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The counter argument is that there are gobs of languages whose names for mother and father sound nothing like ma or pa.
by danans 8y ago
The counter argument is that there are gobs of languages whose names for mother and father sound nothing like ma or pa.
- eridius 8y agoWhat 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 8y agoJapanese, 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 8y agoI 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.