Quote:
Originally posted by CutiePie2000 (in part)
I will recycle my post...
1) Fraternity comes from the Greek word "phratria", meaning people holding a common interest. So, in that sense, the ladies were taking it from the Greek "Phratria", rather than the Latin "frater" for brother. Also, remember, we are GREEK LETTER ORGS, not ROMAN letter orgs or LATIN letter orgs!
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Here's a blurb from my National:
Delta Gamma Fraternity is the correct name of the organization. Why isn't Delta Gamma called a sorority officially? At the time of the founding of most of the older women's fraternities, the Greek derivative phratres of phratria, meaning tribes or groups of people with similar interests and backgrounds, was the basis for the title, fraternity....
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I think a quick look in any dictionary will show that "fraternity" comes from the Latin
fraternitas, not directly from Greek. Remember that the word "fraternity" has been around a lot longer (centuries longer) than GLO's, and its original meaning in English was "a brotherhood," usually of a religious nature.
To take the question a step further, the Latin
frater is in turn (and as your National's blurb suggests) descended from the Greek
phratria. In ancient Greece, a
phratria was a subdivision of a
phyle, which was a tribe or clan based on supposed kinship. So, a
phratria was a group of closely related people -- larger than a family, but smaller than a tribe or clan.
The founders of the first women's fraternities may indeed have looked into the etymological roots of the word "fraternity" to find the connotation of "people with a common interest," but the word itself came into English from Latin.
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