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715:"The cause for this curious crosslinguistic phenomenon is believed to be the easiness of pronunciation of the sounds involved." If this is the only cause one would expect that p is as often used for mama as it is for papa and idem m would be about as often used for mama as for papa. But they are not. To what extend could a common root of languages be a possible cause?
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I'm not sure where to find the studies I mentioned in the article, but I'm sure I've seen them. A few examples of other (unrelated) languages where /ma(ma)/ and /pa(pa)/ etc. mean "mother" or "father" are welcome, but please no lists. What is the physiological basis of this easiness of pronunciation?
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with no organization whatsoever. Case in point: Persian is an Indo-European language found in west central Asia, so does it belong under the
European Indo-European group, or with the East and Central Asian languages? I have no opinion on which system we use, as long as we pick one and stick with it.
807:
There seems to be a major flaw in this theory. Why are certain sounds so prevalently used for mother and different certain sounds so prevalent for father? By this theory shouldn't we expect an even distribution of these sounds for both mother and father? This article gives a single example that runs
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Should we be grouping languages by major family -- Indo-European, Dravidian, Sino-Tibetan, etc. -- by sub-families -- Finno-Ugric, Kartvelian, etc. -- or by geographic location of primary origin -- European, Southeast Asian, East and
Central Asia, etc? Because right now it is a terrible hodgepodge
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The point of this phenomenon is that this is a class of words for which linguistic descent is not the only possible reason for similarity. However, I agree with you that it is good to mention that those languages share linguistic descent. The article needs more cross-linguistical examples though.
827:
to the rule that easy words are formed from the sounds m, p, b, and a! The above post "Any theory on more specific cause?" raises the same point. The PIE example "appa" implies that there is also a theory of a common root, since PIE is reconstructed: somebody must have gathered together a lot of
787:
Why a section about non-semitic languages? there are just a few completely random examples whose presence doesn't make much sense. We should have instead a table with the words for mum, dad, mother and father and people speaking the language can add the word in their languages, if it follows the
988:
Truth be told, shouldn't the groupings be based on language relationships and not geography since this is a linguistics-oriented article? Shouldn't "European" and "Indo-Aryan" be in the same Indo-European category, freeing up
Hungarian to be with Finish and Estonian in Uralic. Likewise Mandarin
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Yet the word "nana" (which I am also not sure what that word is, could be either නැනා or නන?) is not used in either formal or informal contexts as far as I am aware. informally the word "තාත්තා" (thaaththa) or "අප්පච්චි" (appachi) is used, latter being prefered mostly in the central provinces
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should be with other Sino-Tibetan languages like
Vietnamese and then a final category could be created for isolates, like Basque, Japanese, Korean and the language in British Columbia (with special notes on language borrowing where necessary- I.e., proximity to Spanish for Basque, etc...).
984:
Reserving personal conjecture (since wikipedia is meant for tested research), I will point out that a language isolate in
British Columbia doesn't belong grouped in with central and East Asian languages...no matter how much an adherent of Nostratic might be pushing that agenda (joke).
399:
This theory in this article fails, at least some
Eastern Asian languages. In classical Chinese, "mom" is almost never called "妈妈" (māma). In old literature, the most common verbal word (mum) is 娘 (niáng), and the formal word is 母亲 (mǔqīn). In
339:
Indeed. Not mentioning shared descent as a confounding factor seems to imply that all Indo-European languages came up with the word completely independently. Possible, but a little unlikely given the clear etymology.
686:, many Americans (perhaps most) would pronounce "mom" with , which is back, not central. Further complicating the issue is the fact that "mama" isn't actually very commonly used in modern British English (the
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I thought that when I first encountered this article, and the consensus on this page seems to be that the examples should be organised by language family, not by geographic region. So I am going to
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English has mama (or momma) as slang for "mother", and the affectionate term mum/mom (with /m/ and a vowel that varies among dialects, but is always rather low and centralized like ).
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273:, where I added a little paragraph about this phenomenon. The main source is Jakobson (1962). I also found a nice overview article, including some other references,
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did 妈妈 start to mean mom in
Mandarin. So I tend to think this word as an exonym, combined with an existing word, to give a different meaning. (Just like the word
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My point exactly, calling it
European is arbitrary from a linguistics point of view. Hindi should be with English and Polish under "Indo-European", for example.
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I added the Latin, Sanskrit and thus Indo-European. Did it not occur that all the languages in the first paragraph share linguistic descent? Never mind.
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They really "come from" onomatopoeia based on infant babbling. Bantu is about 50,000 years too late to be relevant to the origin of human languages...
392:" and Serbocroatian papica with the same meaning (-ica being a diminutive), so perhaps we have to put this etymology long before the origin of Spanish.
385:, has mǔ "mother", fù "father" (fùmǔ meaning "parents"), māma "Mum" and bàba (voiceless b) "Dad". The style levels are kept apart much like in English.
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I don't think this last part is true; in a
Yorkshire or Lancashire accent, wouldn't it be "mum", pronounced ? And as for the issue of being
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Maybe the article should give a quick mention to variants of Tata/ Dada for "father", since they seem to be fairly common internationally.
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children and adults when speakin' informally say "/mämän/" and "/bäbä/" for "/mädær/" and "/pedær/" for "mother" and "father"--
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Links to external sites welcome, too. Examples of languages with no labials? I'm sure I've heard of some (Native
American?). --
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Pretty sure it's an indigenous North American (First Nations) language. It's not Asian any more than Basque is Berber.
