"Groom" (or its rough equivalent) Across Languages

While my college major may have been English with a concentration in Creative Writing, and while I may be a teacher of English (though more specifically, a teacher of argumentative writing), one of my interests has always been picking up other languages.  Growing up, my grandparents on my mother's side spoke French around the house (though usually only to complain about my brother's behavior and my own behavior, or about the condition of our house in terms of cleanliness) and I actually attended a bilingual preschool where the instructor was fluent in both English and French and taught students in both.

Of course, once I got into public school at Farwell Elementary in Lewiston, the opportunity to be bilingual was pretty much gone.  True, my third grade class had a visiting Japanese teacher (Mamiko-sensei, though how I remember that name is a mystery to me) who came in to teach us some fragments of Japanese language and culture sporadically over the year, but there was no foreign language to go with the standards of reading, writing, and arithmetic.

Before I get any further, I must warn you that this is going to be a very nerdy and linguistically-focused posting.  If you've no interest in the nuances of language or my propensity to gush about language in general, you might not want to click the link below.  There are some pretty funny and interesting bits to this post though, so those brave enough to proceed will be rewarded.




Once I got into middle school at the aptly-named Lewiston Middle School, I was able to pick up my study of the French language once more.  Unfortunately, though I kept my grades up in middle and high school (at the also aptly-named Lewiston High School), school was not really interesting to me at this stage of my life because I did not find it challening (aside from math classes, which I always did horribly in).  This led to the cessation of my study of le français after my sophomore year of high school, at which point I'd fulfilled my language requirement and moved on to taking classes in creative writing and movie criticism to fill those credits.

I did pick French back up during my undergraduate study at the University of Maine, though I found myself banished back to introductory-level French because my score on the placement exam was too low.  This led to banging my head against the wall once I began to remember aspects of the French language that had gone dormant in my mind.  My grades in college French were strong because I was learning things I already knew, so by the time I was done my second year I was tired of doing the remedial learning and desired a change.

Coincidentally, I made my first trip to Japan to visit my cousin Ali in the summer between sophomore and junior year of undergrad, so when I found out that UMaine offered Japanese I dropped courses in philosophy and psychology in order to take MLC 190: Japanese I.  In the last two years of my undergraduate study, I aced Japanese I, II, III, and IV, and am sadly probably more comfortable speaking Japanese (especially after two subsequent visits back to Japan) than I am carrying on a conversation with a native speaker of French.

Along the way, I have also picked up parts of German and Spanish, but I wouldn't call myself well-acquainted with either language unless you use "well-acquainted" as a euphemism for "able to insult people".  What can I say; those are the terms people learn when they only peripherally approach a language.

At this point, if you ignored my warning and clicked to read further, you might be asking yourself what all of this personal language history means for the sake of a blog about planning a wedding and being a groom.  Allow me to answer that question now.

Groom is an interesting word to me, because it was my thought that the only real noun usage of the word comes up only when we deal with weddings.  Sure, we have a verb form which deals with cleaning or preparing, and we have other forms that can be used as nouns (such as groomer, as in a pet groomer), but there's really only one definition for the term "groom" used as a noun; or so I thought.

Upon further review, I found quite a few definitions for the word; here are a couple I've culled from Google's definition and Merriam-Webster's online dictionary:

1. a man participant in his own marriage ceremony
2. stableman: someone employed in a stable to take care of the horses
3. archaic: man, fellow

According to Wikipedia (a great resource for facts, I know, so don't tell my students I'm referencing it here), there were also positions in the Royal Household of British monarchy that began with the word "groom":

1. Groom of the Chamber; general attendant to a Lord.
2. Groom of the Robes; the male equivalent of a lady-in-waiting, part of a Lord's personal entourage.
3. Groom of the Stool/Stole; literally, a person responsible for wiping the Lord's ass (no joke).

So far, we have quite the mental image worked up of what a groom is supposed to be.  He is either participating in his wedding, taking care of horses, or sucking up to royalty, to the point of being the royal ass-wiper.

Focusing my search more towards the use of groom in a wedding ceremony through Wikipedia (again, no telling), I get a bit more of what I was originally looking for:

1. The word bridegroom is dated to 1604, derived from bride and the archaic goom, from Old English guma, "boy".

You see that, ladies?  You get upset because "woman" is just "man" with a "wo" in front, or because "female" is a "male" with "fe", but here we have an example of the masculine being merely an extension of the feminine.  A "bridegroom" is merely the "boy" getting married.  Although, you may be upset to hear that:

1. The word [bride] may come from the Teutonic word for "cook".

*sigh* I guess everyone loses in this linguistic gender war.

So in English, apparently, the bride is the cook and the groom is the boy-cook.  Doesn't have a real magical ring to it, does it?

Let's see what the French language has to offer.  En français, a groom is referred to as le jeune marié, which roughly translated means "the young man getting married".  The bride is referred to as la jeune mariée, which has the same translation except in feminine form thanks to the use of the feminine la and the extra e on marié.  I like this particular form much better, as it refers only to the marriage taking place and doesn't have the extra baggage carried by the English words.

Though I do not claim to be an expert on Spanish, I do claim to be somewhat of an expert in terms of being able to find translation websites online that can help me find out what the words for bride and groom are in Spanish.  So there.  According to my online resource (WordReference.com), bride and groom en español are novia and novio, respectively.  Interestingly, novia and novio represent the concept of two people together regardless of the situation.  If two people are dating, they are novia and novio.  If they are engaged, they remain novia and novio.  When they are at the wedding, they are the los novios until after the ceremony, when they become los recién casados (the newlyweds or recently married).  Not being a student or speaker of Spanish, I can't speak to the meanings of novia and novio, but much like French it is clear to see that the concept is the same, only adapted for masculine or feminine form.

Finally, and the language that most intrigued me when I thought about this: Japanese.  A logistical note first: if you do not have Japanese language support enabled or installed for your browser (or if Blogger hates me), you might not be able to see the Japanese characters I'll be using in this section.  I will try to make some quick images just in case so that everyone can see the language in action.

First off, bride in Japanese is represented by the Kanji characters 花嫁, which are pronounced はなよめ in the hiragana syllabary.  "How would it be pronounced in English?" you hurriedly ask me as you wish that I'd get to the point: ha-na-yo-meh.  The first character of the Kanji reading, hana, means "flower"; the second character, yome, means "bride or daughter in law", and connects back to the Japanese verb for "to marry", 嫁ぐ, pronounced yo-tsu-gu.  A quick translation: "flower bride", which is meant to be a compliment as flowers and the character 花 are important in Japanese.

For groom, the Kanji characters are 新郎, pronounced しんろう and pronounced shi-n-rou in English. The first character, shin, means "new"; the second character, rou, has varying meanings: among them "young lord/nobleman" and "vassals, retainers, or followers".  I'm assuming, for the case of 新郎, the use of "young lord/nobleman" is implied (though us grooms can just as easily become followers of the bride, am I right? *annoying snicker*).  Of course, we are looking at a predominantly masculine culture in Japan, so in this case the translation would most likely be "young new lord/nobleman", which does play right back into gender issues for those of us living in the U.S.

Being a language nerd, this has been a really interesting concept to sit down with and put through the various paces of translation.  I feel that 99.9% of the world probably take the words "bride" and "groom" at face value, but I'm one of those weird 0.1% who wonder how we started using those words in the first place.  I hope this has been an interesting (and perhaps enlightening) insight into my language nerdiness and the history of the terms we've taken for granted.

After all, this is The Groom's Take.