An English preacher of the twelfth century sought to derive the word from the Anglo-Saxon _fédan_, "to feed," making the "father" to be the "feeder" or "nourisher," and some more modern attempts at explanation are hardly better. This etymology, however incorrect, as it certainly is, in English, does find analogies in the tongues of primitive peoples. In the language of the Klamath Indians, of Oregon, the word for "father" is _t'shishap_ (in the Modoc dialect, _p'tishap_), meaning "feeder, nourisher," from a radical _tshi_, which signifies "to give somebody liquid food (as milk, water)." Whether there is any real connection between our word _pap_,--with its cognates in other languages,--which signifies "food for infants," as well as "teat, breast," and the child-word _papa_, "father," is doubtful, and the same may be said of the attempt to find a relation between _teat, tit_, etc., and the widespread child-words for "father," _tat_, _dad_. Wedgewood (Introd. to _Dictionary_), however, maintained that: "Words formed of the simplest articulations, _ma_ and _pa_, are used to designate the objects in which the infant takes the earliest interest,--the mother, the father, the mother's breast, the act of taking or sucking food." Tylor also points out how, in the language of children of to-day, we may find a key to the origin of a mass of words for "father, mother, grandmother, aunt, child, breast, toy, doll," etc. From the limited supply of material at the disposal of the early speakers of a language, we can readily understand how the same sound had to serve for the connotation of different ideas; this is why "_mama_ means in one tongue _mother_, in another _father_, in a third, _uncle_; _dada_ in one language _father_, in a second _nurse_, in another _breast_; _tata_ in one language _father_, in another _son_," etc. The primitive Indo-European _p-tr_, Skeat takes to be formed, with the agent-suffix _tr_, from the radical _pâ_, "to protect, to guard,"--the father having been originally looked upon as the "protector," or "guarder." Max Müller, who offers the same derivation, remarks: "The father, as begetter, was called in Sanskrit _ganitár_, as protector and supporter of his posterity, however, _pitár_. For this reason, in the Veda both names together are used in order to give the complete idea of 'father.' In like manner, _mâtar_, 'mother,' is joined with _ganit_, 'genetrix,' and this shows that the word _mâtar_ must have soon lost its etymological signification and come to be a term, of respect and caress. With the oldest Indo-Europeans, _mâtar_ meant 'maker,' from _mâ_, 'to form.'"