What is the word to call the husband in your country’s language?

By: | Post date: 2016-10-10 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: Artificial Languages, Linguistics, Modern Greek, Other Languages

Ah, Dimitris. Yoruba oga “boss” vs Ottoman Turkish ağa [aɣa, now aː] Agha (Ottoman Empire) “an honorific title for a civilian or military officer” < Old Turkic aqa “elder brother”.

Three letter word, final vowel the same, consonant similar, meanings in the same ballpark.

You can see why I’m not impressed. Islam was shared between Turkey and Nigeria, sure, but this was a specifically Ottoman title, and the cultural traffic just wasn’t there.

Besides, when a woman wants to flatter her mate in Greece, and call him “boss” and bring him his slippers and fulfil his patriarchal fantasies, she doesn’t call him “my agha”.

She calls him “my Pasha”. Pashas outranked aghas, after all.

What’s that I hear? Pshaw?

Why yes. Bashaw was an early English rendering of Pasha.


And, as a desultory attempt to answer the question as stated:

Here in Australia, I get hubbo from my wife. Partaking in the age-old tension between the two Australian hypocoristics, –o and –ie. Hubby is far more widespread throughout English.

Qo’noS, the Klingon home planet, uses loDnal. We know loD is ‘man’.

In Esperantujo, it’s edzo. A back formation from edzino “wife”, itself a reanalysis of the Litvak Yiddish pronounciation of the the suffix in Prinz-essin.

In Lojbanistan, it’s speni “spouse”. You can specify the gender as nakspe “male spouse”; I doubt most Lojbanists bother.

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