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My first thought was "mama" (and possibly "dada"), as I believe I've seen it attributed to the fact it's an easy word for babies to make since it mimics the fir
by legohead 3y ago
My first thought was "mama" (and possibly "dada"), as I believe I've seen it attributed to the fact it's an easy word for babies to make since it mimics the first sounds we make. But it's not even mentioned..
- jangliss 3y agoIn Turkish those are "anne" (an-ney) and "baba"... And "mama" means baby food!
- Cyph0n 3y agoIn Tunisian Arabic baby speak, “mama” means “mama” but “mam-ma” (see [1]) means food/eat. Quite confusing, but it seems to work? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadda https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadda
- sambapa 3y agoNope, see finnish for supereasy counterexample
- magicpin 3y agoAnd yet the word for grandma is suspiciously similar to mama.
- mostlylurks 3y agoThe word for grandma is "isoäiti", at least in sentences like "I went to visit my grandma last weekend". Monikers such as "mummo" are borrowed from Swedish, which means that not too long ago, the finnish language seems to have been without any "mama"-related words. Which is more interesting than the fact that some of those have been borrowed into modern day finnish, since it shows that "mama" is not a universal feature of all languages.
- eru 3y ago> Monikers such as "mummo" are borrowed from Swedish, which means that not too long ago, the Finnish language seems to have been without any "mama"-related words. I'm not sure we can conclude that? Borrowings can displace existing words, so the current state of the vocabulary doesn't necessarily tell you what was there before. As a slightly related example in German: 'Base' and 'Vetter' for your girl and boy cousins have been replaced in the last few decades with the French borrowings 'Cousine' (also spelled 'Kusine') and 'Cousin' (also spelled 'Kuseng'). Looking just at the current vocabulary, you might conclude that German did not have specific words for these people until the French come along. Germans also replaced 'Muhme' and 'Oheim' with 'Tante' and 'Onkel'. Fun aside: the English word 'boss' has etymological ties with the German 'Base'. (English got 'boss' from Dutch.)
- MandieD 3y agoI’ve never heard “Base” (only “Kusine”) for female cousin, but still usually hear “Vetter” for male cousin, and “Vettern” for multiple cousins of mixed gender.
- Aachen 3y ago... well go on then, what do the Finnish babies say as their first word?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- SilasX 3y agoAnd which of the zillion declensions do they use? :-p
- reducesuffering 3y agoIn Georgian's case, mom is deda and dad is mama
- irrational 3y agoReminds me of Hebrew where Who is he, He is she, and Me is who.
- judah 3y agoAlso in Hebrew: fish is dog דג
- whitten 3y agoI guess that is why Dagon is a sea god in Phoenician
- tonymillion 3y agoDidn’t the Beatles write song like that?
- grishka 3y agoIn Russian there's no "dada", it's "papa" instead.
- garba_dlm 3y ago'd' and 'p' are close enough. specially since the point of contrast is the 'm' of the opposite(complimentary) concept/sound/principle: ma ma
- pkd 3y agoLinguistically, I don't think d and p are close at all. But a sibling comment also links to the Wikipedia entry for this common fallacy.
- bedobi 3y agowhat? linguists would universally consider d and p extremely similar, they're near identical plosives
- pkd 3y agoPlosives are a big category. "k" is also a plosive, but does not sound anything like a <d> or <p>. d and p are plosives but are made using completely different parts of the mouth (dental vs labial). Perhaps some linguist will consider them "close" but "near identical" is almost certainly wrong, but I am happy to be proven wrong with a citation.
- opprobium 3y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mama_and_papa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mama_and_papa "In linguistics, mama and papa are considered a special case of false cognates. In many languages of the world, sequences of sounds similar to /mama/ and /papa/ mean "mother" and "father", usually but not always in that order."
- stevekemp 3y agoOur Finnish child learned to say "äiti" for mother pretty early on. But his first real word was when he started saying "mama" - meaning he wanted milk. No idea where that came from, but we understood pretty quickly.