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Neither of those match the rather unsurprising answer I've heard before, which is that "mama" and "papa" are two of the simplest sounds babies can make and ther

Neither of those match the rather unsurprising answer I've heard before, which is that "mama" and "papa" are two of the simplest sounds babies can make and therefore two of the sounds babies are most likely to start making first as they learn to speak. And us parents naturally assume the baby is trying to talk to us when they start making sounds, so we latched onto "mama" and "papa" (or the various extremely similar sounds in other languages) as being the words the baby was using to refer to us.

Mvandenbergh 7y ago
Yes but then we might expect that in some languages "mama" and "papa" are reversed. What is surprising is not just that these simple words seem to be preserved but that they mean the same thing.
- eridius 7y ago
  I think "ma" generally comes first in baby's lexicon, and historically the gestational parent has been the primary caretaker (and the gestational parent in most cases has the identity "mother"), so it's no surprise that the "ma" sound is associated with mother.
danans 7y ago
The counter argument is that there are gobs of languages whose names for mother and father sound nothing like ma or pa.
- eridius 7y ago
  What are these "gobs of languages"? I know there are a few, but the sounds there are generally still things that are really easy for babies to say. What's interesting about "mama" is that it's the same (or very nearly) in tons of languages that don't share common roots.
  - danans 7y ago
    Japanese, Many native american languages, Sundanese, Malay, many African languages. Not to say that sound symbolism of the "ma" sound isn't a real thing, but rather that its adoption for the "mother" word is far from universal, but just frequent enough to be interesting.
    - eridius 7y ago
      I didn't say it was universal, but it's extremely widespread, and more importantly, it's widespread among a diverse set of languages that don't share a common root. Incidentally, the Wikipedia page for "Mama and papa" says that in Old Japanese the word for "mother" was papa.
posterboy 7y ago
These three theories are convergent and not mutually exclusive

Mvandenbergh 7y ago

Yes but then we might expect that in some languages "mama" and "papa" are reversed. What is surprising is not just that these simple words seem to be preserved but that they mean the same thing.

eridius 7y ago
I think "ma" generally comes first in baby's lexicon, and historically the gestational parent has been the primary caretaker (and the gestational parent in most cases has the identity "mother"), so it's no surprise that the "ma" sound is associated with mother.

danans 7y ago

The counter argument is that there are gobs of languages whose names for mother and father sound nothing like ma or pa.

eridius 7y ago
What are these "gobs of languages"? I know there are a few, but the sounds there are generally still things that are really easy for babies to say. What's interesting about "mama" is that it's the same (or very nearly) in tons of languages that don't share common roots.
- danans 7y ago
  Japanese, Many native american languages, Sundanese, Malay, many African languages. Not to say that sound symbolism of the "ma" sound isn't a real thing, but rather that its adoption for the "mother" word is far from universal, but just frequent enough to be interesting.
  - eridius 7y ago
    I didn't say it was universal, but it's extremely widespread, and more importantly, it's widespread among a diverse set of languages that don't share a common root. Incidentally, the Wikipedia page for "Mama and papa" says that in Old Japanese the word for "mother" was papa.

posterboy 7y ago

These three theories are convergent and not mutually exclusive