first to comment!. interesting tho.

its mothers day eve 2day

That makes very little sense. Infants do not teach adults to speak, but the other way around.

Really cool info.

I need mum mum..gu gu..ba ba hehe

I am the first one

Now for sure I will get some mum mum or gu gu!!

I arrived at Jakobson’s conclusion independently after realizing that “mamar” in Spanish means “to suck.” Then I put two and two together when I considered that get the words “mammal” and “mammary” from that basic sound of human function. It just makes sense. Happy “Mama’s Day.”

towards is British…we use toward

yay, first comment, and wow cool ^^

That is pretty cool. It’s especially interesting that all languages developed the word for ‘mother’ with at least a similar subconcious reasoning. Very appropriate article for Mother’s Day.

face

Le first? yah?

Hmm. This i must say is very interesting….although i BEG to differ.

Am I first?

Truly marvelous post. As a avid linguist, I have realized this phenomenon as well, even as far away as China and Iceland!!!

Yes, but in Georgian… “MAMA” (here phonetically…)means “dad” and the word for mom is “DEDA” (idem)…

Any explanations as to why the Georgian language seems to go in exactly the opposite direction ???

What a beautiful story! I will say this to my mommy when I talk to her tomorrow!

What a beautiful entry! I will say this to my mommy when I talk to her tomorrow!

First comment! I like your ending to the article. It was very nice. I’m glad I know this information.

[...] MAMA and her mameries — cue cards for the kid — Pap smears give the all clear — for what Papa and Mama did — that preoccupation with the breasts — is no linguistic Feat — have another taste of mother’s milk — the cross generational cultured treat. — wrap the child in the finest silk — unless poverty prevents all tests. — One more cheer for mother’s milk and three cheers for Mama’s Breasts! –>>L.T.Rhyme [...]

This was a good explanation. I’m personally a little tired of people using the fact that the word for “mama” is very similar in practically all languages as supposed evidence that all languages descend from a common ancestor.

Leonard Bernstein had a theory just like this! Check out his wonderful video on youtube, “Origin of Music.”

Mama Mia! Abba Dabba Do, Oui?

First?

Deets; didn’t you have something to say about this @ 1.45 fortnights ago as the biblio-zazi’s were derailing the thread?
Also hoping our linguist’s of the norse come back to chime in.

Thanks for this printing this informative article on Mother’s day!

Dear Hernan,

I would like to confirm that in Kurdish the word for mother is ‘daya’. It might be that etymologicall this word is close to a Kurdish verb ‘dan’, which means to give. So the meaning behind the word ‘daya’ might be ‘a giver’, which is so very true. Perhaps it is the same story in Georgian language!

With regard to ‘papa’, there is no problem. It is ‘baba’.

This explanation is ridiculous and completly ignores the influence of the Aryan empire out of Turkmanistan whose language was the root of latin, greek, sanscrit, arabic and other languges. What’s more children do not simply settle on whatever sounds they choose and form languages. Parents influence their children, nobody says “lets all do what the baby does”. The babies are making this sound out of imitation and if it were not simply a diminutive of their parent’s own word for mother said parents would not simply accept it but would actively correct them. You can not tell me in a world where parents actually untrain left handedness they would accept their children inventing words. Furthermore a text from 1962 is naturally unaware of advances in linguistic archaeology that have been made in the last half century.

Hi,

Could complete your article with some african oe aborigen words for mama, it would reinforce your explanation.
Thanks

And then there are languages that outrightly defy this pattern, like “äiti” — mother, in Finnish.

So, it appears that we all learned what the infant was anticipating from the sounds he or she makes when sucking on a breast and then we learned what to call each other. Sorry, this makes NO SENSE.

@ Ghengis John seems to make some good points here. Are we perpetuating another urban myth?

Hmm…. In Japanese the word for Mom is okaasan or haha. Doesn’t come near to sounding like “Mama”.

Seriously – Are Americans so egocentric as to think that the word for Mama is world-wide? How stupid! Babbling is when babies start trying to make sounds that are familiar and I guarantee a Chinese babbling baby does not sound like an British babbling baby to linguistic.

@ Genghis… the behaviorist theory is older than 1960’s and antiquated, outdated and disproved. Children learn language – on their own – whether or not adults correct them – in fact – several studies have shown that children will disregard grammatical corrections until they understand them. They do not just start using it because a parent tells them to. Anyway – even children who are never corrected figure out language, vocabulary, and grammar. So your argument is false. Read up on the current events – it is 2011 and 50 years of research have concluded.

