Why babies in every country on Earth say 'mama' | Hacker News Reader

Why babies in every country on Earth say 'mama'

theweek.com

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This is a highly contested subject in linguistics and very much not definitive like the article makes it out to be. There are many languages where mama does mean mother, but there are many languages where it does not. In some cases, you get the opposite. In proto-Old Japanese, for example, papa meant mother. In Georgian, mama means father and deda means mother. I don't know enough about the mama/papa topic to comment further, but a quick Google suggests that this paper is somewhat well regarded by at least some people:

https://www.sussex.ac.uk/webteam/gateway/file.php?name=where...

Eeeh, either you cited the wrong article, or I'm very confused. That paper, and what's written in your comment, actually supports what the original article says. It's the same thesis, actually. The paper that you link to is even written by R. Jacobson, the author of the book that's cited in the article; it supports the article's position and addresses your specific objections. So it's a highly contested theory, but you cite a paper supporting it?

What that paper does argue is against "in the beginning, there was one language" theories, which is not the same thing at all.

Granted, the original submission goes a bit overboard. It's not "nearly every language", it's about 55% of all languages for "mama" as mother, and 55% for "papa"/"baba" as father, there's a lot of mixing m/p/b (the labial consonants) and so on. But both you, and the paper you link to, are supporting that position, essentially.

Pertinet excerpt from linked paper:

"8. Conclusion.

As the evidence shows clearly, the mama/papa words are created by parents who are eager to believe that their children are trying to talk when in fact those children are merely producing the universal babbling noises.

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.

Again and again parents create words like mama ‘mother’, and again and again these creations pass out of the nursery into adult speech, displacing other words in the process.

As a result, we find the mama/papa words in languages all over the planet, in much the same form everywhere, and we frequently find them in the process of displacing older and more formal words, which themselves may be the greatly changed remains of earlier mama/papa words."

Yup.

In the South Indian language Tulu, "ma" root word (ie., Amme) is used to refer to the father and the "pa" for mother (ie.,Appe).

Also, mama = Uncle in many Indian languages (both Dravidian and Indo-European).

In Turkish, mother is "anne" (pronounced ah-neh) and father is "baba". I don't know whether or not Turkish babies make the mama sounds or not, not having experienced them doing so.

Well, "mama" in Turkish is a nickname for breast milk. So if a foreign man in Istanbul is calling his mother "mama" all the time, expect some giggles.

In rural areas and during the pre-republican period mother is "ana", in Turkish.

"Mamu" means "Mother" for Balkanian Turks.

Mama isn't always the first "word". Some babies start with dada or papa, sometimes to the dismay of their mother who don't understand the development of language and feel rejected...

It is not surprising that some culture developed it the other way around.

I watched my brother grow up and his first word was "give me". Well, to be pedantic it was "dai", which means "give me". Given that it's a simple single syllable, it's somewhat in line with the article...

Edit: before you ask, yes he did know exactly what it meant. He'd point at things and say "dai", fully expecting you to bring it to him.

before you ask, yes he did know exactly what it meant. He'd point at things and say "dai", fully expecting you to bring it to him.

I think you may well be reading too much in to it. Reaching for things and uttering out of frustration if they're out of reach comes long before any useful linguistic understanding.

Do you remember how old he was? As someone with several younger siblings and newborn foster siblings, I'd guess that it was a cute coincidence (as many "first words" are).

2 or 3. It's an interesting philosophic argument though - if he knew that pointing at things and saying that word led to others almost always giving him what he asked for, does that mean he knew the meaning of the word, or is he just aware of its effect? Is saying "mama" and expecting mom to come any different, given that it's not an actual full imperative sentence?

First word at age 2 or 3 years old? Can't be. With a 3-year-old you can talk using short sentences, and typically they know about 100-200 words, sometimes more. The first word like "mama" "baba" "tata" usually comes out at age <12 months.

Both our kids produced 'dada' before 'mama' - seems quite common.

Finnish = äiti

Hungarian = anya

Kannada = ತಾಯಿ (taayi) ... "avva" sometimes colloquial.

