Re: Does every language family contain one with "ma-" "da-" "ta-" words for parents?

-----Original Message-----
>From: Roger Mills <rfmilly@...>
>There's also the problem that we're talking about "nursery" words, that
>arise literally out of the mouths of babes (and their doting parents), are
>constantly reinvented, and notoriously resistant to/exempt from the usual
>sound changes. Since they're based on babies' acquisition sequences, I would
>guess we'll never find forms like /dZr=/ or /gwyK/.
I'm not positing any form of relatedness, or indeed anything other than noting the
frequency of those two sounds in those two words. I just remarked on somebody
else's remark that the ma/da pattern is probably older than written English. I
have nothing to prove here, nor do I want to.

If you want to go off and prove some guy I saw on TV ten years ago wrong, by all
means go ahead, but I stopped caring before this thread even came back onto the
list.



Paul