Why ‘Mom’ and ‘Dad’ Sound So Similar in So Many Languages | Hacker News Reader

Why ‘Mom’ and ‘Dad’ Sound So Similar in So Many Languages

theatlantic.com

74 pointsnols47 comments

In India where there are dozens of languages, this plays out interestingly... Granted, in few indian languages 'M' sound is not there.. but it uses even more basic sound 'aa'(as in used by babies earlier than 'm' sound) e.g. Aai in Marathi etc - or a similar Baa in Gujrati..

There's a joke in a Marathi children's book, which goes roughly as follows:

A: Know why we call our mothers "Aai"?

B: No, why?

A: The reason is because "aaaaa" is the sound you make when hurt or in trouble, and it's your first instinct to call to your mother for help in such cases.

B: Nonsense. Do English-speakers^ say "maaaaaaaa" when hurt?

I think Indic languages have almost every permutation of "a" and "m" for "mother" -- we have "Aai", "amma", "maaa", "mamma", ...

^Might have been Hindi speakers, I forget now.

I think its not just a matter of naming the closest person with the easiest sound, and the second closest person with the second easiest one. You know how parents say they can tell by the cries of their baby what the baby needs? After the birth of our kid I found there is actually some truth to it. When he was hungry, he smacked his lips (like when sucking) and it made a mamamama sound, or myammyammyam or maybe even nomnomnom (overlaying the crying). When he had pain, it sounded more like auääää (excuse the umlaut) or auayyyy, due to the way he suddenly opened his mouth. I can imagine this is the source of expletives like Ouch or Aua in many languages. Now that he is a bit older (~10 months) he has more control over the sounds he makes, and is experimenting with speech, but the mamama and auäää seems to stick. Funnily, he seems to say "daddy" to me, although thats not the word in this region of the world (that would be papa) and I don't know where he got it from. Also, its too early to tell if he is consciously using it for me or just experimenting with interesting sounds. I guess parents tend to overinterpret the first utterances of their kids a lot :-)

> You know how parents say they can tell by the cries of their baby what the baby needs? After the birth of our kid I found there is actually some truth to it.

In fact there are five or more "words" that newborns have that can tell you what they need. A friend showed me a video from Oprah discussing it. Below is the first link I found describing them. Her newborn nearly always calmed down immediately when she responded to him based on what she heard. I was surprised I'd never heard of these before and that they don't appear to be well-known among new parents.

http://www.whattoexpect.com/blogs/motherhoodinthemountains/n...

The author, John McWhorter, is a great guy to listen to. His TED talk[1] is interesting, his TED-Ed lessons[2] are even more interesting, and his "Story of Human Language"[3] course is so enormously interesting and fun, I listen to it as entertainment when bored.

[1] https://www.ted.com/talks/john_mcwhorter_txtng_is_killing_la...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=ted+ed+john+mcw...

[3] http://www.thegreatcourses.com/courses/story-of-human-langua...

And then in Finnish it's äiti.

Basque, which is one of the oldest, European languages with no direct relationship to any other modern language, uses "ama" for saying mom, and "aita" for saying dad (both putting the stress on the second "a").

Kannada language has something simialr - amma(mom) and appa(dad).

"ana"(mom) and "ata"(dad) for Turkish

"anne" and "baba" modern Turkey Turkish

"mama" is baby food, or how you describe food to a baby.

"Isä" and "äiti".

hungarian has "anya" for "mom" and "apa" for "dad", (although "mama" is also used sometimes but is probably a loanword).

But they also look like baby sounds.

which reminds me of episode 1--

eeseetah oida-- oo, bah...ooooo bah....

eeseetah oido! oo bah...oooobahh...

Estonian: isa and ema

I guess I'll be the geek who brings Tolkien into this, but for the curious: even the Elvish word for mom is basically a phonetic equivalent to "mommy." (I'll leave it to someone more enterprising to give us the Klingon word.)

It's SoS in Klingon.

I wonder what this tells us about Klingon physiology? After reading the article, the words for 'mother' and 'father' actually seem like interesting pieces of information to learn about any newly discovered race of aliens.

And whether they even have the concepts.

japanese falls completely outside this generalization. edit: on further investigation mama and baba are used very informally but it appears these are loanwords.

Japan is a linguistic minefield and defies generalization. In Ainu 'nanna' is mother and in Okinawan it's 'anma'. In Old Japanese there's 'haha' (and variants - 'papa' appears to have been prevelent in Old Japanese, see link in cousin post) and 'amo'.

Also note: while 'mama' is a loanword it's overwhelmingly what babies call their mothers in Japan i.e. it has outcompeted other words likely for the same reasons as said in the article.

Traditionally, they were "o-toh" for dad and "o-kah" for mom. You might add "-chan" or "-san" or remove the "o-" prefix, depending on your taste.

