Talk:Queen mother

This is the talk page for discussing improvements to the Queen mother article.
This is not a forum for general discussion of the article's subject.

Put new text under old text. Click here to start a new topic.
New to Wikipedia? Welcome! Learn to edit; get help.

Article policies

Find sources: Google (books · news · scholar · free images · WP refs) · FENS · JSTOR · TWL

Archives: 1

Biography: Royalty and Nobility

	Biography portal This article is within the scope of WikiProject Biography, a collaborative effort to create, develop and organize Wikipedia's articles about people. All interested editors are invited to join the project and contribute to the discussion. For instructions on how to use this banner, please refer to the documentation.BiographyWikipedia:WikiProject BiographyTemplate:WikiProject Biographybiography
	This article is supported by WikiProject Royalty and Nobility (assessed as Low-importance).

Women's History Low‑importance

	History portal This article is within the scope of WikiProject Women's History, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of Women's history and related articles on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.Women's HistoryWikipedia:WikiProject Women's HistoryTemplate:WikiProject Women's HistoryWomen's History
Low	This article has been rated as Low-importance on the project's importance scale.

In re "Queen Mother" in India

Rajmata [sic] is currently translated in the article as "Mother of the State", with the justification that 'Raj' means 'State'. However, the technical term for state/kingdom is actually 'Rajya'. Furthermore, the actual term for the King (or, rarely, if at all, Queen) Mother is "Rajamata" [IPA: r aː dʑ ɐ m aː t aː](note the missing 'a' in the term in the article). This is technically from the same word in Sanskrit, which itself is a Sanskrit compound "राज्ञः माता या सा राजमाता।" (Translation: "She who is the King's mother is the King-mother". The translation here has the appearance of stating the obvious, but it gramatically defines the compound word in terms of the simple words whose place and meaning the compound word takes).

Basically, I think that the translation "Mother of the State" is inaccurate, with the inaccuracy being caused by the inaccurate term 'Raj' [IPA: r aː dʑ] inaccurately being confused with 'State' due to lack of accurate Sanskrit transliteration of the word 'Raja' [IPA: r aː dʑ ɐ] in "Rajamata" in the first place. The accurate term is, thus, "Rajamata", and the accurate translation is "King-Mother". Viv73 (talk) 05:35, 25 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Earliest English usage

The sentence “The term has been used in English since the early 1560s” does not make sense because the sovereign then was Elizabeth I and her mother died in 1536; no one could have been Queen Mother in the early 1560s. Please edit the sentence to name the person for whom the term was first used and to clarify whether the person was Queen Mother at the time or previously. 47.144.47.200 (talk) 23:57, 20 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]