Re: Common words for man & husband, woman & wife

Paul Bennett wrote:
> On Sun, 07 May 2006 15:56:28 -0400, R A Brown
> <ray@...>  wrote:
>
>>> You don't know when the earliest usage of Mum/Mam/Mom or Dad was, do
>>> you?
>>
>>
>> 'fraid not - tho I think one can be certain it was being used for
>> quite  a time before it ever got recorded in writing.
>
>
> The fact that the ma / da pattern is found in every documented language
> family on the planet[*] is surely testament to that.
>
> [*]Interestingly, in Georgian (IIRC, but I can't speak for the entire
> set  of languages in the Caucasus), it's da for mother and ma for father.
Not so much those syllables specifically, but it is a common pattern
that "mother" uses nasal consonants, and "father" uses front oral
consonants.

In Old Japanese, though, "mother" was /papa/ (/haha/ in the modern
language) and father was /titi/ (/tSitSi/ in the modern language)