This is very interesting…I also would like to add that when the baby first makes the connection between sucking and nutrition (a case of classical conditioning), he would most definitely generalize his knowledge to the one who controls when or how much he could have of that nutrition, who is, obviously, his mother. therefore, he not only addresses the sucking as something that contains the phoneme “ma” (or “am” in certain cases) but his mother as well. The mother of course, would gleefully interpret this as first steps in the baby’s language acquisition (and it is) and establish herself as whatever the baby calls her–mama.

in Arabic, mama is mom. and baba is dad or papa. there is no “p” sound in the Arabic language. just so you know……

It sounds like the Georgians are very confused. Even Russian uses “mat’” (or mama) and “otetz” for mother and father, respectively – Georgian “DEDA” sounds like Russian “dedushka”, which is grandfather, or Russian “dyadya”, which is uncle.

Dear haters

Where did language originate from? certainly, humans did no come into this world with a language already established. At one point, we had no language and had to make up sounds to convey thoughts. in essence, all the languages in the world was created by humans experimenting with sounds that their mouth can make. if a baby is capable of easily accomplishing this feat that adults are credited for, why not let them contribute to the creation of a language? What is the difference between an adult making arbitrary sounds and a baby making arbitrary sounds? In the end, they are both making arbitrary sounds. Babies, in fact, are even more creative, since they are yet uninfluenced by the present framework of the language.
A long time ago, the sound that many babies made towards their moms happened to be ‘mama’ and it is quite logical for the earlier people to use this word for children to address their moms. Even today, without teaching babies the current language, their first word (in most cases) is still ‘mama’, an existing word in our language.

Happy Mother’s Day =D

Happy mother’s day to all the mom’s out there!

I think that this post was quite interesting and I can see the connections. But my comment is towards the negative comments.

Why are you guys so angry? So what if the author didn’t think of a specific culture out of all the other ones worldwide! Is it really that big of a deal?

Stop being so serious about a post on a dictionary site and have some fun with your life!

What a marvelous tribute to all mothers.Thank you for all the liguistic information you put on Dictionary.com. Such posts encourage visitors to stop by on a regular basis

Lovely informative information especialy on mother’s day. Well timed

HAPPY MAMA’S DAY!!!!

For those entries that insist that adults teach chilldren how to speak; the teaching of children and babies is a reciprocal arrangement. Parents actually want to be able to encourage and exchange with their offspring. It’s in the interests of both parents and children to have a word that is easy and comes naturally to the child. Look at all those important early words such as “no”, “bye-bye” , “ta”. All easily pronounced.

To Ghengis John: It is true that parents influence their children and not vice versa, but language did have to come from somewhere, and wouldn’t a phonetic sound that came naturally to humans be convenient to use as a word? Remember that lots of languages are either very old or come from very old languages. This seems like a plausible explanation, unless someone has another explanation.

Babies can breathe and swallow at the same time.

in indonesian, the word for mama is ibu – so it doesnt work for turkish, indonesian, georgian, or kurdish.

but papa in indonesian follows the pattern – it is bapak (pronounced bapa)

And is there no one who believes in the account of the Tower of Babel and the confounding of languages?

that’s awesome! thanks for the explanation!xD

My baby relative can’t swallow properly without coughing……

im Gerrard

hi everyone!!!

Ok, Its a good effort by Jakobson, but the matter is still unanswered. It explains the cause of the baby’s “m” sound but how was it transferred to the vocabulary of the different cultures around the world. Did the cultures really considered the “m” sound produced by the babies in vocabularizing the word for “mother” ?

@ Ghengis John.
I would urge others to answer Ghengis John’s following question, without which the Jakobson’s propositon is incomplete.

Parents influence their children, nobody says “lets all do what the baby does”. ??

With regards to Japanese, it’s true that “okaasan” doesn’t fit the explanation above. But “mamma” is common baby-talk for food, so this would appear to lend some support to the babble-feeding connection.

While it’s true that babies learn language from adults, not vice versa, if babies produce random sounds and adults react to them and reward them (with love, feeding, etc.) then this becomes de facto communicative, and the babies will quite naturally learn to associate those sounds with e.g. mother or food. In other words, babies produce sounds, then adults teach the babies what they (the adults) think those sounds mean.

I have an alternative explanation. It’s the biblical one. We started out with one language, but God confused language at the Tower of Babel. Henceforth many languages have very similar, yet different, or even backward, words in them. And these languages have splintered and changed over time, some more than others. I do hope all mothers have had a Happy Mother’s Day today and may God Bless them.

amma ia a tamil word meaning “mother”

It’s interesting, but it breaks down a bit in the country of Georgia where “mama” actually means father.

fooooy

I LIVE IN A BAG OF POTATOES

Once a babe’s first babble was mama in some oldest civilization and the mother must be so happy to define her as mama… (lik in the article)..

