In linguistics, mama and papa refers to the sequences of sounds /ma/, /mama/ and similar ones are known to correspond to the word for "mother" and "father" in many languages of the world, often completely unrelated among themselves. Apart from Italian mamma, Romanian mama and Spanish mamá, English has words such as mama/momma and mum/mom, which tend to use open vowels such as [ɑ] and [ɐ]. In Dutch too, mama and papa are the most common terms with which a child addresses his parents. Mama and papa also occur in Interlingua, as a result of their widespread international use. Mamma may also be used, and in fact this word predates mama. Italian, Romanian and Spanish come from a Latin base, tracing the words mater and pater from Latin. Latin, Sanskrit and English come from wider group of Indo-European languages. The modern language of Hindi, has the word mātā for mother. Dravidian languages like Kannada, Tamil, Telugu and Tulu have the words amma and appa. In Mandarin Chinese, which is completely unrelated to the above, the word for mother is ma, mama, mu (literally) and niang. For Father is ba, baba, fu or die (Pronounced as Diye) .Ma is also the word for "mother" in Kutenai, a language isolate of southeastern British Columbia. In Japanese, the basic word for mother which does not combine with honorifics is haha, which apparently derives from proto-Old Japanese *papa (modern Japanese /h/ derives from the bilabial fricative {{IPA|[ɸ]) which in turn is from the older *p.) Japanese has also borrowed informal mama and papa along with the native terms. In Thai, "mother" is me3e (long e with glottalized high-low falling tone), and "father" is pho3o (with aspirated /pʰ/). In 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. In Russian the words mama, papa, deda and baba mean "mother", "father", "grandfather" and "grandmother" respectively, though the last two can represent baby-talk (baba also means "strong woman"). Georgian is notable for having its similar words "backwards" from many other languages: "father" is მამა mama, while "mother" is დედა deda. The cause for this curious crosslinguistic phenomenon is believed to be the easiness 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. The basic kinship terms mama and papa comprise a special case of false cognates (cf. !Kung ba, Hebrew abba, Chinese bàba, Persian baba, and French papa (all "dad"); or Navajo má, Chinese māma, Swahili mama, Quechua mama, and English "mama"). The striking cross-linguistical similarities between these terms are thought to result from the nature of language acquisition (Jakobson 1962). According to Jakobson, 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. This hypothesis is supported by the fact that 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 (> ɸaɸa > haha). Furthermore, the modern Japanese word for "father," chichi, is from older titi. In fact, in Japanese the child's initial mamma is interpreted to mean "food". It is also worth noting that in some dialects of Spanish, papa is baby-talk for "food", 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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Non-Semitic languages
In some non-Semitic languages some words exist which are similar to "ab" with a related meaning, either as the result of a loan, or by a papa parallelism.
Proto-Indo-European
In the non-Semitic Proto-Indo-European language *appa- means "papa", that is nursery word for "father".
Romance languages
In the non-Semitic 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".
See also
References
- Jakobson, R. (1962) "Why 'mama' and 'papa'?" In Jakobson, R. Selected Writings, Vol. I: Phonological Studies, pp. 538–545. The Hague: Mouton.