Telugu = తల్లి (talli)

Interestingly enough, "äiti" is actually a (very old) loanword of Germanic origin. The original Finnish word for "mother" is "emä" or "emo", deriving from the Proto-Uralic "*ämä". "Emä" and "emo" are still in use in poetry and in some compound words in a figurative sense, for instance "emolevy" (motherboard) and "emäalus" (mothership).

In modern Finnish, "mamma" is one of the words used colloquially to refer to one's grandmother (cf. "granny"). In some dialects, it can also mean simply "mother". These usages are probably loaned from Swedish where the formal words for mother and father are "mamma" and "pappa" respectively.

äiti, anya (pronounced ~aaya) and avva are still compatible with the explanation.

The Telugu word is the formal name (corresponding to mother on Wikipedia). Are you familiar with the language?

We'd need statistics on the frequency of the first consonant utterance, and see if it correllates with the distribution of the names given to mothers by babies.

Yes, Telugu is my mother-tongue and Kannada is my first-language. In spoken Telugu today, 'amma' is far more common than 'talli'. In written Telugu, both are equally common. 'talli' has secondary meaning of just refering to any female. For example, "chitti talli" (little girl), "talli-tandrulu" (mother-father, i.e., parents), etc. Similar remarks apply to Kannada. Avva is informal and more common in rural dialects.

> In spoken Telugu today, 'amma' is far more common than 'talli'.

That's intriguing, because 'amma' is the Tamil word for mother.

Talli is to mother as Amma is to the mama word from the article. Interestingly, 'mama' in Telugu is uncle.

Mama also means mother in Hungarian though. Nagymama (nagy means big) is grandmother.

North Sámi = eadni

Way better read than the OP. You seem to be pretty well-versed in the field. What readings would you recommend to someone interested in historical linguistics?

I don't see where you disagree with the article. From what I understood, the article is suggesting that the reason we all have mama, papa or similar words in our languages is their relatively easy prononciation coupled with the baby's needs. Where is it saying that mama definitely means mother?

Tagalog:

formal: nanay (mom), tatay (dad) or just nay or tay for short

informal: Ina (Mother), Ama (Father)

It's interesting that even the formal words are simple enough for a baby to pronounce.

FWIW, "mama" means something entirely different (formal, uncommon term for gentleman).

And in Maori Papa is the Earth Mother.

Bulgarian: mama, tati

Polish: mama, tata (of course not in formal contexts).

“Every language has a word for water. In Swahili they call it maji. In Dutch, it's vand.”

‘Vand’ is not an existing word in the Dutch language. The Dutch word for water is ‘water’.

"Vand" is apparently Danish for "water". I guess the author isn't very good with languages.

Or, more likely just misread their notes.

Would definitely not be the first person to confuse the Danish and the Dutch, :p

Because they start with D? They sound so completely different …

In Japanese, the work "Manma" is a baby-talk word that means food. "Mama" is used for mother sometimes, but I think this is a recent influence from the West. "Haha" is the normal (non-polite) word for mother, although children are taught to use the more polite "o-kaa-san." "Haha" still has those repeated "ah" sounds.

Haha isn't the normal word for mother, you only use it when talking about your own mother to someone else in a formal setting. Mama has the most casual sound to it. Okaasan (or one of its derivatives) is slightly more formal. Depending on the family, you might use either when talking to your mother.

My late father-in-law spoke a language, one of the Austronesian aboriginal languages of Taiwan, in which the word /mama/ indicated "father" rather than "mother." Several languages are like that, and some human languages do not have the word /mama/.

The article cites Roman Jakobson on the issue, and he is the correct person to cite, but the article doesn't digest the findings of linguistics (a subject I have studied) helpfully. There isn't any universal word "mama," and there isn't any universal association of one sound string or a small subset of sound strings with feeding infants.

AFTER EDIT:

Hurrah for the earlier comment here

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5694995

which links to a much better article

https://www.sussex.ac.uk/webteam/gateway/file.php?name=where...

and well deserves your upvote.

Interestingly, in Spanish "mama" means "breast". The intimate word for mother is "mamá" (stress on the second syllable, not the first).

