Calling our parents anything other than mom, dad or one of the
many variations thereof is an almost alien concept to many (and in
some cultures is considered downright rude). So why is it we refer to
our parents in this way? Where did it come from and perhaps, more
curiously, is there any culture that forgoes this seemingly universal
nickname custom for parental figures?
The words can be traced back to the 1500's for “dad” and the
1800's for “mom”. As with so many etymologies, where these words
were first uttered and by whom is a mystery. Even the Oxford English
Dictionary has admitted that they have “no evidence” on where the
word “dad” originated. The word “mom”, on the other hand, is
a slightly different story and it’s widely believed that the word
was born from the much older word “mamma” which itself can be
traced
back
to the 1500s in English. This, in turn, can be traced back to
Latin where “mamma” meant “breast” or “teat”. From this
word,
we also got the word “mammalia” and later “mammal” to
describe animals that suckle their young.
This brings us to the amazing part- a word extremely similar to
“mom” occurs in almost every language on Earth. We don’t mean
that there is a word
for “mom” in every language; we
mean that the word for “mom” is shockingly similar across
nearly all of the most commonly spoken languages on Earth.
For example, if you wanted to address your mother in Dutch you’d
say “moeder”, if you were to travel to Germany on the other hand
you’d call her “mutter” while over in Italy you’d refer to
her as, “madre”. Now we know what you’re thinking, those are
all European languages. So let’s mix things up a bit and list
the words for mom or mother in some more, shall we say, “exotic”
languages, from an English speaker’s point of view, and see if you
start to notice a pattern:
Chinese: Mãma
Hindi: Mam
Afrikaans: Ma
Ancient Egyptian: Mut
- Swahili: Mama
As you can clearly see from this list, there’s a very peculiar
trend with “mom” in various languages in that it’s nearly
universally pronounced with an “m” sound. If you’re still
not convinced or think that we’re perhaps cherry picking examples,
here’s a
pretty
exhaustive list of ways to say “mother” in a number of
languages for you to peruse at your leisure. With a few exceptions,
our favorite of which is the Mapunzugun “Ñuke”, you’ll note
that they pretty much all employ an “m” and often a “ma”
sound.
As for the word “dad”, while there is certainly more variation
in the ways to address your man-mum in foreign languages, similar
trends can be observed. For example, the word “Papa” is present
in several languages including Russian, Hindi, Spanish and English,
while slight variations on it appear in German (Papi), Icelandic
(Pabbi), Swedish (Pappa) and a number of other languages across the
globe. Likewise in Turkish, Greek, Swahili, Malay and several
other languages the word for dad is “Baba” or a variation of it.
The current working theory to explain this fascinating phenomenon
is that the words parents use to refer to themselves are derived from
the babblings of their child during its “baby-talk” phase. It has
been observed that babies, regardless of where in the world they’re
born, naturally learn to make
the
same
few sounds as they begin to learn to speak. It has also been
noted that during the babbling stage, babies will create what is
known as “protowords” by combining nonsensical combinations of
consonants and vowels.
The really interesting part about these protowords is that they’re
consistent across different cultures for reasons that aren’t quite
clear. The words babies make in this early babbling stage tend to use
the softer contestants like B, P and M, often leading to the creation
of otherwise non-words like baba, papa and mama by the child in
question.
It’s further theorised that as these are often the first sounds
babies are able to make consistently, parents came to use them to
refer to themselves, which explains why words like “mama”,
“papa,” “dada”, “tata” and “baba” are present in so
many languages as a way of addressing one’s parents. It’s usually
less complex to say than the parent’s real names and works as a
substitute that ultimately sticks.
As to why the “ma” sound in derivations like “mamma” came
to be assigned to women instead of men, it is generally thought that
it derived from the sound babies make while suckling or feeding. It’s
noted that the only sound a baby can really make while its mouth is
full of his or her mother’s life giving bosom is a “slight nasal
murmur” or a repeated “m” sound. Further, when the baby
is hungry and sees the object of its foodie desires, it is not
uncommon for the baby to, as linguist Roman Jakobson put it,
“reproduced [it] as an anticipatory signal”. While no one
can prove this is how “mom” and its predecessor “mamma” came
about, it would at the least explain why there is an almost universal
trend of the word for mother in varying languages utilising the “m”,
and often “ma” sound.
There is no such precise theory for why the word “dad” was
specifically chosen (presumably from “dada”), but this lack of a
good reason to assign “dada” to male parents over other
variations like “papa”, “tata”, “baba”, etc. is perhaps
why there is such variation on this one in terms of which repeated
consonant is used to go along with the a’s in a given culture.
So is there any culture in which this nicknaming practise isn’t
observed? There are certainly examples of cultures that don’t
adhere to the idea of a nuclear family, but as far as applying
similar types of nicknames to parental figures, not really… At
least as far as we could find and we’re usually very good at this
sort of thing and spent more hours than we care to admit trying to
find the obligatory exception. But if you happen to be an
anthropologist or just someone who knows different and you know of an
exception where children don’t commonly give their parental figures
(whether truly their biological parents or not) some sort of
nickname, please do let us know. We came up empty on it, which makes
us a little uncomfortable as there seemingly always is at least one
exception somewhere for just about any issue. Is this an exception to
the rule that there is always an exception? It would
seem
so.
Source: todayifoundout.com
