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Baby talk: what mom is made out of

 
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Recently I was watching an 11-month child making his first speech exercises. Naturally, the family in full ecstasy tried to guess whether he said "mama" or "papa". Later it occurred to me that the guy said nothing of the kind, he only babbled something and probably soon will figure that when he babbles something like "ma", his mom freaks out, and when he utters something like "pa", then it is dad's turn. In other words, it's not a child who learns "adult" words for "mom" and "dad", it's that these words are nothing but baby's talk. Strange that this idea has never come to my mind before, neither had I heard it from anybody. Maybe it's so banal that nobody even bothered to say it.

However, later I came across a quote that proved this hypothesis.

In a process parallel to the one just described, the first consonants acquired are stops and labials -- pronounced using the lips (perhaps connected to a baby's natural sucking movement?) -- and the first meaningful distinction acquired is generally that between nasal consonants (/m/) and oral consonants (/p/, /b/); the second is the one which separates labials (/p/, //b/, /m/) from dentals (/t/, /d/, /h/). We recognize straightaway the initial consonants of the first words pronounced by children all over the world: mummy, daddy, mama, papa (French), <...>1, mama, tata (Serbo-Croat), etc.

Marina Yaguello. Language Through the Looking Glass: Exploring Language and Linguistics



-----------
1) deleted part was about Russian, and it was pure nonsense. It said that Russian words are "matushka" and "babushka" -- where did you see a baby who can say "matushka"? It's an adult word, plus it is an anachronism, almost out of usage. Standard words are "mama" and "papa", like in French, only stress is on the first syllable.

So basically we have that the first consonants a baby pronounces are m, p, b / t, d, h; and there is an interesting explanation that it is connected to a baby's natural sucking habit. I would like to propose another hypothesis: that the first vowel a baby "learns" is "a", and it is connected to a baby's natural habit to cry.

So we have:
ma
pa
ba

which (with some modifications) gives us several words: ma/mama (several languages including Chinese(Cantonese)), pa/papa, baba ("grandma" in Russian and apparently "dad" in Farsi). Then we have "tata" for dad in Serbo-Croat, and a similar word with the same meaning (with softened "a") existed in Russian up to XIX century.

An alternative explanation is that all these languages belong to the Indo-European family, so these could be simple borrowings. With one exception: Chinese. Which gives some hope...

To summarize, a universal babies word for "mom" is made out of babies' natural habit to suck and cry.
[ July 23, 2004: Message edited by: Mapraputa Is ]
 
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In my experience, anyway, most babies say something like "da da da da da" before they say "ma ma ma ma ma". I'd guess this is because the toungue is more natually "fronted"; saying "ma" requires the tongue to be drawn back a bit.
 
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My experience with inexperienced speakers is very limited (and this is actually exaggeration). But thinking about supposed origins of labials in sucking habit, it seems that a sound of a kiss is fairly close. And this sound is, in fact, a part of speech, albeit extremely rare one.

Nor should it be forgotten that a kiss - all romantic misconceptions to the contrary - involves basically only a lip click (or two), symbol Θ. In some Bushman languages Θ actually occurs as a phoneme.
Edgar A. Gregersen. Language in Africa: An Introductory Survey.



According to Marina Yaguello's hypothesis, this sound should be extremely frequent one, not rare.
 
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Some more words:



Big thanks to Ravish for his help!!!

If you speak a language other than English, you are invited to contribute. Especially if this language isn't Indo-European. (This doesn't automatically exclude any language spoken in India or Europe. To check, find your language here (click on the letter) and read what "Classification" said.)
 
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Arabic today.

"In Standard Arabic (AL-Fusha):
dad is Abee and Mom is Ummah

In colloquial Arabic:
dad is baba and mom is mama."
 
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I was right!!!

Look, look at this:


The observation that words like mama and papa are widespread in human languages is not new. In fact, it was made in the 1950s by the anthropologist George P. Murdoch. In 1959, in response to an appeal for an explanation by Murdoch, Roman Jakobson (my academic "grandfather") published a paper entitled "Why 'mama' and 'papa'?", in which he offered the explanation that the mama and papa words come about through the wishful thinking of parents. Before babies start to speak, they go through a period of what linguists call babbling in which they experiment with their vocal tracts and make lots of meaningless noises. Parents don't realize this, though, and eager to hear their child speak, attempt to interpret their baby's vocalizations as words. Naturally, they are keen on the idea that the baby is addressing them, so they assign the meanings "mother" and "father" to the baby's first "words". It happens that certain consonants, such as [p],[t],[b],[d],[m],and [n] are among the sounds that babies produce frequently in the early stages of babbling, as are vowels like [a], so the early "words" perceived by parents are things like [papa], [mama], and [dada]. They aren't actually words, but the parents perceive them as such and assign them the meanings "father" and "mother".
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/001428.html



I guess, all Russians think the same.

According to the reports in the New Scientist and The Telegraph Bancel and de l'Etang surveyed 1000 languages for which they were able to obtain detailed information on kinship terms and found that 700 of them contained the word "papa" with the meaning "father" or "male relative on the father's side".


[ September 09, 2004: Message edited by: Mapraputa Is ]
 
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...explanation that the mama and papa words come about through the wishful thinking of parents.



My (uneducated) thoughts too. My son is 16 months and uses a constant conversation-like baby babble, but I'm still don't consider any of them 'first words'. He'll go through phases where 'mum' and 'dad' sounds are common, but it mostly sounds German to me. "Guh'gn Gah'gn gah?"

Friends with a slightly younger daughter have decided she's talking (and she may be, girls develop faster), but personally I think it looks more like the parent attaching a context to a sound, rather than the child using the sound in context.

Still cute as heck, though!
 
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My son is approaching 1 year and we speak English, Spanish, and Basque at home.

We use in English Mummy & Daddy and in Basque Amatxo & Aita.

The truth is we rarely use Spanish to represent ourselves and I rarely use Aita. He used to make 'ma' type sounds at 8/9 months then 'da' and occasionally 'dada' at 10months but for the last two or three weeks he mostly points at his Duracell bunny and says 'bully'. I know we taught him bunny but the other words kind of follow the original quote above of distinguishing m's, d's and b's.

His cousin who is the same age exactly will only ever use amatxo and aita so it may be interesting to see if she will call her father aita first or start using dada papa type words first and if her parents will attach meaning to the dada type words.

Steven
[ September 10, 2004: Message edited by: Steven Hoodless ]
 
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