Well, Spanish is a Romance language[1]. ‘Mamma’ is Latin for ‘breast’, so that makes sense. It’s where words like ‘mammal’ and ‘mammogram’ come from.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:LatinEuropeans.png

Even more interestingly, "ma(ma)" means breast too in the dialect of my home town which locates at the central part of China.

In baby-Turkish "mama" means meal. And "meme" means breast.

"Mama" in Hungarian means grandmother. On the very very rare occassions when I heard a Hungarian child call her mother 'mama', it felt really awkward and strange, and always suspected western cultural influences (i.e. western dad or moving between countries, etc.).

I am dutch and I can tell you that the third sentence of that article is wrong. 'vand' doesn't even resemble a dutch word.

> The "m" sound is the easiest for a baby mouth to make when wrapped around a warm delicious breast.

The article presents a hypothesis without experimental evidence.

Because the experiments to conclude the "natural" language by not teaching children any language at all are highly unethical.

But not unheard of: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_deprivation_experiment...

I am sceptical of the claim that "mama" comes from the act of suckling. That claim is unsupported by evidence as far as I can tell from the links in the article and is reminiscent of behaviorism.

Verifying that hypothesis does not require depriving anyone of language and may be able to be achieved through observational studies of babies of babies that are in pre-existing situations where they do not suckle breasts and in cases where they have no interaction with their mothers.

Notwithstanding the above, if experimental evidence cannot be produce a hypothesis cannot be proven and the claim should be appropriately discounted.

But the hypothesis is that the word for mother _in a certain language_ comes from that situation. Those breast-deprived babies you observe would not be creating their own language (unless you do more than just observe :-/), so what would you be observing? A difference in frequency of ma-sounds from other babies?

> But the hypothesis is that the word for mother _in a certain language_ comes from that situation.

No it isn't. The hypothesis described in the article explains the purported cause for the universality of the word "Mama".

And yes you would observe if the frequency of "ma" was lower which would tell you if the "ma" sound is behaviorally induced by suckling which is the claim described in the article.

It's still about words that are part of a language, not about sounds made by one baby. The universality was about the sounds becoming part of the language.

The process of creating a new word in language is not the same as the process of interpreting sounds as belonging to a certain word in a language. So you still have that bridge to gap between "higher frequency of ma" and how the word "mama" was created. Perhaps it's convincing, I'm not sure.

As an aside being deprived of language does occur to a very small number of children which does present some observational data. Chomsky talks about this in one of his recent lectures.

I had come here to say exactly this. This article feels very much like armchair theorizing. Is there any evidentiary suport for it? I couldn't find much.

3rd sentence is already wrong.

> "In Dutch, it's vand."

Should be:

> "In Danish, it's vand."

> "In Dutch, it's water."

Their story checks out.

Using google translate, I can't find a single language that does not have a 'mama' or something very similar.

Fun thing I found on Wiktionary is that in Georgian, /mɑmɑ/ is a word for father[1] and mother is /dɛdɑ/[2].

Add: oh, and it's "panjo" in Esperanto... :)

Other languages outside of rule may possibly include Eshtehardi, Fijian, Greenlandic, Inuktitut, Igbo, Kyrgyz, Malay, Maori, Mari, Moksha, Thai and Vietnamese (suspections per http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/mum#Translations and http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/mother#Translations). Personally, I've unfortunately never even heard about half of those languages, and not familiar with the ones I've heard about to the extent I can confirm or opposite.

[1]: http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E1%83%9B%E1%83%90%E1%83%9B%E1...

[2]: http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E1%83%93%E1%83%94%E1%83%93%E1...

As a member of a Vietnamese speaking household, mom is still vaguely similar to English.

Of course, I could be wrong since I have moderate hearing loss.

You didn't look well enough:

http://translate.google.com/#en/ka/mom%0Amother%0Adad%0Afath...

(Though for some reason, GT translates English "mama" into Georgian "mama", meaning 'father'. But then, one should really not use GT for linguistic research …)

Most Indian languages also follow this pattern, however Marathi uses 'Aai' for mother

The "pure" Tamil word for mother is "thaai". There's no relation between the two languages, however.

