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Comment by legohead | Hacker News Reader

My first thought was "mama" (and possibly "dada"), as I believe I've seen it attributed to the fact it's an easy word for babies to make since it mimics the first sounds we make. But it's not even mentioned..

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

"In linguistics, mama and papa are considered a special case of false cognates. In many languages of the world, sequences of sounds similar to /mama/ and /papa/ mean "mother" and "father", usually but not always in that order."

In Turkish those are "anne" (an-ney) and "baba"... And "mama" means baby food!

In Tunisian Arabic baby speak, “mama” means “mama” but “mam-ma” (see [1]) means food/eat.

Quite confusing, but it seems to work?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadda

In Korean, "mamma" is baby-talk for food, "eomma" is mom, and "mama" is "Your Highness" (which is also a euphemism for... measles).

So measles is a royal sickness.. I guess Korean wins haha

In Georgian's case, mom is deda and dad is mama

Reminds me of Hebrew where Who is he, He is she, and Me is who.

Also in Hebrew: fish is dog דג

I guess that is why Dagon is a sea god in Phoenician

Didn’t the Beatles write song like that?

In Russian there's no "dada", it's "papa" instead.

'd' and 'p' are close enough. specially since the point of contrast is the 'm' of the opposite(complimentary) concept/sound/principle: ma ma

Linguistically, I don't think d and p are close at all. But a sibling comment also links to the Wikipedia entry for this common fallacy.

what? linguists would universally consider d and p extremely similar, they're near identical plosives

Plosives are a big category. "k" is also a plosive, but does not sound anything like a <d> or <p>. d and p are plosives but are made using completely different parts of the mouth (dental vs labial). Perhaps some linguist will consider them "close" but "near identical" is almost certainly wrong, but I am happy to be proven wrong with a citation.

Quickly glossing over index diachronica, there's no common sound change of p<->d, but p<-b->m with the medial b has instances. (sorry for the syntax, no idea how to express this)

both you and the comment I'm replying to are hilariously hackernews pedantic

consider all the sounds humans can produce

now ask yourself

1) amongst them, if p and d are close (there is no world in which the answer to that is "no")

2) if there are real life examples of languages shifting between them or using them interchangeably (there are, papa and dada being a prime example)

Of course, I did qualify my initial comment with "linguistically", the intention was to be pedantic.

Alveolar for /d/, at least the way I say it.

Nope, see finnish for supereasy counterexample

... well go on then, what do the Finnish babies say as their first word?

And which of the zillion declensions do they use? :-p

And yet the word for grandma is suspiciously similar to mama.

The word for grandma is "isoäiti", at least in sentences like "I went to visit my grandma last weekend". Monikers such as "mummo" are borrowed from Swedish, which means that not too long ago, the finnish language seems to have been without any "mama"-related words. Which is more interesting than the fact that some of those have been borrowed into modern day finnish, since it shows that "mama" is not a universal feature of all languages.

> Monikers such as "mummo" are borrowed from Swedish, which means that not too long ago, the Finnish language seems to have been without any "mama"-related words.

I'm not sure we can conclude that? Borrowings can displace existing words, so the current state of the vocabulary doesn't necessarily tell you what was there before.

As a slightly related example in German: 'Base' and 'Vetter' for your girl and boy cousins have been replaced in the last few decades with the French borrowings 'Cousine' (also spelled 'Kusine') and 'Cousin' (also spelled 'Kuseng'). Looking just at the current vocabulary, you might conclude that German did not have specific words for these people until the French come along.

Germans also replaced 'Muhme' and 'Oheim' with 'Tante' and 'Onkel'.

Fun aside: the English word 'boss' has etymological ties with the German 'Base'. (English got 'boss' from Dutch.)

I’ve never heard “Base” (only “Kusine”) for female cousin, but still usually hear “Vetter” for male cousin, and “Vettern” for multiple cousins of mixed gender.

Our Finnish child learned to say "äiti" for mother pretty early on. But his first real word was when he started saying "mama" - meaning he wanted milk.

No idea where that came from, but we understood pretty quickly.

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