Larry Trask's paper on mama and papa

[Helmut Richter]

I have recently retrieved a copy of Larry Trask's paper
“Where do mama/papa words come from?” from
https://www.sussex.ac.uk/webteam/gateway/file.php?name=where-do-mama2.pdf&site=1

The text does not contain Larry Trask's name nor any other hint of its
origin. Just the headline and the text.

I am much interested in learning
* the date year when it was written, and
* whether it has ever been published in any form, and if so, when and where

Thank you.

--
Helmut Richter

[Daud Deden]

Can't help you with that, sorry Helmut.
-

Yusuf, does "aurat" in Arabic mean 'one-eyed, defective', as Trask claimed in the paper?

[Yusuf B Gursey]

ʕawrā'أَوْرَاءُ is 'one eyed (f) but the word comes from Classical Arabic ʕawrah / ʕawrat-un عَوْرَةٌ 'defectiveness', 'imperfection', 'weak spot' pl. ʕawrāt عَوْرَاتٌ 'genitilia', 'parts of the body required to be kept covered' (Quranic). The meaning 'woman' comes from seeing all parts of the female shameful, a woman as a whole a genital section and in need of covering (a strict reading of the Quranic passage refers only to the genitalia). Use of `awrat / `avrat as 'woman' is only found in the Persian sphere of influence (Turkey, Caucasus, Central Asia and northern South Asia), thus Turkish, Persian, Turkic languages of Central Asia and the Caucasus, Hindustani - Urdu and Hindi, etc.) but not in Arabic. In Turkish and Persian it is considered crude, slang or low register, but it has become quite regular in Central Asia and Hindustani. In the 20th cent. a pioneering work was entitled taħrīr-u~l-mar'ah تحرير ٱلمرأة 'Liberation of the Woman' but the Urdu translation was ħurriyyat-i `awrāt 'Freedom of the Woman' which an Arab will understand as "Freedom of Genitalia" (freedom to show genitals)!

When I had visited Turkmenistan SSR just before Glasnost and Perestroika, a middle aged woman visiting the city from a Kolkhoz (collective farm) told me in response to my explaining that I was Turkish but currently finishing my studies in America had said: "America?! What are you doing there? Come here to Turkmenistan, you'll do well, we'll find you an "avrat"" i.e. we will find you a wife, we will marry you (I was indeed looked upon as a very eligible bachelor in Soviet Central Asia). In a city in Turkey it would have sounded like "we will find you a broad"

[Yusuf B Gursey]

On Saturday, April 25, 2020 at 7:44:22 PM UTC-4, Yusuf B Gursey wrote:
> On Saturday, April 25, 2020 at 6:19:44 PM UTC-4, Daud Deden wrote:
> > On Saturday, April 25, 2020 at 2:11:43 PM UTC-4, Helmut Richter wrote:
> > > I have recently retrieved a copy of Larry Trask's paper
> > > “Where do mama/papa words come from?” from
> > > https://www.sussex.ac.uk/webteam/gateway/file.php?name=where-do-mama2.pdf&site=1
> > >
> > > The text does not contain Larry Trask's name nor any other hint of its
> > > origin. Just the headline and the text.
> > >
> > > I am much interested in learning
> > > * the date year when it was written, and
> > > * whether it has ever been published in any form, and if so, when and where
> > >
> > > Thank you.
> > >
> > > --
> > > Helmut Richter
> >
> > Can't help you with that, sorry Helmut.
> > -
> >
> > Yusuf, does "aurat" in Arabic mean 'one-eyed, defective', as Trask claimed in the paper?
>

In short Larry Trask missed the step "genitalia" in the semantic connection

[Daud Deden]

Thanks, I hadn't come across that before. The female genitals have a vague resemblance to an eye, perhaps a vulgar reference to "the third eye". Awra seems parallel to nether:

nether (adj.)
Old English niþera, neoþera "down, downwards, lower, below, beneath," from Proto-Germanic *nitheraz (source also of Old Saxon nithar, Old Norse niðr, which contributed to the English word, Old Frisian nither, Dutch neder, German nieder), from comparative of PIE *ni- "down, below" (source also of Sanskrit ni "down," nitaram "downward," Greek neiothen "from below," Old Church Slavonic nizŭ "low, down").

