"Mama and Papa" Type
The basic kinship terms mama and papa (together with the wider class of Lallnamen) comprise a special case of false cognates. The striking cross-linguistical similarities between these terms are thought to result from the nature of language acquisition (Jakobson 1962). According to Jakobson, these words are the first word-like sounds made by babbling babies; and parents tend to associate the first sound babies make with themselves. Thus, there is no need to ascribe the similarities to common ancestry. This hypothesis is supported by the fact that these terms are built up from speech sounds that are easiest to produce (nasals like m or n, typically for "mother" words, or plosives like p/b and t/d, typically for "father" words, along with the basic vowel a). However, variants do occur; for example, in proto-Old Japanese, the word for "mother" was *papa, and in Slavic languages, baba is a common nickname for "grandmother". In Georgian, the usual pattern (nasal for "mother", plosive for "father") is inverted: the word for "father" is mama and the word for "mother" is deda.
Read more about this topic: False Cognate
Famous quotes containing the words mama, papa and/or type:
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