In linguistics, mama and papa refers to the sequences of sounds /ma/, /mama/ and similar ones known to correspond to the word for "mother" and "father" in many languages of the world.
The basic kinship terms mama and papa comprise a special case of false cognates. The cross-linguistical similarities between these terms are thought to result from the nature of language acquisition.[1] 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 to !Kung ba, Aramaic abba, Mandarin Chinese bàba, Persian baba, and French papa (all "father") ; or Navajo má, Mandarin Chinese māma, Swahili mama, Quechua mama, and English "mama" (all "mother").
These terms are built up from speech sounds that are easiest to produce (bilabials like m, p, and b and the open vowel a). However, variants do occur; for example, in Fijian, the word for "mother" is nana, and in proto-Old Japanese, the word for "mother" was *papa. The modern Japanese word for "father," chichi, is from older titi. In Japanese the child's initial mamma is interpreted to mean "food".[citation needed]
In some dialects of Spanish, papa is baby-talk for "food"[citation needed], and buba or pupa mean "hurt" (compare English boo-boo), which are two of the concepts that babies first learn to convey to their parents. Following the same idea, consider also English poo and pee, not to speak of baby itself (Spanish bebé), all of them showing a simple syllabic structure and bilabial consonants.
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European language examples
'Mother' in different languages:
- Catalan mamà / mama
- Chinese mama
- French maman
- Italian mamma,
- Romanian mama
- Spanish mamá,
- English mama / momma, mam in Northern England and Ireland and mum / mom,
which tend to use open vowels such as [ɑ] and [ɐ].
In Russian papa, deda and baba mean "father", "grandfather" and "grandmother" respectively, though the last two can represent baby-talk (baba is also a slang word for "woman", and a folk word for a married woman with a child born. Deva is an archaic word meaning "young lady").
Origins
Italian, Romanian and Spanish come from a Latin base, tracing the words mater and pater from Latin. In Latin language, the word "avus" means "grandfather" or "ancestor", often with a connotation of wisdom. In Spanish the word for "grandfather" is "abuelo". In Portuguese it is "avô". Latin, Sanskrit and English come from wider group of Indo-European languages.
In the Proto-Indo-European language *appa- means "papa", that is nursery word for "father".
The modern language of Hindi, has the word mātā as the formal "mother".
In Hungarian, which is a Finno-Ugric language unrelated to the Indo-European languages, apa means "father" and anya means mother.
Dravidian languages
Dravidian languages like:
all have the words amma and appa.
Asian language examples
- Mandarin Chinese, ma, mama, mu (literally) and niang.
"Father" is ba, baba, fu or die. The word fu was pronounced bilabially (as with p or b) in older and some other forms of Chinese.
- Kutenai, (a language isolate of southeastern British Columbia) Ma
- Khmer has different words that indicate different levels of respect. They include the intimate mak/meak and pa, the general mai/me and puk, and the formal madaay and ovpuk.
- Japanese, haha is the basic word for mother which does not combine with honorifics *papa
(modern Japanese /h/ derives from the bilabial fricative [ɸ]) which in turn is from the older *p.) Japanese has also borrowed informal mama and papa along with the native terms.
- In Vietnamese, mẹ is mother and bố is father. Má and ba respectively in Southern Vietnamese.
- Korean, eomma[ʌmma] is mom and appa is dad.
- Thai, me3e (long e with glottalized high-low falling tone). and "father" is pho3o (with aspirated /pʰ/).
- Georgian "mother" is "დედა" deda."father" is "მამა" mama, "grandfather" is "პაპა" papa
- Tagalog, an Austronesian language, mothers can be called nánay or ináy (diminutives of iná "mother"), and dads tátay (by contrast, not related to amá "father").
Owing to contact with Spanish and English, mamá, papá, ma(m(i)), and dad [dʌd] or dádi are also used.
The cause for this curious crosslinguistic phenomenon is believed to be the ease of pronunciation of the sounds involved. Studies have shown that children learning to speak master the open vowel sound [a] and the labial consonants (most commonly, [p], [b], and [m]).
Almost no languages lack labial consonants, and no language lacks an open vowel like [a]. The Tagalog -na-/-ta- mom/dad words parallel the more common ma/pa in nasality/orality of the consonants and identity of place of articulation. However, there is nothing of motherhood or fatherhood inherent in the sounds.
See also
References
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