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

From:Paul Bennett <paul-bennett@...>
Date:Wednesday, May 10, 2006, 18:51
-----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