Words for grandparents

[Douglas G. Wilson]

>Nobody has yet mentioned what we called our paternal grandparents -
>Bubbie and Zaydie.

These are conventional Yiddish, aren't they?

I suppose from Polish? Polish has 'babka', 'dziadek', I think, Russian
'babushka' [I remember this one as my grandma's scarf!], 'dedushka'.

Swedish retains 'father's/mother's father/mother', following Old Norse, but
my book shows Danish 'bedstemor', 'bedstefar' = 'best mother', 'best father'.

This parallels English 'grand-' < French 'grand-', Dutch 'groot-', High
German 'gross-' ... the German forms apparently modeled on the French (Old
High German apparently 'ana', 'ano', Old English using 'eald-' = 'old'). Of
course 'big mama', 'big daddy' are in this group. It seems Sanskrit
appended a 'maha' (= 'great') to the relevant parent ('mata' or 'pita'),
and inflected the combination to distinguish 'grandmother' from
'grandfather' ('mahi' vs. 'maha') [diacritics omitted].

Buck gives four basic forms -- reduplications presumably originating in
infant utterances -- found throughout Indo-European (and elsewhere): (1)
"papa"/"baba" and (2) "tata"/"dada" for "father"/"older man", (3) "mama"
and (4) "nana" for "mother"/"older woman". (The AH IE roots book omits
"tata"/"dada"; I don't know why.) Sometimes there has been semantic shift,
with, e.g., "baba" in Slavic changing sexes and "nonno"/"nonna" in Italian
extending to both, apparently.

-- Doug Wilson