GENERAL WORDS FOR SEX AND KINSHIP 121 



breeder, rhyming it with muter. The Slavonic brati, 

 Old Irish brith, for birth, may also be noted. I take it 

 that the Aryan roots bhara, bear, carry, and bhero, 

 bear, are ultimately the same. From the former we 

 have Sanskrit bhartri, mother, child -bearer, and also 

 bhdrtar, master, spouse, to be compared with Latin 

 fertor; from the latter brati, brith, and birth. Even 

 with the same notion I should ultimately connect Mieya, 

 rub, pound, as in Latin friare, A.S. briv, O.H.G. brio, 

 modern German brei, the fundamental notion in all 

 cases being the result of the primitive mill, the pound- 

 ing and the swelling or fermenting of the bruised grain 

 under the influence of water, the brewing. I take it, 

 accordingly, that there is no ultimate radical difference 

 between Sanskrit bhartar, spouse, and bhrfitar, brother, 

 between Latin fertor and frater, or indeed between 

 English breeder and brother. 



If we find in both bride and brother the same 

 notion of kindle and breed, we are led back to these 

 words (Landsmaal, brur and brurer) as correlatives, 

 and we see that so far from brother originally connoting 

 the legal protector of the sister, he is in reality her 

 spouse. We are brought indeed back to that primitive 

 social system so amply evidenced by archaic myth- 

 ology in which brother-sister or kin-group marriage 

 was the normal relationship. 



This view is to a great extent confirmed by the 

 fact that the words for both brother and sister are in 

 early use, and also in modern dialects, used indifferently 

 for both sexes. Thus schwester, sister, does not seem 

 in any way correlated to bruder, brother. Geswester, 