Also an adverb in Old English and Middle English. It has been replaced in most senses by lower (adj.). Of countries, "situated on lower ground" (late 14c.). In Middle English (and after) used also of body parts.

Absolon hath kist hir nether eye. [Chaucer, "Miller's Tale"]

[Tilde]

Wow, this was hard to get. Apparently only published online. Referenced in
the following (all though I did find numerous references to the paper
itself at the Sussex link). How that got
publicized I don't know.

https://www.linguisticsociety.org/sites/default/files/10_91.1Ansaldo.pdf
LANGUAGE, VOLUME 91, NUMBER 1 (2015)
New perspectives on the origins of language. Ed. by Claire Lefebvre, Bernard
Comrie, and Henri Cohen. (Studies in language companion series 144.)
Amsterdam:
John Benjamins, 2013. Pp. xvi, 582. ISBN 9789027206114. $165 (Hb).

Trask, Larry R. 2003. Where do mama/papa words come from? Brighton:
University of Sussex, ms. Online:
https://www.sussex.ac.uk/webteam/gateway/file.php?name=where-do-mama2.pdf&site=1.


An archive of his web site from 1996

http://www.buber.net/Basque/Euskara/Larry/WebSite/

but that naturally didn't list it since the paper is dated 2003, including
it here in case anyone wants to look further at this Basque material.

[Yusuf B Gursey]

On Monday, April 27, 2020 at 3:14:20 PM UTC-4, Tilde wrote:

Larry Trask was a contributor to sci.lang way back (when there more sci. to this group)

[Helmut Richter]

Thank you very much indeed.

In the meantime, I have found one more reference to the article in:

Alain Matthey de l’Etang, Pierre J. Bancel: The age of Mama and Papa. In:
John Bengtson, Harold Crane Fleming (Ed.): In hot pursuit of language in
prehistory. Benjamins, Amsterdam 2008, ISBN 978-90-272-3252-6, p. 417–438
(English).

They give a date of 2003 as well. It is somehow weird that the internet
file contains neither the author's name nor a date.

This paper and the one you cited both seem to criticise that Trask fails
to make a clear distinction of mama/papa words (baby talk) from
mother/father words (used by speakers of the language). Whereas the former
are continuously reinvented in every generation of babies, the latter
undergo language change, borrowing and other processes, just like other
words. I have not yet had the time to read these two papers in detail, and
access to public libraries is restricted to zero at the moment.

--
Helmut Richter

[Tristan Miller]

Greetings.

This was published electronically in 2004 as part of the Working Papers
Series of the University of Sussex's Department of Linguistics and
English Language (now the School of English). The series home page,
including PDF links to all the papers in the series, is now
<http://www.sussex.ac.uk/english/research/publications/linguisticspapers> but
at the time Trask's paper was published, it was
<http://www.sussex.ac.uk/linguistics/1-4-1.html>. (You can see a
Wayback Machine archive at
<https://web.archive.org/web/20050408073027/http://www.sussex.ac.uk:80/linguistics/1-4-1.html>.)

Larry Trask. "Where do mama/papa words come from?" University of Sussex
Working Papers in Linguistics and English Language No. LxWP 10/04.
Brighton, UK: University of Sussex's Department of Linguistics and
English Language, 2004.
<http://www.sussex.ac.uk/linguistics/documents/where_do_mama2.pdf>

I'm not sure why other sources list the paper as having been published
in 2003. Possibly Trask put it online (maybe on his web page?) before
it was formally published as part of the Working Papers Series.

If you want further details about the publication history, you might try
contacting Vyvyan Evans <https://www.vyvevans.net/>, who was the Working
Papers Series editor at the time.

