This is the origin of the French word for mother

French is increasingly popular in Kenya. So many Kenyans know that mer is the French word for “mother”.

But — for a word hunter like me — the question is: Where did mer come from? The answer that every Euro-Caucasian lexicographer will give you is: Latin.

Literally, a lexicographer is a “word writer”. The word lexicon originally referred to the “vocabularies” of certain Mediterranean languages, especially Arabic, Greek, Hebrew and Syriac — the last one (known also as Aramaic) being the mother tongue of the New Testament’s dramatis personae, including Jesus.

Since the Greek graphein meant “to write”, a lexicographer is any compiler of a dictionary, that is, of a book of diction – “diction” being just another word for “vocabulary”.

But every Caucasian Euro-American dictionary maker is a dyed-in-the-wool Eurocentrist. So he will never trace any word as significant as “mother” beyond Latin or Greek.

For Latin is the mother of practically all of Europe’s Mediterranean languages.

Moreover, Latin and Greek also dominate the superstructure — the higher thought content — of all of today’s globally influential European languages — including Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish.

Yet Italian, the eldest of all the daughters of Latin, secretes terms – including the word “Rome” itself and such of its derivatives as romance – taken directly from the Etruscans, a Nilotic tribe which migrated through Egypt, Canaan, Anatolia (Turkey) and Crete to settle in Etruria, the north-western Italian region still known as Tuscany.

Literary criticism is fully familiar with their leaders (though their African personality is totally stifled in the dangerously misleading term “Greek mythology”.

Daedalus it was who took Sicily for King Minos of Crete.

Aeneas fled to Italy with his Libyo-Ethiopian Trojans following the dastardly Trojan Horse treachery by the Hellenic Aryans at the end of the Trojan War.

In the vein of Cain, Enoch, Ham, Menes, Nimrod, Tubal-Cain and other Levantine African heroes, an Etruscan city builder called Ramula or Rumola or Rumlua (the name later Latinised as Romulus) was the founder of Ruma, the town still known in Italy as Roma and to the rest of us as “the Eternal City” of Rome.

The many Nilotic words that the matriarchal Etruscans introduced into what was to become Latin included the word for “mother”, idealised in maat, the name of the creator Goddess, who personified kindness, beauty, justice and discipline.

The many renditions of maat included mut of the Deltaic Copts, the ancestors of the Etruscans, Canaanites, Amorites, Edomites, Kalenjin and Luo.

Mut is extant as myoot (the ultimate mother of the Kalenjin) and as min and mer of their Luo cousins.

As I said here last week, “omin”, the Luo word for “brother”, literally means “son of (my) mother”.

But even more common is omera. Among Jokajok, the oldest of Nyanza’s five Luo super-clans, merwa – rather than minwa – is the word for “my mother”.

The stem mer in both omera and merwa means “mother”. It tells you to whom French, a Latin Language, might owe its word mer for “mother”.