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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 r
by danans 8y 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 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.