(This article first appeared in the June 2017 edition of Lexpert)
Why mama
and papa?
by
Howard Richler
Around the globe, May and
June represents the most common months that honour mothers and fathers
respectively. Surprisingly, the near universality of recognition for parents is
almost matched by the similarity that many languages have for the two words.
In the 1950s, the American anthropologist George Murdoch studied
the words for mother and father in 470 languages scattered throughout the
planet. His analysis showed that the word for mother contained a syllable
similar to ma in 52% of cases whereas
the word for father contained this syllable in only 15% of the languages.
Conversely, the word for father has a syllable akin to pa or ta in 55% of his
language sample, while these syllables occurred in the word for mother in only
7% of cases.
What accounts for these staggering proclivities?
One theory proposed is called the “Proto-World Hypothesis” which
posits that the similarity of words for
mother and father in various languages
can be explained by the words being present in the ancestral language of mankind and that these words have simply survived in
hundreds of languages in a similar form and with the exact same meaning.
But before we examine the veracity of this theory, let’s look at
some of the parental words in various languages. Since Mother’s Day celebrations
usually precede ones for Father’s Day and we have the entrenched expression “ladies
first,” we will start with mother words.
Most languages seem to have a word for mother that is either “mama” or
has a nasal sound similar to mama, such as “nana.” Observe, Arabic ahm, Basque ama, Bosnian majha,
Chechen nana, Dutch moeder, Greek mana, Quechua and Romanian mama,
Tagalog nanay, Urdu ammee and Welsh mam to name but a few.
On the paternal side of the equation we have Albanian,
Mandarin and Turkish
baba,
Greek babbas, Hindi and Russian, papa, Italian padre, Latvian tevs,
Welsh
tad,
and Xhosa tata.
Although what I previously referred to as the Proto-World
Hypothesis sounds logical, it doen’t hold up to a close scrutiny or accord with
scientific evidence which was extrapolated by pioneering Russian-American
linguist Roman Jakobson. In
Jakobson’s 1959 article Why “mama” and papa”? he explained that
babies everywhere acquire language in a very orderly fashion. At first the
vocalizations of a baby are done by crying or shrieking. After this, the infant
moves to a cooing stage characterized by those distinct baby noises. In this
period the young child is not making any recognizable speech sounds and is
still in the pre-speak period. But it is during the next phase – the babbling
stage that something significant occurs. Here we begin to hear recognizable
speech sounds in the form of vowels and consonants. The easiest vowel sound
for babies to utter is ah because it can be made without doing
anything with the tongue or lips. Thus the “ah” sounds in “mahs” and “pahs.
Very often these speech sound s are repeated and the “mah” sound turns into
“mahmah.” Of
course the baby isn’t really speaking, it’s babbling, but it sounds
like speaking to adults and as if the baby is
addressing someone who most likely is
the mother. Naturally, mom takes mama as meaning her, and when speaking to her
baby refers to herself as mama.
As anyone learning English as a second language knows,
certain consonants are
very difficult to pronounce such as the th sound in the beginning of words such
as
“the” and at the end of words like “south,” Even a
three- year old child whose first
language is English might have a problem with this
sound and their rendition of
think
might emerge as fink. On the other
hand, some consonants are quite easy to
produce. These are the sounds that are made entirely
with the lips such as m, p, or
b.
These are easier because they require no tongue work; all that is required for
their production is placing the two lips together and
releasing them. The m sound is
easiest of all
and this explains why mama invariably
precedes papa.
Papa
is virtually ubiquitous for a similar reason. After babies begin making the m
sound with their lips, they’re likely to make a sound
that involves slightly more
than just the putting of their lips together. This new
sound involves not only the
putting of the
lips together, but holding them in that
position for a second or two
and then blowing out a puff of air. This invariably
produces a p or a b sound.
Another possibility involves the slightly more
complicated procedure in which the
baby plays with its mouth a little further back from
the lips and this elicits a t
or d
sound. The order in which babies acquire these sounds
explains why the second-in-
command caretaker to mama is usually called papa,
baba, tata, or dada.
A happy Mother’s Day and Father’s Day – even to those
whose mother tongues
represent the rare languages whose words for parental
figures diverge from this
theory.
Richler’s latest book Wordplay:
Arranged and Deranged Wit was published in 2016