Personally, a phrase like "every language" immediately flags a BS sign to me.

Kids use okasan/otosan only when they are talking about third party mom/dad. They use haha (which make even more sense, according to article) or chichi when speaking about their own mom and dad.

haha and chichi are more formal.

It really depends what you mean by 'traditionally'. My reading of [1] is that the 'ka' reading is one of many although it's become more prevelant in modern usage. [2] says that 'papa' was most common in Old Japanese.

[1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E6%AF%8D#Japanese

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mama_and_papa

Japanese has 'chichi' (dad) and 'haha' (mom)

It's a nice article, but isn't this something every parent realizes after their first kid? 'Aaaah' sounds come first, then maybe an 'oh' and then the lips come in to make 'mamama' or 'bababab' and then it takes a longer time for complex words involving the tongue or non-aspirated sounds to come in (like 'teh' or 'keh').

Everyone with a brain the size a walnut already knows this: http://www.qwantz.com/index.php?comic=1581

I am in Australia, and we say 'Mum' not 'Mom'. Does anyone know why?

I have always found Mom weird.

Just one of those words with several different regional pronunciations.

If you can believe Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_and_British_English_s... - Mom is sporadically regionally found in the UK (e.g., in West Midlands English). Some British and Irish dialects have mam,[117] and this is often used in Northern English, Hiberno-English, and Welsh English. Scottish English may also use mam, ma, or maw. In the American region of New England, especially in the case of the Boston accent, the British pronunciation of mum is often retained, while it is still spelled mom. In Canada, there are both mom and mum; Canadians often say mum and write mom.[118] In Australia and New Zealand, mum is used. In the sense of a preserved corpse, mummy is always used.

Just one of many pronunciation drifts that occurred between the UK and its American colonies at some point between 1620 and 1788. Largely it seems the Americans kept the old pronunciations while the mother country changed theirs, which is why the English of Shakespeare's time sounds a bit American.

It's not quite like that. American pronunciation change as well. Here's an example of how linguist reconstruct the original pronunciation of Shakespeare plays: http://youtu.be/gPlpphT7n9s

It really has more elements that sound like West Country accent, Irish English, or even Scots/Ulster Scots.

This claim is generally made less about Standard American or General American and more about regional Appalachian dialects. Even this is a myth. http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/002699.h... http://lrc.ohio.edu/lrcmedia/Streaming/lingCALL/ling270/myth...

English and American dialects both originated in (Shakespearean) Early Modern English, but both have changed over time, as languages do.

To my ears an Appalachian accent doesn't sound that different to a regular American accent, it's just an exaggerated version of it.

No, American-English changed too.

Shakespeare doesn't sound a bit American and language has been changing since 1788 as well.

That's a long drift from the original Klingon

I say Mum in the US. I don't think there's a hard or fast rule.

I don't believe there are any hard and fast rules in the English language. It's all convention, some of which has a very high percentage of adherents, and some people in high towers claiming that one way is more correct than another. But you will find that every "rule" has some form in some region that breaks it. There's the concept of an official grammar and vocabulary in some languages, such as French, with the Académie française, but even then people don't follow the rules. English has no such official committee.

But do babies say that from the very first, when they're playing with sounds as the article says? I'm guessing not, they learn it after awhile.

Nah, it's more of a "ma" sound with a short "a".

Now what's interesting is that this sound is closer to how an American might pronounce a short "o" (I think of a southern belle fanning herself and saying "lawd it's haaaht") and how an Englishman might say a short "u". It's not exactly the same vowel but I can see how it develops.

Both versions of English think babies say "mama", but you can't shorten that to "mam" because you'd use a different "a" to pronounce that.

English has many dialects. American-English uses Mom. British-English (and Hiberno-, Australian-) uses Mum.

England?

In Korean "mam-ma" means food.

Important to remember both that the same word can mean different things in a language and that multiple words can mean the same thing. What a baby tends to call his mother in a language might not be the stock dictionary translation.

In Korean, 엄마 (eomma) [ʌmma] and 아빠 (appa) are mom and dad in informal language...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mama_and_papa

And also in Korean to say mom is "oh-moh", with emphasis on the 'moh' part. Sounds like ma as in ma and pa.

Very similar in Turkish! Minor difference: "mama".

Mother is "ana" (traditional) or "anne" (contemporary).

You'd be surprised how similar Turkish and Korean actually is. Both coming from Altaic language group the grammatical structure is very similar. It blew my mind when I first learned about that. Take a look at this...

  yap-mak == ka-da 
  yap-ma == ka-jima 
  yap-ma-yin == ka-jima-yo

They even have the same kinship rules as us (Abi, Abla, etc.). The more I'm digging in Korean culture the more similarities I'm finding during my short stay here.

Mater Pater

Imho it's an obvious thing. Strange that it takes so song article

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