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Mexican X-plainer: Father’s Day, el Día del Padre
Yikes. Today’s a time of mixed emotions for me, I’ll be honest.
There’s joy. There’s sadness. There’s anger.
What better way to grapple with it than by doing some quick etymology!
Father. Padre.
Where do these words come from?
If you go far enough back, they start at the same place.
Six thousands years ago, on the steppes of Easternmost Europe and Westernmost Asia, a group of people spoke a language linguists call Proto-Indo-European.
Their reconstructed word for “father” or “padre” was *ph₂tḗr.
“WTF? How do you pronounce that, David?”
Let’s not worry about that too much. As far as we can tell, the word is made up of two elements: the verb *peh₂- (“to protect, shepherd”) and the suffix *-tḗr (used to indicate a doer, an agent).
So these Indo-Europeans conceived of “fathers” as “protectors,” as “shepherds” of their families.
It’s interesting to note that the word “pastor” comes from the Latin verb “pāscō” (“to feed, maintain, pasture, graze”), which is ALSO from that root *peh₂- (“to protect”). And *peh₂- furthermore gave us the English words “feed” and “food” (through Proto-Germanic *fōdô).
