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

On Thu, 11 May 2006, Benct Philip Jonsson wrote:
>
> Daniel Hicken skrev:
> > While I was only able to glance at the whole thread, it is interesting
> > that nearly all of them use the principle stops of a baby, /m/, /d/,
> > /t/, /b/, /p/.  Even the Euskaran example of /aita/ has the
> vocalic with
> > the stop attached.  Interesting.  Which leaves one to wonder, did the
> > short names of mama, papa, dada, etc. come from babies?  Curious!
[snip]
>
> Yes, that's what the famous Russian linguist
> Roman Jakobson thought.  In a paper named,
> IIRC, "Why mama and papa" he pointed out that
> babies' first articulations are like [m6m6m6],
> then comes [p6p6p6], then [n6n6n6], then
> [d6d6d6].  Note how the baby's primary relation
> gets identified with the first type of articulation
> -- after that assignment is probably culture-
> dependent.  Sometimes however the assignment of
> "meanings" to these baby utterances is slightly
> different: in Latin _mamma_ means "breast";
> perhaps because upper-class Roman babies weren't
> breast-fed by their birth mothers, and perhaps
> by different other women at different times.
>
> I googled for "jakobson mama papa" and found
> a PDF treating the subject at length:
> <http://tinyurl.com/7pf6n>.
Impressively well-written paper, easy to understand
and quite easy to be seduced by its conclusions.  How-
ever, I wasn't able to deduce its author ... !?


and Larry Sulky replied:
[snip]
> My son's first 'word' was [m6m6m6], which very clearly meant "food /
> I'm hungry".
My son's first utterance at seven months, was
"Yahya, berat!"
by which he informed me, by name, and in
grammatically perfect Malay and with perfect
enunciation, that he had messed himself ...

He even got the "h" in the middle of my name
correct - something most English speakers can't
do to this day.  My wife was a bit disappointed,
as it was over a week later before he deigned to
name her: "Nisha!"

No baby-talk for him!  But guess what?  We'd
decided, even before he was born, that we
wouldn't handicap him with having to learn an
extra language that he would later find to be
socially inacceptable, namely baby-talk.  Instead,
we agreed to use "proper" language with him at
all times.  His nursemaid, however, wasn't under
any injunction to use any particular kind of
language; by her own choice, Sabnah spoke simply
but affectionately to him, mostly in Malay, some-
times in English; I did likewise, while my wife
spoke mostly English.

I have an inkling of a theory ... kids reproduce -
 - what they can do
 - of what they hear
 - when they want to.
We might call this the "nature, nurture and free
will" hypothesis. ;-)

Jakobson's theory seems to me to cover only the
first of these three bases.  Comments?

Regards,
Yahya

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