Mulier or the age of puberty: primary meaning and etymological origin

Abstract

Mulier, which may well have been first attested as the form muliar[ in the Corcolle altar fragments (first half of 5th c. BC), has no clear etymon and a review of its study to date does not provide us with a convincing explanation. We must widen our methodological approach, therefore, and explore the lesser-travelled routes of research into its polysemy, lexical family, and semantic field. This paper identifies the primary meaning of mulier as that of ‘female human adolescent’, as opposed to puella ‘girl’. Its  meaning is analogous to that of uir (‘male human adolescent’) as opposed to puer ‘boy’. The root of mul-ier is the same as that of mul-g-ēre ‘to milk’ (cf. En. mil-k, Germ. Mil-ch) and it should also be linked with variant 8. mel- ‘to appear, come up’ in Pokorny (1959: 721-722), which is used to designate objects with a convex or conical shape and may have been applied to the breasts. With the addition of the intensive suffix -jes, *mel-jes > *mol-jes > mul-ier must have the etymological meaning ‘that activates the breasts’. The fact that femina, as a ‘female animal’, has a similar origin and parallel evolution to mulier, to the point that it has become its best substitute, supports its origin and polysemic trajectory.