cild
cild
Old English
“Child is one of the oldest words in the English language — and its singular-to-plural shift from child to children is the result of adding a second plural suffix to an already plural form.”
Old English cild meant a child, a young person. The word is ancient: it has cognates in Old High German (kind), Gothic (kilthei, womb), and appears to descend from a Proto-Germanic root related to the concept of something carried in the womb. Old English pluralized cild as cildru — the -ru suffix was the plural marker. Then English added another plural suffix, -en (from Old English -an), to make cildren. Modern children is a double plural.
The double plural of children is one of the most elegant fossils in English grammar: you can see the language adding a new plural ending onto an existing plural form, not quite trusting the first ending to do the job. The same thing happened to brethren (from brother), which added -en to an already-plural form.
Old English cild had a specific secondary meaning: a young noble who had not yet been knighted. A child was someone in training, someone not yet fully actualized in their social role. This is the Child of 'Lord Randal, my son' and other ballads — the young nobleman, not merely the small person.
Children were not, historically, a protected class in the way modern childhood assumes. The concept of childhood as a distinct and protected stage of life, with its own psychology and rights, is largely a product of the 18th and 19th centuries. Philippe Ariès's 1960 historical work argued that medieval Europe had no concept of childhood at all — children were treated as small adults. The word is older than the concept it now names.
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Today
The double plural children is a linguistic record of language change in progress, preserved in the most common word: the old cildru form was already being abandoned when a new generation added -en to make cildren, unsure whether the first ending was still working. Both endings survived, compacted together.
Modern childhood is a social construction with a specific history — the protected, schooled, innocent childhood that Western modernity claims as universal was largely invented in the 18th and 19th centuries. The word cild predates the concept by a thousand years and was used for young noblemen as well as young humans. The word is not responsible for what we made it mean.
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