"Dear mother, dear father What is this hell you have put me through? Believer, deceiver Day in, day out, lived my life through you Pushed onto me what's wrong or right Hidden from this thing that they call life Dear mother, dear father Every thought I'd think you'd disapprove Curator, dictator Always censoring my every move Children are seen but are not heard Tear out everything inspired" (Metallica, "Dyers Eve" from And Justice For All, August 25, 1988)
There is an interesting thing happening--a connection with words for "mother" and "father" throughout the world cultures and language groups that goes far beyond explaining away as instinctive baby talk, babbling, or onomatopoeia. The words have nearly identical morphology and even where they deviate somewhat from one another the application of basic principles from comparative linguistics such as regularity of linguistic drift enables the analyst to reasonably anticipate the appearance of such words between different languages. Often the differences offer only a single degree of separation or perspectives on a common activity shared by different social classes within a distinct culture.
The only reasonable explanation after examining the mounting evidence from multiple disciplines and from the vocabularies of many languages that ring the Pacific is that there was once a vast network of interconnections. These pre-Columbian links ferried people from the Old World of Eurasia to the New World of the Americas directly across the oceans, climbing the rungs of the world ladder, a woven network through which shipping lanes interlaced and were pulled taut by a spider-like titanic effort. A vast, now dimly remembered web or tapestry was crafted during human prehistory.
In today's post, I will examine only two cases--the words for parents, for mother and father.
In North America, we find two words that stand out:
Diné (Navajo): ‘AMÁ “mother”
Hopi: AMAW / AMAWA “dance partner”
(What else is a "mother" or "father" than a "dance partner" for the other parent?)
In Oceania:
Sāmoan: AMA "the outrigger (ama) of a canoe (va'a); (figuratively) a wife”. Here the smaller half of the canoe is the "dance partner" of the larger half. As a metaphor, it is the stabilizing half of the canoe to the half that is the bearer of burdens.
Hawaiian: AMA “outrigger”; ‘AMA “talkative, prattling, tattling; revealing secrets”; ‘AMA’AMA “expert at gaining knowledge”. For anyone who has ever been married, both of these attributes perfectly describe a wife--talkative, prattling, tattling, and expert at gaining knowledge. Perhaps this is why tutelary deities are most often portrayed as women, wives, and mothers.
Hebrew: AMA (אִמָא) “mother”
Akkadian: UMMU (𒂼) “mother”
Lastly, Sumerian is examined because of its literary and often lexical connection with the more recent Akkadian / Babylonian / Assyrian.
Sumerian: AMA (𒂼) “mother”. Virtually no change here occurred between Akkadian and the older Sumerian denoting a likely loanword into Akkadian.
The Sumerian cuneiform is a ligature of:
GA₂ (𒂷) / MA₃ (𒂷) “basket, container, box”
AN (𒀭) / diĝir (𒀭) “sky, heaven; divinity”
Literally: “sky box; divine container; basket of god” (figuratively, from the AMA “smaller outrigger of a double canoe”)
Curiously, in Indonesian--
There is a reversal in the gender of the word AMA, and we are introduced to an alternative word for "mother".
AMA: "father"
INA: "mother"
But in the Americas, in Lakota Sioux--
INÁ is "mother"
In Hopi:
INA is "my father"
INGU is "my mother"
In Tongan:
FINE is "girl"
In Sāmoan:
FĀFINE is "girl"
TINĀ is "a mother" (T+INĀ)
TAMĀ is "a father" (T+AMĀ)
Probably the "t-" here is a contraction of "TE" for the definite article "the".
