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ADDED: "Sonly" is a word. The OED has it dating back to c1443.
R. Pecock Reule of Crysten Religioun... He schal haue sonely drede to god lest he offende god.
February 11, 2021
We say "motherly" and "fatherly" and even "daughterly" but not "sonly."
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Because we say "filial" instead, and Latin is older than English?
The son is the one who can do anything. The daughter is picking up household habits from the mother.
"Because we say "filial" instead, and Latin is older than English?"
No. "Filial" refers to both daughters and sons.
To go to "filial" only for sons is like using "parental" for fathers and "motherly" for mothers. The avoidance of gender specificity is meaningful!
Brotherly
Sisterly
I’ve never heard of the word “sonly.” Come to think of it, I’m not too familiar with “daughterly” either.
I’m at pg 4 of a google search for “daughterly” but the only results have been dictionary and thesaurus definitions, names of companies, one hit about a crossword puzzle hint, but still no natural use of it in a sentence.
--- "Filial" refers to both daughters and sons.
Not in Kentucky. The filly is the daughter. The son is a colt.
@Kay
"Daughterly" is used in terms of dutifully tending to domestic responsibilities. Recent examples given in the OED:
2015 E. Hodgson Grief & Women Writers in Eng. Renaissance iv. 121 She is described as piercing, immense, mature, and rich, not in submissive or daughterly terms.
2009 A. Tyler Noah's Compass viii. 193 There was something of the only child in her character—an air of perennial daughterliness, an excessive concern for her parents' good opinion of her.
WE don't really say "daughterly", though. I see you have some examples that it has been said. Two examples in the past twelve years and both kind of negative on the term.
I've never heard "daughterly" -- do we really say that? I use "filial" myself.
Blogger rhhardin said...
The son is the one who can do anything.
So sayeth the Lizard King...
Google Ngram seems to confirm daughterly is very rare compared to fatherly and motherly.
I got that quote wrong. I wish Jane Austin had said it just like that, but she didn’t. So I am deleting it.
Jane Austin used “cousinly” in Persuasion.
It's not a question of using daughterly, but of understanding it. Sonly has no obvious interpretation.
Looking at that chart more closely, daughterly has always been somewhat more common than sonly, but it's risen steadily over the past 40 years, while sonly has remained pretty much static. Midcentury, daughterly was about 5-6 times as common as sonly, but now it's almost 20x.
If I were to ask what it meant, I would think more to the saying
"A son is a son til he takes a wife, a daughter is a daughter all of her life".
I know I am a daughter, and I have taken time away from home in the past few years to care for sick relatives, to help with hospice for my dying sister, and I now drive across the state regularly to help my aging parents. I think of that as daughterly.
As a result, my husband spends more of his time working to keep the money going, because we are in business for ourselves. That isn't sonly, but I think of it as manly or husbandly or fatherly.
I’ve never heard of the word “sonly.” Come to think of it, I’m not too familiar with “daughterly” either.
Their ngram popularity is fairly similar, but they both pale in comparison to motherly and fatherly.
auntly and uncly?
We don't say daughterly.
Perhaps because killing your dad and fucking your mom is considered antisocial these days. Sophocles and Freud ruined the word before it was even invented.
Nobody says 'daughterly' on this planet.
"Filial" is a gender neutral term and should be favored in a progressive society. For the same reason, the Dutch did away with their masculine and feminine articles, leaving only the distinction between gendered and neuter: gender in Dutch grammar
This is discrimination pure and simple. Clearly an example of systemic misandry. Its time to call in the PC police!
There is a wokeness problem with Althouse’s rejection of filial. Here is the definition on a synonym site for daughterly: “ Relating to a son or daughter”. Same for sonly.
Online dictionaries are updated in real time now. They are useless for this question.
Maybe filial is commonly used with daughters, but citing an online dictionary won’t show it.
According to Babbel, 1.5 billion speak English and 360 people speak it as their first language. A couple of examples of the use of daughterly is really no proof that "we say."
The ngram for cuntly shot up in 2016 and has been climbing steady ever since.
Those folks talked funny.
I saw an interesting video about Shakespeare and the actual pronunciation of words at the time he wrote his plays.
It seems that many of his lines were rhymes in his day (some of them dirty) but we don't hear them that way because we pronounce those same words in a modern manner.
Some of the plays are now being presented with the original accents.
Here are a couple of examples:
https://youtu.be/y2QYGEwM1Sk
https://youtu.be/iqmgeth4tFY
Did people keep using it much after c. 1444?
Re: Ken B
Maybe filial is commonly used with daughters, but citing an online dictionary won’t show it.
If you look at the ngrams for "her filial" and "his filial," you. see his is maybe 50% more common than her. You could interpret that either way, e.g. that "filial" tends to be used for women so it's more often marked with a gendered pronoun when used for men, or simply that use of "filial" tends to be used for men rather than women. But there's not a huge gap either way, so I'd infer that in English as she is spoke, "filial" only weakly implies gender, if at all.
Lolly lolly lolly get your adverb here.
Sonly exhibits a verbal and written ambiguity, which does not express a discernible difference between individuals based on sex and biological succession.
"Google Ngram seems to confirm daughterly is very rare compared to fatherly and motherly."
But also that "daughterly" is more common than "sonly." To my ear, "sonly" doesn't even seem to be a word.
By the way, "fatherly" used to be much more common that "motherly," before the 1880s, then the 2 words were equal, then around 2000, "motherly" became more common.
"There is a wokeness problem with Althouse’s rejection of filial. Here is the definition on a synonym site for daughterly: “ Relating to a son or daughter”. Same for sonly."
Good luck understanding language through a "synonym site" — that is, a thesaurus. You can't just swap words for each other that are in a group of synonyms! You writing will practically turn into MadLibs.
"A couple of examples of the use of daughterly”
It always sounded like a word to me. Not ‘sonly,' I would have had to parse that one out if I came to it. There are lots of words that don’t sound like words to a lot of people, like ‘paling' or ‘uxorious.' Of course now when I run across the word ‘uxorious’ I will think of Ethan Hawke.
The difference with filial is that filial applies to both son and daughter and daughterly adds on special responsibilities to the daughter.
For a girl it's daughterly. For a son it's duty. Perhaps a sexist difference, or just a different tone for girls and boys.
"filial piety" is a big thing among people who consider God to be a Father who deserves "filial piety".
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Mother, father and daughter are quite distinctive words in English, and so are the adjectives/adverbs formed from them. Son obviously sounds like sun, but also like some, sum, thumb, etc. So it's not surprising to me that sonly never caught on or stuck around.
Sure, we use filial, and sure it applies to daughters, too. The Latin words for son and daughter are very close. But it does seem to be more often used of sons. Uxorious is a word like no other in English and uxor is pretty distinctive in Latin, too. We don't have a corresponding word for women who obey their husbands and are solicitous of their wishes. I thought it might be because it was because it was difficult and confusing to make an English word out of maritus, the world for husband, but perhaps it was because women were expected to be obedient to their husbands and solicitous of their wishes.
We have avuncular but no equivalent for an aunt
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