Ded Moroz, Russia's 'Grandfather Frost'
Is the word ded a cognate with the English word dad ?
A note by Bill Casselman
A Russian card depicts Ded Moroz, the Russian Santa figure, as an astronomer. Ded Moroz means 'Grandfather Frost.' The Russian words at the bottom mean 'for (the) New Year.' Canada too has celebrated the Frosty One, as you can see below on one of our Christmas postage stamps.
In folksy, intrafamilial Russian, the affectionate term for grandfather is 'staray papa' which we can translate as 'old Dad.'
But in the formal Russian word for grandfather 'ded,' we see one reflex of an Indo-European term of consanguinity that appears in Modern English as the word dad, colloquial and affectionate synonym for father. Thus it seems clear that the Oxford Dictionary's long-unexamined contention that English 'dad' stems from the childish da-da is wrong. 'Dad' is obviously a word with a very ancient root.
The Russian word for father 'otets' also contains this etymon. The terminal s is merely the familiar Indo-European marker of masculinity. The initial o is the common Slavic intensifier, and -tet- is -ded-, that is, the shifting of dental consonants where the letters t and d interchange is a frequent phenomenon throughout the Indo-European family of languages, to the Slavic branch of which Russian belongs, just as English belongs to the West Germanic branch.
Or perhaps the brains' trust at the OED will tell us that Russian babies crawl around saying 'da-da' too?
Here again is one of the many etymologies in the OED, namely that of dad, that is stubbornly unexamined and rigidly unchanged, even in the face of a reasonable linguistic hypothesis which supports at the very least the admittance, the introduction of some variables into the etymological portions of some OED word entries.
However, do not wait up late into the night, gentle dictionary readers, for any such emendations to occur soon.
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