The Motherland, Fatherland, Homeland. Who decides?

Where does this terminology come from? Who decides whether the name for one’s country is the Homeland, The Fatherland or The Motherland…?

The history of language decides this.

Homeland.

It’s just like knowing which article to use in German (der, die, or das). You basically have to memorize which term to use unless you happen to know the gender of the country (masculine, feminine, or neuter).

Germany, for example, is masculine so they use Fatherland. The United States, on the other hand, is neuter so we use Homeland. I think Russia is feminine.

:wink:

In Hebrew, it’s “Birthland”, which is a feminine word.

In Spanish it is “fatherland” (patria) and it is feminine. So there.

(To elaborate for those who may become confused: because the word, by its Latin etymology, does not mean “that which is the father”, but rather “that which is OF the fathers”; and land/tierra is feminine. When used as an adjective there is both the feminine “patria” and the masculine “patrio”.)
The USA adopted the “Homeland” usage in the last decade for its internal/border security scheme by sort of analogy to how in Britain it’s assigned to something called the Home Office. Traditionally though the US simply used “The Country” to invoke America.

I am not sure the explanation is that “patria” is adjective for “tierra”. I doubt it. Patria is a noun which stands on its own and implies people/culture more than land.

English speakers (and some ignorant Spanish speakers) try to equate sex with grammatical gender because they most often align but they are different things which have different origins. See wikipedia. Grammatical gender in Spanish - Wikipedia

So in Spanish “persona” is feminine even though when referring to a man and the same with “patria”.

We have recently had a succession of government ministers making fools of themselves by displaying their ignorance in public and one of them was a female feminist minister who made awful mistakes in her quest to “use language to empower women” or something like that. Educated people just wondered how oe could get to be a cabinet minister and yet so ignorant.

This is even more marked in German where sex and grammatical gender are even less aligned.

English nouns are gender neutral but in reference to the British Empire and its descendant, the Commonwealth, The UK is the mother country. But I can’t think of how Brits ourselves would regret to GB. Maybe just ‘home’.

[bracketed edits added]

This, as every post after it richly illustrates. Although the quote should be altered as I just [edited to add] before posting, to be more accurate.

sailor, check the RAE dictionary. Patria is both noun and adjective, though most commonly used as a noun.

With all due respect, I personally find the use of terms like Motherland, Fatherland, Homeland totally, pardon my French, Nazi or USSR-ish. Nationalistic. Totalitarian. When I heard that the USA had begun to use the term Homeland as in “Homeland Security”, I could see the writing on the wall… sounds so like a black and white film from the forties… stuff that our parents warned us against.

I am not sure what you are trying to mean. I know this. Spanish is my native language. Here we are talking of motherland, fatherland, etc. which are nouns, not adjectives.

KarlGrenze cita del DRAE donde sí aparece como sustantivo y adjetivo.

KarlGrenze is citing from the DRAE where it does appear as an adjective and a noun.

Same thing in French, since obviously we cribbed from the same Latin. La patrie, feminine land of our fathers. Often grateful, on monuments to those of her children who died on battlefields somewhere. Terrible parenting, that.

Just that the word “Patria” was derived from the Latin adjective and became a noun through usage as Latin evolved into the romance tongues. Terra/Gens Patria (Fathers’ Land/People) –> Patria (Fatherland), keeping the gender.

No such load in the romance languages, though, we have been saying Patria/Patrie since the late Middle Ages/Early Renaissance so it’s not associated with anything save perhaps cheap appeal to emotion(*). Only the way that anglophones never seemed to acquire such a term may make them nervous about it, but they always had “for God and Country” or “for Queen and Country”, or “Freeedooooom!!!1!1one” to do the similar job.

subAnnoying Git: “We have to do this!”
JRD: “No we don’t”
AG: “Por LA PATRIA!”
JRD: “Really?”
AG: “Does not your heart swell and stir when La Patria calls on to you?”
JRD: “Yes, but what you’re proposing does shit to improve the lives of the people.”
AG: “LA PATRIA demands SACRIFICE!”
JRD: “And what do the people achieve with that sacrifice?”
AG: “The GLORY of having SACRIFICED for LA PATRIA!”
JRD: “This got circular quickly.”[/sub]

Who cares?

It’s all an attempt to manipulate your feelings, to get you to become more loyal to a political entity by confusing it in your mind with your parents.

This is frustrating.

I said that in Spanish we use “patria” (noun) which means fatherland and which is feminine.

Then someone says it is also adjective. Well, yeah, but it is not what we are talking about and I never said it wasn’t. We are talking about the noun.

The noun is derived from Latin adjective and evolved… well, yes, but it is not what we are talking about. My native language is Spanish and I did study Latin in school and although I have forgotten most of it I still remember the declensions and how they evolved to grammatical gender.

Patria, persona, víctima… all feminine gender even though they refer to male subjects.

Curiously, espía and camarada used to be feminine but transitioned to masculine gender and are now masculine.

The terms are all fairly recent in English. “Motherland” dates from the sixteenth century, “fatherland” and “homeland” from the seventeenth.

Initially “fatherland” and “motherland” had the same meaning; the land of one’s birth. In the eighteenth century, however, “motherland” acquired the connotation of referring to a colonising country, in relation to its colonies. “Fatherland” never acquired this sense.

Both “motherland” and “fatherland” had sentimental or patriotic overtones; “homeland”, at least initially, did not. While it always meant a person’s home country or native land, it tended to be used to distinguish, e.g., between homeland and overseas trade. Nowadays we’d probably say “domestic”, and oppose it to “foreign”. In Britain and Ireland, the term was often a convenient shorthand for “British and Irish”.

If, for some people, it now has slightly authoritarian overtones, that may be because it was extensively employed by the apartheid government of South Africa, which tried to set up “homelands” for various indigenous African peoples in order to justify depriving them of the full rights of citizens in South Africa. Plus, I’m open to correction here, but my impression is that in the US the term is used only in the context of security. You’ve got “homeland security”, but you don’t have, for example, “homeland trade” or “homeland traffic”. That does rather make it sound like a euphemism.

No tiene por qué serlo. No need for it to be.

It was merely an aside or parenthetical comment about how something derived from “father” is a feminine, meant to be no more than that and expecting the the actual thread subject (what is it you call your country and how does that come about) to carry on. I fail to understand the frustration.

For now, to allow the actual thread to resume unhindered, I will not post more on this particular sidetrack.