Mama and papa


In linguistics, mama and papa are considered a special case of false cognates. In many languages of the world, sequences of sounds similar to and 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.

Etymology

'Mama' and 'papa' use speech sounds that are among the easiest to produce: bilabials like,, and, and the open vowel. They are, therefore, often among the first word-like sounds made by babbling babies, 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, and Persian baba ; or Navajo amá, Mandarin Chinese māma, Swahili mama, Quechua mama, and Polish mama. For the same reason, some scientists believe that 'mama' and 'papa' were among the first words that humans spoke.
Linguist Roman Jakobson hypothesized that the nasal sound in "mama" comes from the nasal murmur that babies produce when breastfeeding:

Variants

Variants using other sounds do occur: for example, in Fijian, the word for "mother" is nana, the Turkish word is ana, and in Old Japanese, the word for "mother" was papa. The modern Japanese word for "father," chichi, is from older titi. Very few languages lack labial consonants, and only Arapaho is known to lack an open vowel /a/. The Tagalog -na- / -ta- parallel the more common ma / pa in nasality / orality of the consonants and identity of place of articulation.

Examples by language family

"Mama" and "papa" in different languages:

Afro-Asiatic languages

In the Proto-Indo-European language, *mā́tēr meant "mother" and *pǝtḗr meant "father", and meant "papa", a nursery word for "father".

Romance

: Mātṛ / Ambā