Regards,
Tristan

--
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Tristan Miller
Free Software developer, ferret herder, logologist
https://logological.org/
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

[Yusuf B Gursey]

I found the whole book in pdf format.

https://epdf.pub/in-hot-pursuit-of-language-in-prehistory-essays-in-the-four-fields-of-anthropolo.html

The authors are Proto-Worlders. Trask may or may not have some errors but his basic thesis remains sound. Trask in a discussion in sci.lang pointed to the variability of such words in Turkic Languages. kaka as "feces" in Turkish but "father" in Turkmen, "elder brother" in Gagauz; "mama" as "chow, baby (or pet) food" in Turkish, "mother" in Azeri dialects; baba as "father" in Turkish "grandfather" in Azeri; ata as "father" in Azeri and many Turkic languages, "ancestor, elder grandfather" in Turkish are examples that come to mind.

[Daud Deden]

Caca as feces in Spanish

but "father" in Turkmen,

"elder brother" in Gagauz;

Kakak as elder brother in Indonesian
(but abang as elder brother in Malay)

"mama" as "chow, baby (or pet) food" in Turkish,

Jam as yummy(?) or pre-chewed baby food(?) in NW Africa (yam growers)

[Ross]

Or mama for "father" in quite a few Oceanic languages. The Anglican Church
has used Mama as a title for (male) priests in Vanuatu and the Solomon Islands.

What we can reasonably infer from the evidence the two French authors
review is that infant babbling was probably similar some tens of millennia
ago to what it is today; and that adults have, for a long time, made
words out of their children's vocalizations. Usually these words remained
in the baby-talk register, but sometimes they found their way into
grown-up language. The fallacy is to conclude from this that these words
have come down to us by continuous inheritance from proto-human. They
are created anew here and there, now and then, and once they become real
words they can change and be lost like any other. To show that they were
part of the proto-vocabulary, you would have to go through the same
type of argument as for TIK and MELG and the rest, and run into the
same impasse.
It surprised me, during one of the previous rounds of this argument, to
find that "mama" and "papa" are not attested in English before the 16th century.
They are clearly borrowings from French, and latterly other European
languages (Italian, Yiddish, etc). Before that, English of course had
"mother" and "father", from PIE *mā and *pə, fitted out with IE morphology.
I don't think Latin mamma 'breast' has any strict cognates, so it's
probably another independent creation from the same mine.

[Daud Deden]

Is there in any 'language' a word meaning mother or father or parent that sounds like "coo" (ku:) or "coocoo" (ku:ku:)?

I ask because that is the first casual sound (as opposed to crying etc.) produced by infants, long before ma, ba, pa, ta are spoken. It is also the sound produced by macaque monkeys while grooming.

I'd expect that coo is not used for any parent in any 'language'.

Ku or aku means my or me in Malay.

I wonder about the etymology of 'cootie'.

(I used Ross's colon to indicate long vowels)

[Daud Deden]

Tata, taita (Gaelic?) father
Tahit, tait (Malay) feces

[Daud Deden]

cootie (n.)
"body louse," 1917, British World War I slang, earlier in nautical use, said to be from Malay (Austronesian) kutu, the name of some parasitic, biting insect.

Certainly that is related to social grooming.

[Peter T. Daniels]

On Friday, May 1, 2020 at 8:39:49 AM UTC-4, Daud Deden wrote:

> Is there in any 'language' a word meaning mother or father or parent that sounds like "coo" (ku:) or "coocoo" (ku:ku:)?

The explanation (due to Jakobson?) could be that the lip action in "mama"
and "papa" is visible to the infant trying to make speech sounds, giving
them a hint as to how to do it, but the tongue action in "cuckoo" isn't,
so they don't get any help in making that noise and can't start to bring
it under control until the vocal tract enervation has gotten beefed up a
bit.

> I ask because that is the first casual sound (as opposed to crying etc.) produced by infants, long before ma, ba, pa, ta are spoken.

Why do you suppose that?

> It is also the sound produced by macaque monkeys while grooming.
>
> I'd expect that coo is not used for any parent in any 'language'.
>
> Ku or aku means my or me in Malay.
>
> I wonder about the etymology of 'cootie'.
>
> (I used Ross's colon to indicate long vowels)

It is not "Ross's colon." It is the IPA symbol and has been for a very
long time.

