This article needs additional citations for verification .(October 2011) |
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. This is thought to be a coincidence resulting from the process of early language acquisition. [1] [2] [3] [4]
'Mama' and 'papa' use speech sounds that are among the easiest to produce: bilabial consonants like /m/, /p/, and /b/, and the open vowel /a/. They are, therefore, often among the first word-like sounds made by babbling babies (babble words), and parents tend to associate the first sound babies make with themselves and to employ them subsequently as part of their baby-talk lexicon. Thus, there is no need to ascribe to common ancestry the similarities of !Kung ba, Aramaic abba, Mandarin Chinese bàba, Yoruba bàbá, and Persian baba (all "father"); or Navajo amá, Mandarin Chinese māma, Swahili mama, Quechua mama, and Polish mama (all "mother"). For the same reason, some scientists believe that 'mama' and 'papa' were among the first words that humans spoke. [5]
Linguist Roman Jakobson hypothesized that the nasal sound in "mama" comes from the nasal murmur that babies produce when breastfeeding:
Often the sucking activities of a child are accompanied by a slight nasal murmur, the only phonation which can be produced when the lips are pressed to mother’s breast or to the feeding bottle and the mouth full. Later, this phonatory reaction to nursing is reproduced as an anticipatory signal at the mere sight of food and finally as a manifestation of a desire to eat, or more generally, as an expression of discontent and impatient longing for missing food or absent nurser, and any ungranted wish. When the mouth is free from nutrition, the nasal murmur may be supplied with an oral, particularly labial release; it may also obtain an optional vocalic support.
— Roman Jakobson, Why 'Mama' and 'Papa'?
The baby, with no particular thought, is babbling his "mamma, mamma", and the adults are interpreting it their own way. Some imagine he calls "mother", others believe he addresses his father, and yet others thinks he calls no one, but is simply hungry, wants to eat. They are all equally correct, and are all just as equally mistaken.
— Lev Uspensky, The Word About Words (1954)
Variants using other sounds do occur: for example, in Fijian, the word for "mother" is nana, in Turkish, the word for mother is ana, and in Old Japanese, the word for "mother" was papa. The modern Japanese word for "father", chichi, is from older titi (but papa is more common colloquially in modern Japanese). Very few languages lack labial consonants (this mostly being attested on a family basis, in the Iroquoian and some of the Athabaskan languages), and only Arapaho is known to lack an open vowel /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.
"Mama" and "papa" in different languages: [7] [8]
In the Proto-Indo-European language, *mā́tēr (modern reconstruction: *méh₂tēr) meant "mother" while *pǝtḗr (modern reconstruction: *ph₂tḗr) and átta meant "father".
Old Indo-Aryan (Sanskrit): Mātṛ / Ambā for "mother" and Pitṛ / Tātaḥ for "father".
In grammar, the vocative case is a grammatical case which is used for a noun that identifies a person being addressed or occasionally for the noun modifiers of that noun. A vocative expression is an expression of direct address by which the identity of the party spoken to is set forth expressly within a sentence. For example, in the sentence "I don't know, John," John is a vocative expression that indicates the party being addressed, as opposed to the sentence "I don't know John", in which "John" is the direct object of the verb "know".
A mother is the female parent of a child. A woman may be considered a mother by virtue of having given birth, by raising a child who may or may not be her biological offspring, or by supplying her ovum for fertilisation in the case of gestational surrogacy.
Papa is a word used in many languages as an affectionate term for father.
Mama(s) or Mamma or Momma may refer to:
A contraction is a shortened version of the spoken and written forms of a word, syllable, or word group, created by omission of internal letters and sounds.
An honorific is a title that conveys esteem, courtesy, or respect for position or rank when used in addressing or referring to a person. Sometimes, the term "honorific" is used in a more specific sense to refer to an honorary academic title. It is also often conflated with systems of honorific speech in linguistics, which are grammatical or morphological ways of encoding the relative social status of speakers. Honorifics can be used as prefixes or suffixes depending on the appropriate occasion and presentation in accordance with style and customs.
Slovak, like most Slavic languages and Latin, is an inflected language, meaning that the endings of most words change depending on the given combination of the grammatical gender, the grammatical number and the grammatical case of the particular word in the particular sentence:
Yanyuwa is the language of the Yanyuwa people of the Sir Edward Pellew Group of Islands in the Gulf of Carpentaria outside Borroloola in the Northern Territory, Australia.
An amah or ayah is a girl or woman employed by a family to clean, look after children, and perform other domestic tasks. Amah is the usual version in East Asia, while ayah relates more to South Asia, and tends to specifically mean a nursemaid looking after young children, rather than a general maid.
In Tamil, honorifics governs daily speech and register of both written and spoken communication. Traditionally, Tamil has been classified into two registers viz செந்தமிழ் (Centamiḻ) meaning 'classical' or 'pure ' Tamil and கொடுந்தமிழ் (Koṭuntamiḻ) meaning 'corrupt' Tamil. A huge feature of this difference is honorifics. Tamil honorifics usually are suffixes, although prefixes are not uncommon.
Hindustani, also known as Hindi-Urdu, is the vernacular form of two standardized registers used as official languages in India and Pakistan, namely Hindi and Urdu. It comprises several closely related dialects in the northern, central and northwestern parts of the Indian subcontinent but is mainly based on Khariboli of the Delhi region. As an Indo-Aryan language, Hindustani has a core base that traces back to Sanskrit but as a widely-spoken lingua franca, it has a large lexicon of loanwords, acquired through centuries of foreign rule and ethnic diversity.
Caló is an argot or slang of Mexican Spanish that originated during the first half of the 20th century in the Southwestern United States. It is the product of zoot-suit pachuco culture that developed in the 1930s and '40s in cities along the US/Mexico border.
Reduplication in Russian is used to intensify meaning in different ways.
Ab or Av, sometimes Abba, means "father" in most Semitic languages.
Teknonymy is the practice of referring to parents by the names of their children. This practice can be found in many different cultures around the world. The term was coined by anthropologist Edward Burnett Tylor in an 1889 paper. Such names are called teknonyms, teknonymics, or paedonymics.
The following is a list of words and formulations commonly used as profanity throughout Romania.
Siraya is a Formosan language spoken until the end of the 19th century by the indigenous Siraya people of Taiwan, derived from Proto-Siraya. Some scholars believe Taivoan and Makatao are two dialects of Siraya, but now more evidence shows that they should be classified as separate languages.
The kinship terms of Hindustani (Hindi-Urdu) differ from the English system in certain respects. In the Hindustani system, kin terms are based on gender, and the difference between some terms is the degree of respect. Moreover, "In Hindi and Urdu kinship terms there is clear distinction between the blood relations and affinal relations."
In the Sinhalese language, it is almost always compulsory for the speaker or writer to take into account the importance of the subject and of the object when constructing a sentence. Sinhalese uses a vast collection of honorifics to reflect the speaker's relationship with the subject and object of the sentence, and it also reveals the level of importance the society or the writer has given to them. In the present stage of the language, honorifics are mostly used in the literary language as opposed to in the vernacular, and their use is being gradually limited to only formal occasions.
Majha Hoshil Na is an Indian Marathi language television series which aired on Zee Marathi. It starred Gautami Deshpande and Virajas Kulkarni in lead roles. It is produced by Subodh Khanolkar, Onkar Kate and Sujay Hande under the banner of Ocean film company and directed by Aniket Sane. It premiered from 2 March 2020 by replacing Swarajyarakshak Sambhaji.
[A] considerable number of elements crept into Philippine languages...including...nanay...and tatay.