My wife asked me why matrimony meant marriage whereas patrimony meant something entirely different, and I had no answer for her, so I googled around. Wiktionary is no help:
From Old French matremoine, from Latin mātrimōnium (“marriage, wedlock”), from mātri(s) (“mother”) + -mōnium (“obligation”). By surface analysis, matri- + -mony. Compare patrimony.
So I tried the OED (entry revised 2001) and found:
< Anglo-Norman matermoine, matremoine, matrimoigne, matrimone, matrimonie and Middle French matremoine, matrimoigne (14th cent.; c1155 in Old French in sense ‘property inherited from one’s mother’: compare 1a) < classical Latin mātrimōnium state of being married < mātri-, māter mother (see matri- comb. form) + ‑mōnium ‑mony comb. form.
Which is also no help. I recognize that marriage tends to lead to motherhood, but can anyone explain the Latin formation more effectively? Does it have to do with Roman society, or is it just one of those things?
According to the OLD, the suffix -monium is “An enlargement of -IVM, prob. derived from lost adjvs. in -mo, -monis (alimonium, matrimonium, testimonium)”.
In the end, it’s probably that what was typical for a mater familias was being honorably married, while for a pater familias it was most typical that he had a fortune that could be inherited.
matrimonium is first found in Plautus, patrimonium a century later in Laberius.
Here’s an extended dissection of this conundrum at the Grammarphobia Blog. Toward the end of the post they write:
That final sentence sounds like the best nutshell explanation.
Interesting and convincing; thanks! (My wife says “I’ll buy it.”)
This suggests a parallel between “matrimonium” as understood by the Romans and the now-obsolete English-legal-jargon word “coverture,” which sort of meant “the status of being married” but really meant more particularly “the status of being a married woman” because being married-or-not did not have the same consequences in terms of ownership/control of property for a man as it did prior to 19th-century reforms for a feme covert (married woman, who at least etymologically was conceptualized as being “covered” by her husband). Maybe the availability of “coverture” for legalistic purposes left “matrimony” in English free to drift into a more symmetric word denoting a status applying to both spouses?
Oh, there were n-stem adjectives once?
@J. W. Brewer: That reminds me of a doublet that I have always found amusing: coverture and couverture. The latter has existed as a spelling of coverture for as long as the the word has been in English. (The first OED cites are in the thirteenth century, with the marriage-related meaning appearing in the sixteenth.) However, couverture was readopted from French in the twentieth century to refer to professional-quality chocolate for cooking (usually sold in the form of small discs).
Couverture contains more fat than ordinary chocolate; it’s more or less specifically for glazing.
(Never seen it in discs. Rather ordinary-looking bars over here.)
Native French speakers can explain better than I how in French matrimoine apparently does not mean matrimony, as in English, Catalan, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish, but instead has been a word so under-used for centuries it could be repurposed in recent decades to be a feminist equivalent of patrimoine in the cultural sense, hence meaning “l’héritage culturel légué par les générations de femmes précédentes.“