Ooo wee ooooo, baby baby...

October 13, 2015 12:10 PM

Why ‘Mom’ and ‘Dad’ Sound So Similar in So Many Languages
posted by Johnny Wallflower (25 comments total)

This is a topic that I'm interested in, but I really dislike how it's presented in this article: "The answer lies with babies and how they start to talk. The pioneering linguist Roman Jakobson figured it out." There are certainly plenty of theories out there, but no one has "figured out the answer". And the article doesn't present any real answer for why the M/N sounds are almost universally attached to mothers and B/P with fathers, instead of the reverse (especially since B/P sounds often occur at least as early in babbling).

The article's got a lot of other interesting information in there, but that absurd unequivocal framing really rubs me the wrong way.
posted by svenx at 12:54 PM on October 13, 2015 [2 favorites]

Yeah, how is this considered "new" information? I've heard that explanation for literally decades...
posted by Greg_Ace at 12:57 PM on October 13, 2015 [1 favorite]

This may also explain why so many languages and cultures use the exact same expression to convey the act of falling off a cliff.
posted by yhbc at 1:00 PM on October 13, 2015 [6 favorites]

And the article doesn't present any real answer for why the M/N sounds are almost universally attached to mothers and B/P with fathers, instead of the reverse (especially since B/P sounds often occur at least as early in babbling).
svenx

The article does address this towards the middle.

It claims that "ah" is the easiest and thus first vowel a baby makes since it's just an open mouth. The next simplest thing is "mmm", since that's just closing your mouth, which together gives you "mah". Adults assume that the baby is not just making random noises but addressing something, and that something in the beginning is its mother. So "mama" for mother.

Father is similar: the next sounds a baby learns, slightly more complex in formation than "mmm", are "p" or "b", giving "papa" or "baba", which is assumed to be addressing the other usual closest caretaker, the father.

The article says that the reason these terms are so universal is because all human babies go through this sound development and association process.

I have no idea if any of that is true, but that's what the article says is the reason.
posted by Sangermaine at 1:13 PM on October 13, 2015 [3 favorites]

Right, but that's not actually accurate -- babies are somewhat more likely to say "dada" before "mama" (although there's a lot of individual variability). And P/B/M all come at about the same time.
posted by svenx at 1:43 PM on October 13, 2015 [2 favorites]

I see that there is some doubt about the article's claims, but I love the idea that the words "mama" and "papa" came about through what is essentially anthropomorphization. Like, what if we all called ourselves "arf" and "meow" because that's how our pets address us?
posted by lollymccatburglar at 1:49 PM on October 13, 2015 [8 favorites]

Of course Spanish pets call us "guau" and "miao".
posted by lollymccatburglar at 1:50 PM on October 13, 2015

Right, but that's not actually accurate -- babies are somewhat more likely to say "dada" before "mama" (although there's a lot of individual variability). And P/B/M all come at about the same time.

Like I said, I have no idea if the article's claims are true and I don't think it provided any sources or citations.

That's very interesting, though. Can you link to some studies on this? Is this true for babies across the world?
posted by Sangermaine at 1:56 PM on October 13, 2015 [2 favorites]

Japanese appears to be a notable exception. Japanese baby talk for "mother" and "father", respectively, are "kakka" and "totto" (from "okaasan" and "otousan"). "Mamma" is Japanese baby talk for "food". "Papa" and "mama" are common in Japanese now, but they are loanwords and almost exclusively used by young children. (anecdote: my mother-in-law refused to respond to my wife or her sister if they used "mama")
posted by Tanizaki at 2:09 PM on October 13, 2015 [6 favorites]

I feel compelled to post a paragraph out of my favorite book:

When Switters was less than a year old, his grandmother had stood before his highchair, her hands on her still glamorous hips. "You're starting to jabber like a damn disk jockey,' she said. "Pretty soon you'll be having a name for me, so I want to make this clear: you are not to insult me with one of those declasse G words, like granny or grams or gramma or whatever, you understand; and if you ever call me nannie or nonna - or moomaw or big mamma or mawmaw I'll bust your cute little chops. I'm aware that it's innate in the human infant to produce M sounds followed by soft vowels in response to materialistic stimuli, so if you find it primally necessary to label me with something of that ilk, then let it be 'maestra' or 'teacher'. I don't know if I'll ever teach you anything worthwhile, and I sure as hell don't want to be anybody's master, but at least maestra has got some dignity."
posted by AlonzoMosleyFBI at 2:18 PM on October 13, 2015 [5 favorites]

That babies make the "mmm-mmm" sounds when they're satisfied with yummy breast milk, and thus that's why the baby-words for "mother" are often "muh-muh" variants, is hardly new research.

