Mother Nature

母なる自然 (haha naru shizen): Mother Nature. 母 haha is mother, in the figurative sense the dictionaries cite from 774, the source from which things are born; なる is the classical which is, so the phrase is nature, which is a mother, a personification and not merely maternal nature; 自然 shizen is nature, everything in the world that human hands did not make. It is a calque, Mother Nature rebuilt from Japanese parts by the Meiji translators of Western education and devotion, on pages from 1900 in Parker, Froebel and Wordsworth, and the language kept it: a bilingual dictionary entry now, with a hundred and twenty years behind it. The other form on this page, 大自然, is great nature, the natural world at its largest, without the personification.