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> My understanding is that these are pretty early words and need to be pronounceable by infants. Anecdata, but one of my infants was able to “speak” papa at a

> My understanding is that these are pretty early words and need to be pronounceable by infants. Anecdata, but one of my infants was able to “speak” papa at a really early age (it was more a continuous repeated use of the sound ‘pha’). I don’t think she learned the word per se or we taught it to her but it was a sound that she was able to reproduce easily. As regard for mama. Both my daughters don’t really say that word yet but they mumble a lot of ‘m’ sounds when they are hungry. Which can easily shift into ‘mama’. (Or ‘memmen’ which is a Belgian word for breasts) So my theory is as well that some of these words derived from their use by infants when they desire attention or breastfeeding and were not “invented” by adults.

friendzis 3y ago
> So my theory is as well that some of these words derived from their use by infants when they desire attention or breastfeeding and were not “invented” by adults. An addendum to your theory. Words with few short syllables, composed of vowels and labial consonants are probably the easiest to pronounce, therefore "independently discovered" by babies. They are not "invented" by adults in a sense that "hey let's use this word for this phenomena", but rather "assigned" in a sense that "the baby babbles this, so let's refer to this phenomena by it". I guess this process is similar to how onomatopoeias appear in languages.