The only thing that leaves, in the very limited list of first-available phonemes for babies, is the p/t/d + vowel.

HOWEVER... no matter how tidy that explanation is, it's still a just-so explanation, and not linguistic proof at all.

The article falsely describes these researchers as having developed a theory older than their mothers are, and also having proven it. Unless they can demonstrate babies self-developing "muh-muh"-type names for nonverbal mothers, free from outside influences, it's going to be kinda tough to prove.
posted by IAmBroom at 2:31 PM on October 13, 2015 [2 favorites]

To make this more interesting, please design an experiment which would allow us to differentiate between the competing hypotheses.
posted by clawsoon at 2:45 PM on October 13, 2015 [2 favorites]

Just to throw in an example I didn't see in the article itself: Hebrew -- mama is "eema" and papa is "abba".
posted by janey47 at 3:00 PM on October 13, 2015

Citation: Larry Trask , Where do mama/papa words come from?
An AskMe thread on the subject.

Baby talk words like mama and nana aren't always applied to mommies, and words like papa and dada aren't always applied to daddies, but they tend to be. There are some languages where this trend is reversed. In Georgian, deda means "mother" and mama means "father". Words like this also show up in different languages with meanings like "poop", "peepee", "boob" and "nursing", and names of other close relatives like grandma, grandpa and older sister.

I really recommend reading Trask's article.
posted by nangar at 3:05 PM on October 13, 2015 [4 favorites]

AlonzoMoselyFBI, my grandmother more or less said the same thing at the time her first grandchild was born in the 40s. We ALL called her "Grandmother." No babytalk allowed.

She mellowed quite a bit by the time her first great grandchild was born in 1968. All of her great grandchildren called her "Gigi" for "G.G." ("G"reat-"G"randmother). Her sons-in-law called her Madam. (My grandfather was known as "Pop" but he was a high school football coach so that's to be expected). That woman defined the word Matriarch.
posted by janey47 at 3:06 PM on October 13, 2015

You can read a 1962 paper by Jakobson on this here.

Counterexamples are always fun; words for 'mother' include Georgian deda, Mongolian ana, Fijian nana, Old Japanese *papa, Pitjantjatjara ngunytju, Finnish äiti.
posted by zompist at 3:12 PM on October 13, 2015 [3 favorites]

> Citation: Larry Trask , Where do mama/papa words come from?

Thank you! The linked article isn't bad for a popular account, but I was so shocked it didn't mention Trask that I did a ctrl-F to be sure; he owns this topic (though, as the article says, Jakobson wrote about it earlier). As it happens, there's a lively discussion going on at the LH thread on the subject.
posted by languagehat at 3:16 PM on October 13, 2015 [3 favorites]

lollymccatburglar: "but I love the idea that the words "mama" and "papa" came about through what is essentially anthropomorphization. Like, what if we all called ourselves "arf" and "meow" because that's how our pets address us?"

They'd probably call us "ar ar" and "mo mo" in that case! Babies are finely-honed machines for getting us to babble at them, rewarding us with attention and smiles when we repeat syllables over and over for them. And then when THEY say any syllables at US, we light up and get excited because we are hard-wired to do that, and thus goes a beneficial feedback loop that rewards babies for attempting babble, encourages adults to keep babbling, and gives babies a jackpot of attention and smiles when they stumble on semi-comprehensible combinations like "ma ma."

Borrow a baby and watch how it rewards you when you babble syllables ("bo bo bo bo bo bo? bee bee bee bee bee?"). You get big attentive eyes and lots of smiles for your efforts, and every time you do it you'll get more attention from the baby, who is deftly manipulating you into talking (and, even better, baby-talking -- helps them learn to differentiate syllables and words) for their benefit.

Babies learning language is a really fine example of how evolution can build on simple things to get really complex behaviors -- that baby is exploiting the shit out of you to learn language with the only tool he has (adorableness) and you both have inbuilt reward systems that remunerate you with good feelings whenever you play "the baby talk game" with each other.

Actually a more interesting study might be what babies call their siblings and pets, since they have to learn to make approximations of much more complicated words. My cat "Jack" has always been "ACK" to my babies, and Oscar is "Oh-er" and then later "Ogger." You could collect a big corpus of what babies call their siblings, and the siblings' names, and see which sorts of syllables they fall back on to approximate names.

(PS, the best part of babies learning to talk is when they mimic your tone but don't know any words, so you hear echoes of yourself, two octaves higher, answering the phone in gibberish and telling off a telemarketer. "A-bo? BA BA BA, NO, BA. A-bye." ("Is that how I really sound when someone cuts me off in traffic? Shit, that's how I really sound when someone cuts me off in traffic."))
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 4:12 PM on October 13, 2015 [13 favorites]

Japanese baby talk for "mother" and "father", respectively, are "kakka" and "totto"

Kaka is also pretty universal in the core kinship term set. It usually means something like brother or uncle, though.