Later the other civilizations that originated from this must have taken the word wit them… Its as simple as that.. So both the theories must be right…

Anyway it was from our mothers, the living gods and the cradle where we grew- civilizations

It just makes sense for parents to choose the first stable sounds a baby makes as their own “names”. The breast feeding bit was interesting, logical and unexpected though. Before one year of age a parent doesn’t teach a child (that’s physically not possible), the child teaches the parent.

Interesting. But I wonder if it’s suckling as much as kissing. Mothers worldwide (surely!) are constantly hovering over little faces and making little kissies. And when a baby’s learning to kiss, she/he really just does a big lip smack and makes the “muh” sound. Of course maybe kissing is rooted in suckling. Who knows. But, whether it’s food or kisses, it’s great to be a mom.

@Veronica — Right on! I was thinking the same thing.

Why does it seem that some people so quickly respond to any theory (from somebody else) with dissent or outright hatefulness? I understand that on many (if not most) things, not everybody will agree, and that people involved in the details will inevitably miss details (i.e., ‘Across languages an uncanny pattern appears for the word “mother.”’ — If you paid attention, is there a claim of ‘across every language’ or ‘across all possible languages’? No).

Seriously, people, try to relax a little. No statement that presents any useful or interesting information will ever describe every language… Don’t pick apart something that was written with good intentions simply because you think you can. Most often, you will not present the iron-clad argument that you expected.

NOTE: I am fully aware that it could be considered hypocritical to pick apart the dissenting opinions, if they were also with good intentions. This is not to be taken in reference to them. My whole point is that being negative just to be negative does nothing for anybody — do you feel better after you have contributed? If not, or if you feel vindicated, you’re probably acting out of (misdirected) aggression.

All this begs the question–why do some people from countries, like Hungary and a few other say the dog says “vow vow” or “wow wow” (Germanic types) vs. English speakers who seem pretty bent on “bow wow”? Does this play in to or answer any question of how we perceive language?

Chicken or egg? Personally I think babies make the “ma” sound very easily, and culturally we reinforce “mama” = “mother” because we want that to be their first word (or words – “dada” etc. ) I think many babies’ first word that they intend to convey meaning with is “NO”

children teach adults when reffering to languages the same as we see the different steps in development in a child face. have any one notice the fisiognomy of babies when they borned how they change from one day to another;some morning they look like grandparents other mornings they look like the parents.same is with words some beging saying tata nana others dada mom mama.if one would like to knw his her roots just listening to what the first words in a baby are not only mama or papa but great variety of sounds that when listening properly one can say why my baby is talking like that none of us speack german or greek. thank you very much.

@ Matt

Hatefulness? No. It’s not like I’m heartless. I can understand why people would want to believe this. It’s a heartwarming thought that fundamental commonalities of our humanity could make themselves so apparent as to crop up even in languages. Let alone in the nurturing environment shared between mother and child. It’s certainly a more appealing thought than the grim reality, that the word was spread by conquest and cultural subjugation of people. So people want to believe it. Because even if it’s a lie it’s a beautiful lie. But like the toothfairy and the easter bunny it is a whimsical and heart warming falsehood.

I could go into the various reasons that it’s wrong, I could cite studies on the transmission of culture, studies on phonological progression, I could discuss at length that parent’s don’t adopt their children’s mispronunciations of words like “tiss” for kiss and “wite” for right or ask why “twinspeak” co-opts into the parent’s language and not the other way around. I might point out the folly of citing a 50 year old scientific text, with a protracted list of examples in other fields where we would find that dinosaurs were cold blooded and featherless, or that there was no such thing as DNA. I would love to discuss the Aryan empire of Turkmenistan and ask Jakobson how the suckling process gave many of these old civilizations the same word for “horse”, “asva”. I could discuss how “common sense” observation led to geo-centric theory or how this “simple words must be invented by children.” kind of correlation, causation confusion is simply putting the cart before the horse. The case, I’m afraid is pretty ironclad actually. But none of that would matter. It would be even more long winded and a big waste time. Like Global Warming or the Theory Of Evolution if you don’t want to believe something, no matter how strong the case is you won’t.

Two hundred years on and people are still debating evolution. In the least proponents on both sides can choose what they want to believe. If you didn’t know there was a logical, fact based explanation for the wide spread adoption of the world “mama” I have provided it. The choice is there. You can choose to take it or not. But it’s there. And in that my intentions are also good. Should I say nothing because of this article’s good intentions? Misguided but well meaning intentions can do as much harm as purposefully malevolent ones can, sometimes more. Is an objection always a bad thing? If you object to somebody’s racism does that make you negative? There should always be another option than ignorance. Nobody has been forced to listen to or to accept it, but my hope is the reason of it will speak to some of the people who would have walked away from this article misinformed and disseminated that misinformation. In the very least perhaps presenting a reasonable doubt early will keep this from being the next “you eat 6 spiders a year” or “men think of sex every seven seconds” “factoid”.

