Here's a little poem relating to daughters from a deceased English poet named Justin Richardson People who have three daughters try once more And then it's fifty-fifty they'll have four. Those with a son or sons will let things be. Hence all these surplus women. Q.E.D.
Today's podictionary word brought to you by GoToMeeting. Try it free for 45 days by following the link www.gotomeeting.com/podcasts Now, that little rhyme almost makes sense, doesn't it. In actual fact about 105 sons are born for every 100 daughters.
Daughter is one of the old, old, old words that have come down to us from beginnings unknown. A word like it exists or existed in Germanic languages as well as Armenian, Lithuanian, Greek and Sanskrit.
It's the Germanic source that brought daughter into Old English. The timeless nature of a parent/daughter relationship means that a word was needed for this girl-child as long as humans have had language. We don't know how old the roots of daughter are but it's further back than we can trace and certainly shows up in Indo-European. Because the word in Sanskrit seems related to the verb “to milk” there is a suspicion that the daughters of a household were the milkmaids.
Back when daughter showed up in English about a thousand years ago English was more like French or German is today in that there were differences in how a word was pronounced depending on the situation in which it was used.
So daughter was dohter or dehter depending on whether it was someone else's daughter or your own, and dohter or dohtru or dohtra depending on the number of daughters being discussed. Because Justin Richardson wasn't a particularly important poet I can't find much to say about him. But I do like another one of his little ditties entitled Take Heart, Illiterates For years a secret shame destroyed my peace— I'd not read Eliot, Auden or MacNeice. But then I had a thought that brought me hope— Neither had Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Pope.