And totto is basically dada from a linguist's perspective. T and d differ only in voicing, and linguists generally ignore vowels unless they are forced to pay attention to them because they are very weird :)

(I have a paper about mama and papa in Australian languages, which you can probably google with just those keywords if you are interested, but I'm not going to link it because I don't want colleagues to find my metafilter username via Google.)
posted by lollusc at 4:28 PM on October 13, 2015 [2 favorites]

("Because they are very weird" was meant to refer to vowels, not linguists, by the way. But sometimes it applies to both.)
posted by lollusc at 4:30 PM on October 13, 2015 [3 favorites]

If you are a fan of fringe linguistic theories (and if you aren't, why not?) you can learn from Margaret Magnus that every word's sounds contribute to its meaning.

(Her book is pretty cool!)

But again, fringe. Very much fringe.
posted by edheil at 4:47 PM on October 13, 2015 [2 favorites]

Trask's article is interesting and he definitely demolishes the notion of a proto language, but his assertions about parental intent seem like a big stretch (or wild overstatement):

Since every child babbles in much the same way, parents everywhere hear the same noises, and they almost always choose to assign the same meanings to the childish noises they hear.

This seems much more like an example of mimetic evolution: having some form of "mama/papa" in the language serves the very useful purpose of allowing babies to identify their caregivers verbally. So if those words don't exist, they will almost certainly be "invented" fairly quickly. But it's not like parents are reinventing those words in every generation -- otherwise, how are the gender assignments so stable within a given language?

On further reading, I think Jakobson's framing seems much more reasonable:

The socialized and conventionalized lexical coinages of this baby talk, known under the name of nursery forms, are deliberately adapted to the infant's phonemic pattern

In other words, "mama" and "papa" aren't just random babbling assigned meaning by overeager parents, but are real words used with real intent by the infant, it's just that the range of phonemes available to them is so limited that the same sounds are duplicated across a broad range of languages.

(I might be unfairly interpreting Trask here, but as the father of an infant who uses "mama" and "dada" pretty unambiguously, his characterization raised my hackles a bit. When he was babbling, our son would say things like "padadadamama" -- I would assert that only the most self-deluded parent would pick out a few syllables here and there and herald it as actual language. But when they start using particular two-syllable words in conjunction with certain people, and reacting appropriately to those words when spoken by others, it seems churlish to deny that they are legitimately speaking.)
posted by bjrubble at 4:58 PM on October 13, 2015

My 6 month old has me half convinced he's already heard and recognized daddy and I using "mama" to indicate me, because he seems to babble that string more often when he needs something, like to be arighted into a sit when he flops over, more often than other strings. That's just a chicken/egg kind of data point; I don't think it would be the most extraordinary thing if he grokked in some way that we are repeatedly making one of the sounds he can make ("static static static mama? mama static mama?"), and associates that sound with us/me in a naming or calling sense.
posted by Ambrosia Voyeur at 12:14 AM on October 14, 2015

Actually a more interesting study might be what babies call their siblings and pets, since they have to learn to make approximations of much more complicated words.

I totally agree! This is something I've puzzled over for awhile. My 2-year-old calls our cat, whose name is Don Gato, "Concanto", although he can clearly pronounce the words don and gato by themselves. In fact, his first word (after mama and papa) was gato, with a nice clear G, but then the cat's name came out "concanto".
posted by lollymccatburglar at 12:37 AM on October 14, 2015

Eyebrows McGee/lollymccatburglar: both of your examples have to do with phonological development, or the timing of acquisition of speech sounds.

EMG: ACK for "Jack" is a common phonological pattern (initial consonant deletion), and affricates (like J) develop after stop consonants and nasals. AH-ER for "Oscar" is the same thing; /s/ is generally a later developing phoneme, so it gets replaced with a stop - in this case a glottal. "Ogger" as the next progression also makes sense - the /s/ is still hard to produce (an s-blend actually!) but the child starts approximating the medial consonant, but with a voicing error (g for k).

lmcb: "Concanto" for Don Gato is also a phonological process: assimilation, where phonemes "absorb" characteristics of nearby phonemes. He's replacing the front sound (/d/ in don) with a back sound (/k/ in gato). And then he devoices all those consonants because kids (and language) are weird :)

Theres actually a decent overview of phonological development and common phonological processes on wikipedia.
posted by lilnublet at 6:55 AM on October 14, 2015 [3 favorites]