2390: family Jul 4, 2021

Family is not a choice, and neither is slavery. In Latin, 'familia'—the source of many derivatives in languages around the world—most specifically referred to the domestics of one house or estate, and this would include relatives but also servants. An earlier 'famulus' exists as a word for 'servant' or 'slave'. For the sense of family across generations it was more common in fact to use the word 'domus', which has its own very interesting set of derivatives in English. The English word 'family' also referred to the household staff even into the 16th century, though by the 17th the word came to mean 'parents with their children'. This replaced the Old Enlgish 'hiwscipe' which had a similarly broad meaning as well as 'ham' (as in 'hamlet') leading to the word 'home' but originally meaning 'village'.