Your alma mater refers to your former school

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By PHILIP OCHIENG
Posted  Friday, March 9  2012 at  18:06

Maranda, the phenomenal school situated in Raila Odinga’s native Bondo, Nyanza Province, has illustrious “alma mater”.

I cull this petal from the Nation of March 3. Under the headline “Maranda’s alma mater”, it lists the Prime Minister among the “alma mater”.

That construction makes alma mater a plural term. This is underscored by the fact that the headline has used the term as a portmanteau — as the French might say — for a plurality of personal names.

That is part of the problem. If the substantive alma mater refers to many of Old Boys or Old Girls, why hasn’t it been pluralised?

It may be because — being a collective — alma mater has no plural form. If it had, I suspect it would be almae mater (with an “e” suffixed to alma). But I repeat that I don’t know. For I have never seen almae anywhere.

However, I know one thing. It is that the sub-editor is standing the problem on its head. The PM is not Maranda’s alma mater.

To stand it on its feet, he should move the other way round: Maranda is the PM’s alma mater. As it were, the school is his mother.

For, though I do not know the origin of the term, it is definitely feminine in significance.

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Mater is the Latin term for “mother”. We find it in such words as maternity, maternal and matriarchy.

Academic mother

Though deliberately mistranslated into Greek as parthenos, into Latin as virgo and into English as virgin, the Hebrew alma, as used by the biblical Isaiah, means the same thing as the Kikuyu muiritu — no more than a woman at or after puberty, that is, a woman capable of conceiving.

If Isaiah had had a virgin in mind, he would have said betulah, the correct Hebrew word for an intact woman.

Your Alma Mater, then, is your “academic mother”, the institution from whose academic womb you were delivered.

In short, the term alma mater refers to the school, college or university which you attended. My “almae mater” — if you accept almae — include Manyatta Primary (near Awendo), Pe Hill Intermediate (hard by), Alliance High (at Kikuyu) and Roosevelt University (in Chicago).

In the foregoing paragraph, I have capped the initials of alma mater on one occasion and yet lower-cased them on the second to draw your attention to the fact that it is optional.

But the main point, quite clearly, is that the Nation sub-editor has confused the product (Raila Odinga and co.) with the producer (Maranda).

I reiterate that the producer — a person’s motherly intellectual institution — is what is called alma mater.

In North American academic parlance, the product is known as alumnus if male (plural: alumni) and alumna if female (plural alumnae) – though the plural term alumni nowadays tends to be used “unisexually”.

ochiengotani@gmail.com