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Now, contrast the words for "mother" with words with “father”--
Latin: ABBA “father”
Ancient Greek: ABBA (ἀββα) “father, abbot”
Aramaic: 'ABBĀ (אבא) “father, teacher, ancestor, leader”
Hebrew: ABA (אַבָּא) “father” and ʾĀḂ (אָב) "father"
Arabic: ʾAB (أب)
Syriac: ʾABĀ (ܐܰܒ݂ܳܐ)
Ugaritic: ẢB (𐎀𐎁)
Ge'ez: 'ABI (ኣብ) "father" and ʾĒBĪ (አብ) "father"
Akkadian: ABU (𒀊, 𒀊𒁀, 𒀋, 𒀜𒁕, 𒀜, 𒀀𒁕, 𒀜𒁕𒀜𒁕, 𒀜𒀜, 𒀀𒀀, 𒀀, 𒀀𒅀, 𒅀, 𒉌𒀀)
Sumerian--
Early dynastic IIIa / IIIb (2900-2350 BCE):
AB (𒀊) “father”
AB-BA (𒀊𒁀) “father”
ABBA₂ (𒀋) “father”
AD (𒀜) "father"
AD-DA (𒀜𒁕) "father"
A-DA (𒀀𒁕) "father"
AD-DA-AD-DA (𒀜𒁕𒀜𒁕)
AD-AD (𒀜𒀜)
A-YA (𒀀𒀀)
AYA₂ (𒀀)
A-IA (𒀀𒅀)
IA (𒅀)
'A₅-A (𒉌𒀀)
From:
AB (𒀊):
“sea, lake; window, aperture; hole, opening; roof vent; shrine, sanctuary”
BA (𒁀):
“to divide up, allot, distribute, assign; to give as a gift or a share; to reduce, diminish, deteriorate”
ABBA₂ (𒀋):
“father; witness”
AB-BA (as “father” literally means “sea to divide up”, “sea allotment”, “to reduce by sea”, “sea division”)
AD (𒀜): "father"
DA (𒁕):
"arm, wing"; "line, edge, side"
A (𒀀): "water, fluid; semen, sperm, seed; heir, offspring, child; watercourse"; alternative form of 𒀀𒀀 (aya, 'father')"
IA (𒅀): a ligature of I (𒄿) and A (𒀀) where I (𒄿) means "to sprout, come forth; to praise; to cry" and A (𒀀) as above. The gloss of this pairing means literally "to sprout, father" or "to come forth, father"... In short "Creator" in the masculine sense. This is conspicuously close to the Yah (יה) of the Tetragrammaton (יהוה) and begs the question of precisely who or what was Yahweh (יהוה) and where did his divine majesty originate from?
Sāmoan:
While TAMĀ means "father", there is a series of words that align closely with underlying semantic values of the Sumerian cuneiform meanings of "father", particularly AB (𒀊) meaning "hole, aperture" and BA (𒁀) "division".
AVA:
“an opening in the coral reef, a boat passage into the lagoon; an anchorage for ships; the name of a very scaly fish; to show respect to; to be wide apart, as a plank of a canoe not fitting; to be open, as a doorway; this is AB.BA (𒀊𒁀) in a nutshell.
AVAAVA:
"a small opening in the reef; to be full of openings in the reef.” AVA reduplicated to AVAAVA is a diminutive form, reducing "an opening in the coral reef" to "a small opening in the coral reef". We still utilize this mechanism of reduplication in English when we say "teeny-tiny", or "eensy-weensy".
Hopìikwa (Hopi)--
AAVU / AVU:
preserves the sense of “space”, ”opening”, “gap”, “hole” as it means “rotten”. Applied to teeth (TAMA), as in AVU-TAMA, it means “CAVITY”, which are evidenced by missing teeth or holes in teeth.
AVU sounds much like the Akkadian / Semitic word for “father” ABU.
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Interpretation:
The sea was an anthropomorphic father in Sumerian mythology referred to as Apsu / Suab. In Middle Egyptian [sūab] means “to cleanse”, “to purify”. We still have that sense of the word in “swab”. ( Any sailor worth his salt has swabbed a deck two-thousand times ). The gods made war with each other several times before the creation of the servile race of humankind according to both the Sumerians and later Semitic Akkadians and Hebrews. The creation of humanity occurred at the separation of Heaven and Earth in both the Sumerian and Egyptian cosmologies. A servile humanity (tangata / kanaka) was also created at the separation of Heaven (Rangi / Lani) and Earth (Papa). Sky Father, the deity of space (between lands) is also known as Wākea / Vātea, a name that is built on the same root VĀ as Polynesian AVA (sans the initial glottal stop found in 'AVA, which is a variant of KAVA). Some traditions assign this act of separating sky and earth and the creation of a light realm to the creator god Tāne or Māui-Mahuta, and so on... They are all the same entity.
For the sake of brevity, I will summarize the relevance of the Metallica lyrics quote above: the crushing embrace of mother earth and father sky ushered in an age of darkness and misery for the human race. This hearkens back to many traditions--of the Igigi uprising in Sumerian mythology and the engineering of a servile race, of the Māui story and the raising of the sky, the Polynesian Atlas called Māui-Ataranga / Māui-Akalana / Atalaga, etc. Again, I believe these are all identities of the same Skylifter, namely Atlas as he was known to the Europeans. The uprising resulted in the end of an age and the rise of the so-called Olympians, the Anunna, the great Atua / Akua gods and referred specifically to a creation of a realm of rest and repose in the Pacific, figuratively the sky realm. This sky was spread out across the world and separated the extreme East (Asia) from the extreme West (the Americas). Those who inhabited the Pacific were the angels of old, the fallen ones, the nephilim, the great men...
The appearance of both "mother" and "father" in the word clusters around ABA and AMA in both the Americas and Eurasia suggests that the way between the continents was very well-known long before Columbus, perhaps even as far back as 4,000 BCE based on linguistic elements I will delve into in a future post related to the words for "darkness", "black", "soot", "filth", and "spider"-motifs as well as another insect motif related to "ants" and "elder brothers".
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