That's interesting, I never knew that...thanks

in georgian, 'mama' is father, and 'deda' is mother. it is a striking exception.

And 'papa' is a synonym of grandfather in eastern Georgia (e.g. Kakheti).

Regarding the first "word" (a nonsense actually) - it is usually "Aghu". Even before a baby starts talking anything, parents encourage them - "Say aghuu, aghuu" :)

Is it just Georgian or the entire Kartvelian language family?

the short answer is i don't know. however the kartvelian group consists of only four languages, geographically near each other, and they are 'closely related[1]' according to wikipedia. one might expect a some degree of mutual intelligibility, as between czech and slovak, for example.

[1](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kartvelian_languages)

In spanish 'mama' and 'papa' are the actual words for mom and dad, respectively (and IIRC they are too in italian). Funny that other languages don't use the same simple sounds for both.

Auto-nitpick: Well, actually it's not 'mama' but 'mamá' (same with 'papa'), the accent is in the last syllable

In Japanese you use "haha" and "chichi" to refer to your own mother and father (respectively), instead of the more formal "okaasan" and "otousan".

In spoken croatian, mama is mother, tata is father. In some dialects baba is grandmother or old lady and dida (deda) is the grandfather.

In Italian, mama is "mamma", dad is "pap�" (in pap� you stress the second syllabe)

In Mandarin too - mother is 'mama', and father is 'baba'

I've recently wondered if shaking the head to signify disagreement or refusal stems from that being an effective way for a child to refuse food it doesn't want. My son shakes his head almost reflexively, and it makes it very hard to feed him something he doesn't want.

Probably not. When I was in Nepal, I noted shaking head left and right means "yes". And "no" is done with the hand open, rolling it on the axis of the arm ("couci-couça" in French).

BTW Children are sponges, they copy you. For instance my wife and I do not like that much fruits, and our kid don't either, which is sad.

Here is an article I saw recently about word roots with possible global reach, called "Global Etymologies" http://jdbengt.net/articles/Global.pdf

It's quite interesting to just look at the examples. It's proposed that certain word roots might end up in different places in different languages, i.e. what means knee in one language can be close to elbow in another. Reocurring is of course that body parts and mothers, which is common humanity, is a big part of the words examined.

This recalled a childhood memory. When I was extremely young my first words were 'mum' and I used to refer that for thirst. So mum meant 'give me water' and since mother used to be around, she was the one to provide it. Or it could be that mother taught me to associate 'mum' with water as that was the word I could pronounce first. Hmm..

It is not universal but it seems fairly close to universal. I do think mmm comes as an early sound in part because of suckling. If a baby can't suckle, it likely won't live. The article is being a bit humorous about it but I made the same basic point to someone recently while discussing this.

Is someone looking through my comments to write articles about? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5671337

Probably just a coincidence but feels a bit weird.

In portuguese 'mamar' means to suck, usually associated with babies. Mother is 'mãe' or 'mamãe'. Actually, the r is usually dropped when speaking, so 'mamar' is usally spoken 'mama'.

"The child is recognizing that the hairy flat-chested lunk trying to sing "Little Bird" to it is NOT Primary Food Dispersal Unit #1."

Laughed out loud with this. Nice article!

The Basque (a language isolate) word for mother is 'ama'.

It's probably the other way around. Babies learn their first sounds, and languages, as they develop, assign those words to the moms and dads.

Interesting read. In Turkish 'mama' = baby food and also 'meme' = breasts. Also it looks like there is connection to word 'mammal'

In my language Malayalam, mother is 'Amma'. Maman or more correctly 'Ammavan' is uncle.

Mama in Mandarin Chinese literally means mother.

I always assumed that it was a loanword though, and that 娘, 母親 were the "original" words for mother.

Curiously, "ma" is always the first syllable that is taught to students of Mandarin (to explain the tones).

Apparently it is not a Western loanword - http://wold.livingsources.org/word/77161647552647739

Strictly speaking, "ma1ma" is equivalent to "mummy/mommy" and "mu3" is the formal "mother".

The same in Lithuanian. The more formal version is "motina".

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