Sharon Steinberg recently wrote:
> I find it fascinating that, as Scott Thornberry and Timor
> mention, that the word for father [in Turkish] is "apa."
> The word for father in Hebrew is "aba" with the accent on
> the first syllable. There is an obvious linguistic
> connection between apa and aba, and it would be amazing
> to really trace peoples' movements based on linguistics,
> although I guess that's how such movements are traced.
> Any other connections?
In fact, if you look at words for "mother" and "father" in
many languages, you will discover that they generally
involve some combination of the consonants t, d, p, b, n and
m, and the vowel a. For instance, the word for "mother" in
Inuktitut Eskimo is "anaana", for "father" is "ataata", for
"food" (baby word) is "apaapa" and for
"breast/suckling/baby.bottle" is "amaama". English has
"mama", "papa", and "dada", and also "nana" for
"grandmother" in some dialects. Note also the similarity
with the Turkish and Hebrew examples above, and other
examples posted in this discussion.
The reason for this seems to be that these are the sounds
children make earliest, and it makes some sense for their
earliest words to be made up of their earliest sounds.
Imagine how frustrating it would be for doting mothers and
fathers for their babies to say nothing resembling the words
"mommy" or "daddy" till age 5 since they couldn't correctly
produce the required sounds. (An aside: It is also true
that many of children's supposed "first words" which people
interpret to mean "mother" and "father" are really only
children's playing with the vocalization of their first
vowels and consonants.)
So I think the similarity in words for mother and father
across languages is certainly interesting, but phonological
and acquisition evidence shows that it has much more to do
with the fact that these words tend crosslinguistically to
use children's earliest sounds than that there is any
heretofore undiscovered movement patterns involving peoples
who use(d) these diverse languages.
Cheers,
Shanley Allen.
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Shanley Allen, Ph.D.
Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics
Postbus 310, 6500 AH Nijmegen, Netherlands
phone: 31-24-3521911 fax: 31-24-3521213
e-mail: allen@mpi.nl
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