MOTHER-AGE CIVILISATION 101 



fining ourselves to the chief terms, and these principally 

 in their Teutonic forms. 



Mann, man, simply denotes the thinker; Weib, 

 wife, the weaver ; Braut, bride, is supposed to be con- 

 nected with a Sanskrit root b'rud, meaning to veil, and 

 therefore conveying the same notion of subjection as 

 Latin nubere. The root ht, as in Heiratli and Heim, 

 denotes house, and marriage is the foundation of a 

 new house or home. Vermdhlung marks the formal 

 ceremony of marriage, so-called from its taking place 

 before the old folk-assembly or Mahal. Voter, father, 

 is the ruler, feeder, or protector. Mutter, mother, is the 

 measuring or managing one, from a root ma, to prepare 

 or construct. Tochter, daughter, is ultimately deduced 

 from a root d'ug to milk, and signifies the milker. 

 Bruder, brother, is the possessor, the protector, namely, 

 of the Schwester or sister, who, according to Deecke, is 

 the dependent one, the one who by nature and blood 

 belongs to the brother. Thus Deecke makes the terms 



o 



brother and sister correlatives from the very beginning. 

 The sister is the ruled one, for whom the brother is the 

 legal representative and has the Ndchstrecht. One 

 more example of this method of interpretation, namely 

 that of Wittwe, widow. This is derived from the 

 Sanscrit vid'ava, the woman without a d'ava, which 

 appears in late Sanscrit for man, and has been connected 

 with a root meaning sacrifice. Thus the widow is the 

 woman who has no one to sacrifice for her to perform 

 sacrifices for the household being assumed to be the duty 

 of the husband. We may stop here to remark that the 

 word widow has cognates in all Aryan tongues, but 



