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In Africa, Swahili has mama and baba . In the Philippines, Tagalog has nanay and tatay. Fijian has nana and tata. Mandarin, so intimidatingly different from English to the learner, soothes unexpectedly in offering up mama and baba. Chechen in the Caucasus? Naana and daa. Native American languages? Eskimo has anana and ataata; Koasati, spoken in Louisiana and Texas, turns out to have mamma and taata; down further in El Salvador, Pipil has naan and tatah.
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The answer lies with babies and how they start to talk. The pioneering linguist Roman Jakobson figured it out. If you're a baby making a random sound, the easiest vowel is ah because you can make it without doing anything with your tongue or lips. Then, if you are going to vary things at all, the first impulse is to break up the stream of ahhh by closing your lips for a spell, especially since you've been doing that to nurse. Hence, mmmm, such that you get a string of mahs as you keep the sound going while breaking it up at intervals.Babies "speaking" in this way are just playing. But adults don't hear them that way. A baby says "mama" and it sounds as if he's addressing someone—and the person he's most likely addressing so early on is his mother. The mother takes "mama" as meaning her, and in speaking to her child refers to herself as "mama." Voilà: a word mama that "means" mother. That would have happened with the first humans—but more to the point, it has happened with baby humans worldwide, whatever language they are speaking. That means that even as the first language was becoming countless others, this "mama mistake" was recreating "mama" as the word for "Mom," whatever was going on with words like mregh.
Papa and dada happened for a similar pan-human reason. After babies begin making m with their lips, they pick up making a sound that involves a little more than just putting their lips together—namely, putting them together, holding them that way for a second, and then blowing out a puff of air. That's p—or, depending on your mood, b. Alternatively, babies also start playing with their mouths a little further back from the lips—on that ridge behind the upper teeth that we burn inconveniently by sipping soup when it's too hot. That's where we make a t or a d. The order in which babies learn to make sounds explains why the next closest usual caretaker to mom is so often called papa or baba (or tata or dada).
Hmm, wonder how they explain similarities in the word for "beer?"
(Score: 5, Interesting) by mendax on Sunday October 18 2015, @12:17AM
This fellow's theory may have some credence, however there are other theories that make a lot of sense. There is the Nostratic language theory [wikipedia.org] which states that most if not all languages are ultimately related to one single language. Some of the evidence of this are the similarities of very common words in languages that are otherwise unrelated. For example, the word "seven" in other Indo-European languages are uniformly similar, but the word for seven is also more or less similar in unrelated languages such as Finnish, Estonian, Hungarian, Arabic, Hebrew, Japanese, Swahili, Georgian, Sinhala. Some of these similarities may be due to exposure to other languages. For example, Arabic words are common in Swahili just as there are some Portuguese and English words in Japanese. But there are just too many words with too many similarities all over the world for this to be mere coincidence.
So, mama and papa may have its origins in mere baby talk, but I'm inclined to doubt it.
It's really quite a simple choice: Life, Death, or Los Angeles.
(Score: 1) by Francis on Sunday October 18 2015, @01:14AM
It's hard to say that most or all languages are related. I think it's rather unlikely.
I'm not sure how you'd prove it, but I suspect that the early origins of language would be similar to the early days of radio and TV where voice over artists were learning how to make all sorts of crazy sounds with their own body to make different sounds that they didn't know would be possible. Other than that, you have folks like Bobby McFerin more recently engaged in similar efforts to explore the range of possible sounds that we can produce with our vocal cords and mouths.
Once folks could make sounds reliably, assigning them to nouns and actions is relatively straightforward.
The only way to know if there is a precursor language to all the others would be to identify the timing of spoken language with respect to when humans as a group spread out over the globe. If vocalization happened after that point, then it would be a pretty strong point in favor of multiple-genesis points.
But, I doubt very much that this is an answerable question. There were no recordings and we don't even have access to the vocal chords and bodies of the earliest individuals to use language.
(Score: 3, Informative) by CirclesInSand on Sunday October 18 2015, @01:19AM
Interesting, but I think grammar is more suggestive than vocabulary. There are some things humans do with grammar that if you think about it, make absolutely no sense at all; for example, the idiosyncratic way negation is used. The common illogical things that occur in unrelated languages really say a lot about humans IMO.
PS they are probably thinking "shichi" is the Japanese for 7, which isn't entirely correct. The etymology of that way of saying 7 comes from China. "Nanatsu" is also a way to say 7, it is of purely Japanese origin.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Sunday October 18 2015, @08:11PM
IIUC, the Nostratic Language theory *does* postulate that most languages are connected if you go back far enough. That's a reasonable enough theory. It doesn't postulate that they are closely connected, and, in fact, many of them aren't.
FWIW the Nostratic family of languages is a super-family that includes Indo-European as a proper subset, but I don't know that that it includes Basque, Finn, or Hungarian. IIUC it does include various Siberian languages, but I don't think it includes any American Indian or Inuit languages. They *do* postulate a deeper level of connection that they haven't been able to find reasonable evidence for, however.
It does NOT contradict the proposed origin of "mama".
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.