes the ungrammatical way sounds best. And see: I just caught myself again using “best” instead of “better” in that sentence. I compared two items, the grammatical way and the ungrammatical way, but I used a superlative. Well, I guess “best” is sometimes the best option, even if it’s not technically correct. Language changes, and in speech, it’s probably fine to let a few “bests” slip out. But in the most formal writing, you might still want to use a comparative when it’s called for. If it sounds unnatural, try to rewrite the sentence.
And finally, another error I encounter a lot is what I call an empty comparison: a comparison that doesn’t state explicitly what is being compared. For instance, an advertisement that says, “This hard drive is better and faster,” fails to state what is worse and slower. When readers see empty comparisons, they have to guess what the writer means. In this case, I might guess that the ad is promoting a hard drive that is better and faster than a competing model, or maybe it means better and faster than the previous version of this brand of hard drive. Readers don’t like being in the dark, so be sure to include the other half of your comparison when you use a comparative.
This segment was written by Bonnie Mill who has been a copy editor since 1996.
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And finally, I have a familect story:
"Hi, Grammar Girl. My name is Mike, and I have what you might call a dadilect story because I believe my dad is the only person who's actually ever used this word. And the word is ‘pritineer’ as in ‘pritineer almost.’ For example, ‘He laughed so hard he pritineer fell out of his chair,’ and it was only as an adult that I realized when I went to write the word down, that I had no idea how it would be spelled, that it's not a word I was actually going to even find in the dictionary. Love the podcast. Been listening to it for years. Hope you like my dadilect story. Thanks bye."
Thanks, Mike! I hadn’t heard this word before either, but it came up recently when I was talking with Ann Fisher on her WOSU radio show “All Sides,” which airs in Ohio. People were calling in about regional words, and “pritinear” was one they mentioned. After the show, I mentioned it to my husband, and he said, “Oh yes, of course. ‘Pritinear,” like “pretty near.” When I was writing the transcript for your call, I noticed that Google Docs didn’t underline “pritinear,” which means it recognizes that word, which also surprised me. I actually even found it in two less traditional dictionaries. Urban Dictionary has a 2002 entry, and it also appears in The Free Dictionary online, which calls it an idiom. In both places it’s spelled as two words: “pert” (P-E-R-T) and “near” (N-E-A-R). And from what I can gather from postings on online forums and comments, it tends to be something older people say, especially in more rural areas. I saw people say they heard it in Ontario, Kentucky, central Wisconsin, South Dakota and among the “hill folk of West Virginia.”
So I’m sorry to tell you that it wasn’t just your dad who said it, but it was super interesting to me that it came up twice in just a couple of weeks. Thanks a bunch for the call.
If you want to share the story of your familect, a word your family and only your family uses, call the voicemail line at 83-321-4-GIRL. Call from a nice quiet place, and we might play it on the show.
Grammar Girl is a Quick and Dirty Tips podcast, Thanks to our audio engineer, Nathan Semes, and our director of podcasts, Adam Cecil. Thanks also to our digital operations specialist Holly Hutchings, our marketing associate Davina Tomlin, and our ad operations specialist Morgan Christianson, who doesn’t have any pets, but when she does, she wants a puppy named Fergie (after Sarah Ferguson) and another named Seger (after Bob Seger).
And I’m Mignon Fogarty, better known as Grammar Girl. That's all. Thanks for listening.
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The following references for the "comparisons" segment were not read in the podcast but are included here for completeness:
1. American Heritage Guide to Contemporary Usage and Style. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2005, p. 57.
2. Garner, B. Garner’s Modern English Usage, fifth edition. Oxford University Press, 2022. p. 229.