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However, including such technicalities in the article is needlessly confusing, so I've pulled out the following aside:
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Yes, and even worse, the article presents that single example (Japanese "papa" for mother) as if it was an
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I removed the definition of "baba" as "strong woman" as this seems to be an example of subtle vandalism.
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on Knowledge (XXG). If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join
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Another example of the opposite order is Georgian (non-IE), "mama" is father, and "dede" is mother.
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contrary to the "ma" for mother and pa/va/da/ta for father for which there are dozens of examples.--
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languages mother is unyoka but most people consider this very rude and use mama instead. Father in
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in Basque, like (more or less) in so many other languages from West Africa to India and beyond.
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use rre for father which is not particularly easy to pronounce (syllabic voiced rolled lingual).
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416:, almost every language calls it alike. Even the first name in Chinese was 德律風, "délǜfēng".)
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David Marjanović david.marjanovic_at_gmx.at 22:26 CET-summertime 2005/8/7
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Isn't "mommy" used more than "mama" nowadays? Odd that the article doesn't mention this.
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Technically, in many varieties of American English the vowel of 'father' is more like
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In Sesotho, mother is mme and father is ntate. Ntate is probably related to
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As of now the article has a paragraph on Sinhalese that goes as follows
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Spanish papa looks to me much like Latin pabulum "pudding/porridge/mush/
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Sinhalese - The word "nana" is not used to mean "Father" in any context
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729:"In the non-Semitic Basque language, aba also means "father"."
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says "UK old use"). I'm going to edit the text accordingly. --
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meaning of course mother and father respectively. sometimes
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which is considered incorrect, because it's derived from
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ancient examples of "papa" and drawn that conclusion.
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Knowledge (XXG):WikiProject Family and relationships
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1180:. In some areas of Sri Lanka, particularly in the
528:may well be related to the Proto-Benue-Congo root
468:of this word and should be used only in this way.
138:This article has not yet received a rating on the
566:, if I recall correctly. Sorry, I don't know the
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763:I'm deleting the above misleading falsehood.
444:for dad, they're used even among grown ups as
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980:British Columbia and other observations
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1152:, the word for mother originally was "
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783:non-semitic language section: why???
294:Also words like "tata" and "dada"...
209:WikiProject Family and relationships
207:This article is within the scope of
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38:It is of interest to the following
752:(fatherland) and also in the word
711:Any theory on more specific cause?
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482:In Russian also mama and papa.--
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584:"American English has no ?" - F
404:, the word 妈妈 means a bawd. In
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912:Maybe the root is just "ba".
649:' is clear enough, I think. —
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903:These words came from Africa!
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705:02:28, 23 February 2007 (UTC)
487:14:57, 12 November 2005 (UTC)
371:06:35, 29 November 2008 (UTC)
156:This article is supported by
112:and see a list of open tasks.
1060:and just rearrange things.--
1001:16:48, 23 October 2013 (UTC)
939:these were the words of the
933:(in Ewe language) = "father"
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858:00:58, 3 November 2019 (UTC)
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1076:Basque is not Indo-European
908:"father" = baba < Bantu
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871:European language examples
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303:Might be helpful :-? : in
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732:False. Father, dad is
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524:BTW, Nguni
516:User:ZyXoas
460:is used as
446:diminutives
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106:linguistics
59:Linguistics
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1211:Categories
1127:惑乱 Wakuran
1058:WP:Be Bold
831:Card Zero
803:Major flaw
788:pattern.--
377:Chinese...
309:Downtownee
1166:appanande
1158:abbiyande
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875:Tooironic
825:exception
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692:The Lazar
596:njenue? -
556:Dravidian
414:telephone
342:Eriathwen
319:Eriathwen
1195:MaheEvil
1186:nanachhi
1062:Jpbrenna
1038:TechBear
964:AnonMoos
500:isiXhosa
470:konradek
383:Mandarin
359:unsigned
1103:أم and
1025:W.Dust
927:*-tààtá
910:*-bààbá
854:undated
602:vertigo
588:ther? D
508:isiZulu
493:Sesotho
478:Russian
305:Persian
214:defunct
188:defunct
835:(talk)
810:Ericjs
790:Lgriot
775:Sugaar
754:apaiza
750:aberri
623:Arabic
526:unyoka
454:ojciec
432:Polish
351:"Baba"
36:scale.
1178:Tamil
937:Maybe
921:*-máá
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546:Tamil
504:Nguni
484:Nixer
450:matka
1199:talk
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1154:abbe
1131:talk
1086:talk
1066:talk
1044:Talk
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929:and
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879:talk
865:Huh?
848:talk
814:talk
794:talk
760:).
734:aita
669:edit
651:mark
647:like
637:and
629:and
616:/ɑ/.
564:appa
562:and
560:amma
534:mark
458:tato
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442:tata
438:mama
422:talk
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331:mark
282:mark
275:here
267:papa
265:and
263:mama
1105:ab
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768:ama
738:ata
702:Esn
635:/æ/
631:/m/
627:/b/
614:or
612:/æ/
598:Ste
592:g?
568:IPA
530:nyo
448:of
390:pap
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142:.
42::
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