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Mama/dada effect: Children everywhere in the world say mamamama as their first syllable, which is why mama means mother both in Chinese and in anglo-franco-hisp
by acyou 2y ago
Mama/dada effect: Children everywhere in the world say mamamama as their first syllable, which is why mama means mother both in Chinese and in anglo-franco-hispanic-germanic-latin languages, and everywhere else. They then say dada, baba, papa, which is why baba means dad in both China and in latin languages.
Ramachandran and Hubbard suggest that the kiki/bouba effect has implications for the evolution of language, because it suggests that the naming of objects is not completely arbitrary. - Nonsense, mama is an easier syllable for mouths to make, that's the sound that cats make as well as cows.
- acyou 2y agoMaybe that's why we call them "ma- mmals" ?
- nemomarx 2y agoThink mammaries, which comes from an old word for milk, so probably from mother, yeah.
- martyvis 2y agoAnd when the made up word "bouba" is presented I immediately thought of the slang word "boob" for breast so that round shape is a good fit.(Also bubble and bauble are also near sounding and round)
- gjm11 2y agoYou say that like it's a joke, but they're called mammals because they have mammae -- breasts, udders -- and although I don't know completely for certain I'd be flabbergasted if Latin mamma weren't very directly related to mama etc. (Wiktionary says it's from Greek "mamme" which it alleges is a back-formation from babies' "mama", and cites a learned-sounding reference, but I don't know whether anyone actually has more than conjecture here.)
- troad 2y agoThe Occam's razor explanation for the worldwide distribution of mama / dada is very, very straightforward: (a) they are the easiest syllables, and therefore some of the first and most common syllables children babble, (b) parents are extremely willing to read meaning into the sounds their children make (what parent doesn't think their kid is a little genius?), and (c) parents are eeeever so slightly self-interested in what that meaning should be.
- int_19h 2y agoWhile "mama" is a very common word for "mother" across languages, it is by no means universal. A particularly startling example is Georgian, where "mama" means dad, and "deda" means mom (and note that this is an Indo-European language!). Which is to say - there's no single "first syllable" and "second syllable" that all babies say in that exact order. They just babble, and adults interpret those noises as syllables according to the phonemics of their language. Thus results may vary.
- tgv 2y agoThe whole effect is probably based on the combined word-sound associations everyone acquires, not on some biological preference. For starters, there's no evolutionary reason why sounds should be associated with shapes.