The modern meaning of the word ‘amma’ in Malayalam is ‘mother.’ Yet, in the late 1800’s, ‘amma’ was also a common noun, meaning ‘woman.’¹ It was an epithet of goddesses, and continues as such even today.² Amma was also a title conferred on a Nayar woman who was eligible to take a consort, one who had completed her talikettu kalyanam.³ It was also the title of a high priestess, the most famous being Valia Amma of Mannarasala Nagaraja Temple.⁴ The head matriarchs of royal aristocratic families were titled Amma.⁵
None of these titles had common attributes. Infants who had completed their talikettu kalyanam but were in no capacity to be mothers were titled Amma. Valia Amma of Mannarasala Nagaraja Temple was required to be celibate during her priesthood. Goddess Attukal Amma was believed to be childless.⁶ It may be that the titles represented the protective aspect of motherhood or the potential to be a mother. It is easier to conceive of such a figure of speech as applied to a goddess. But what about the other usages? How far should the imagination stretch to accommodate them?
Indeed, there is a simpler explanation, one that does not resort to symbolic, poetic figures of speech. All these titles, except for the modern common noun usage of ‘mother’, derived from the ancient Egyptian word ahma, which had several spellings and different meanings: (1) wife, (2) woman, (3) priestess, and (4) the majesty of a queen or a goddess.⁷
Perhaps the terms wife, woman, priestess, and majesty were pronounced slightly differently originally, or perhaps not. Whatever the case may be, over the course of hundreds of years, the titles remained in Malayalam, but their original connection to their ancient etymological roots was forgotten. During the evolution of the language to its modern Malayalam form, the Egyptian sound [ħ] was dropped from these words, their pronunciation finally merging with the common noun usage of ‘mother,’ likely derived from Tamil, leading to ‘amma’ — mother, wife, woman, priestess, queen, and goddess.
Notes
[1] Glossary, 1891, Report of the Malabar Marriage Commission, Madras: G.W. Taylor, 6. Women of the palace were called kovilamma കോവിലമ്മ [koːʋilɑmmɑ] ‘lady of the palace.’ Padmanabha Menon, 1924–37, A History of Kerala written in the form of Notes on Visscher’s Letters from Malabar, 4 vols. Rev. ed. 2013, New Delhi: Asian Educational Services, 3:350.
[2] Examples include Chottanikkara Amma at Chottanikkara Temple, Attukal Amma in Attukal Devi Templem, and so on.
[3] താലികെട്ട് കല്യാണം [tɑːlikeʈʈə kɑljɑːɳɑm]. Memorandum by the President, Report of the Malabar Marriage Commission, 5.
[4] https://mannarasala.org/about/.
[5] For example, Amma Tampuran was the title of the head of Kodungallur royal family. https:// kodungallurkovilakam.wordpress.com/tradition/.
[6] http://www.attukal.org/origin.aspx.
[7] Tonio Sebastian Richter, Daniel A. Werning, Peter Dils (eds.), 2022, Thesaurus Linguae Aegyptiae, Corpus issue 17, Web app v2.01. 2022 (hereinafter TLA). Edited by Tonio Sebastian Richter and Daniel A. Werning by order of the Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften and Hans-Werner Fischer-Elfert, and Peter Dils by order of the Sächsische Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Leipzig. https://thesaurus-linguae-aegyptiae.de. Updated December 15, 2022. These words are transliterated in modern scholarship as ḥm.t [əħmə]. Hieroglyphs did not include vowel sounds, and thus modern scholars represent the vowels for ease of writing and pronunciation with an ‘e,’ presuming no consonant clusters and no initial vowel sounds. Carsten Peust, 1999, An Introduction to the Phonology of a Dead Language, Gottingen: Peust und Gutschmidt, 188. Further, the final [t] ending in many Egyptian words was not pronounced; it is similar to the Malayalam chillu, or half-vowel sound. Manjula Variyam, 2022, Malayalam Egyptian Comparative Dictionary, Self-published. Yet, in modern scholarship, the [t] is spelled out, so that ḥm.t is referred to as hemet in scholarly articles. But comparison of ancient Egyptian with Malayalam indicates that ḥm.t was likely pronounced as ahma.