You can’t make somebody believe something that they refuse to though. Bottom line. This is a pretty hotly debated idea in the Indian subcontinent for instance, where scholars press the idea while nationalist movements see it as an affront to their identity. That doesn’t mean however that a fact ceases to be simply because you don’t like it. I hate that I can’t fly like superman. No matter how much I hate it though, I still can’t. Perhaps there’s some kryptonite sneaking it’s way into my diet but I doubt it. I’m actually surprised to see such vitriol from people concerning a “fact” they just learned five minutes ago. It’s like some kind of sociological experiment. But I know life is funner with magic. Perhaps people are offended because they liked the idea and I came along and jarred them from it. I think there’s still some commentary on the thread of our common humanity to be salvaged though. You still have the feelings that the thought of the word “mother” evokes, and no matter the tongue those are universal. Hold to that and nothing has really changed.

@ JacuzziSplot

Give my regards to The Rail Tracer!

I really liked this post. Whether I agree with it or not, it made me think, and realise that there might be some connections between the first sounds a baby makes, and the first things he wants to say: mama, papa, food.

Of course, I agree with John that you cannot leave the fact that there are a few archaic languages were the rest come from. But, then, how those primitive languages were formed?
I am just guessing, but it might’ve been from very basic sounds. Nowadays we learn from our parents, there is no doubt. We say wow wow and then we learn it’s dog, or perro, chien, whatever… We say ma-da-pa and our parents correct us and we end up saying Mum and Dad, or even Father or Mother.

But how did our ancestors came to name a mother “m…” or “p…” or ibu, deda, daya, all of which are very easy to pronounce by a baby, they seem directly taken from baby babbling?

Just imagine there is no language, and you need to transmit an idea, the idea of a mother, and the baby babbles… And what is a mother? A woman with a baby. I am no scientific myself, but it seems rather possible that it might come from there.

Personally, I think baby babbling helped form the words “mum”, “dad” and perhaps even “no” in primitive languages, and those words evolved through time and differently through civilizations and languages. Ancient Turkmenistan is maybe the base for many of our modern languages, and probably brought the word mum to us, but it came from somewhere as well, from something much more primitive.

I think these post are not to be agreed or not, just to make you think. It doesn’t have to fit with what you know already, but it can complement it. We just have to open our minds to it.

I love my Mama… thats all I know.

“Mama” may not be universal, but in almost all of the examples given, the word for mother followed the pattern outlined in the article: a labial or dental followed by a wide vowel. In the case of Japanese, I believe “haha” would fall into this category just because the /h/ would be even easier for a baby to pronounce than a labial or dental. They all follow the pattern of being very simple sounds that babies can make before they learn the “adult” terms like “mother,” “Mutter,” or “okaasan.”

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Im with lori and bruce. a hole lot of people were workin on the tower on Babylon and they thought they would get all the way up to heaven , but god didn’ want them to so he made them all start Babylon different languages

This iwas awesome it could be better though

What is the reason for similarity of the phonetic variations of the common noun ‘mother’ similar in most of the languages?…

Labials (including the /m/ sound) and dentals (including the /d/ sound) are some of the first syllables infants begin learning to pronounce when they start babbling (an important step towards talking). Naturally, new parents are anxious for a more bila…

I’m no language specialist but I am a mom…. and I was calling myself mama to my daughter since before she was born and there was no man around to call papa… she said mama at a very young age of nine months…. I would make animal sounds to her in the womb and she learned to make these sounds, again, very young… I think we are the teachers as parents and we learned from our parents…. back and back in time…. somewhere all languages had to come from the same place… then we split off into other sects and bastardized the language we grew up with… happened five thousand years ago and is still happening today…. but to talk about language comming from a single place is obvious since we all began in a single place thousands of years ago…….. duh…. only a GED here but this makes sense….at least to me it does.

My wife and I were sitting in our car with our 3 and 1/2 month old son, Patrick, strapped into his car seat in the rear seat. We were exploring the route my wife had to travel in her school bus the following week when school began. Our discussions intensity escalated in volume as we were attempting to figure the route out. Out of no where we both heard Patrick utter his first 2 words. As if he were telling us to knock the conversation off. He said “oh boy” perfectly in context. I know it’s hard to believe but we both heard it. No M’s for him…..LOL