[Daud Deden]

On Friday, May 1, 2020 at 9:27:50 AM UTC-4, Peter T. Daniels wrote:
> On Friday, May 1, 2020 at 8:39:49 AM UTC-4, Daud Deden wrote:
>
> > Is there in any 'language' a word meaning mother or father or parent that sounds like "coo" (ku:) or "coocoo" (ku:ku:)?
>
> The explanation (due to Jakobson?) could be that the lip action in "mama"
> and "papa" is visible to the infant trying to make speech sounds, giving
> them a hint as to how to do it,

Does that 'explain' Tata?

but the tongue action in "cuckoo" isn't,

A cootie/kutu is an ectoparasite, a cuckoo is a brood parasite, parallels.

> so they don't get any help in making that noise

Noise? Hardly. Cries & screams are noise, properly so, to bring attention to infant distress. Cooing is quite the opposite, indicating a calm situation and cheerful disposition.

and can't start to bring
> it under control

Ridiculous, cooing shows perfect pitch control and oral ability.

until the vocal tract enervation has gotten beefed up a
> bit.

A load of hooey IMO, newborns & preemies have well-enervated vocal tracts.

Doesn't anyone know of a term for parent using the "coo" sound?

>
> > I ask because that is the first casual sound (as opposed to crying etc.) produced by infants, long before ma, ba, pa, ta are spoken.
>
> Why do you suppose that?

It is a fact, well documented.

>
> > It is also the sound produced by macaque monkeys while grooming.
> >
> > I'd expect that coo is not used for any parent in any 'language'.
> >
> > Ku or aku means my or me in Malay.
> >
> > I wonder about the etymology of 'cootie'.
> >
> > (I used Ross's colon to indicate long vowels)
>
> It is not "Ross's colon." It is the IPA symbol and has been for a very
> long time.

I presumed so, but Ross introduced it to me.

[Helmut Richter]

On Fri, 1 May 2020, Yusuf B Gursey wrote:

> > In the meantime, I have found one more reference to the article in:
> >
> > Alain Matthey de l’Etang, Pierre J. Bancel: The age of Mama and Papa. In:
> > John Bengtson, Harold Crane Fleming (Ed.): In hot pursuit of language in
> > prehistory. Benjamins, Amsterdam 2008, ISBN 978-90-272-3252-6, p. 417–438
> > (English).
> >
> > They give a date of 2003 as well. It is somehow weird that the internet
> > file contains neither the author's name nor a date.
> >
>
> I found the whole book in pdf format.
>
> https://epdf.pub/in-hot-pursuit-of-language-in-prehistory-essays-in-the-four-fields-of-anthropolo.html
>
> The authors are Proto-Worlders.

I am not interested in Proto-World. I cited them only because of their
reference to Trask's paper.

--
Helmut Richter

[António Marques]

I imagine Yusuf said that as a caveat between gentlemen.

[Yusuf B Gursey]

Turkish meme 'nipple, breast' another nursery word.

[Yusuf B Gursey]

Thank you.

[Helmut Richter]

Yes, I understood it that way. Did my sentence in any way suggest another
interpretation? If so, I apologise for my bad mastery of the English
language.

[Daud Deden]

Croatian: "Majka"/mayka (mother) and "otac"/otats (father) are "official" words. Kids and common people are actually using "mama" for mother and "tata" for father.

[Yusuf B Gursey]

On Friday, May 1, 2020 at 11:48:06 PM UTC-4, Daud Deden wrote:
> On Friday, May 1, 2020 at 9:27:50 AM UTC-4, Peter T. Daniels wrote:
> > On Friday, May 1, 2020 at 8:39:49 AM UTC-4, Daud Deden wrote:
> >
> > > Is there in any 'language' a word meaning mother or father or parent that sounds like "coo" (ku:) or "coocoo" (ku:ku:)?
> >
> > The explanation (due to Jakobson?) could be that the lip action in "mama"
> > and "papa" is visible to the infant trying to make speech sounds, giving
> > them a hint as to how to do it,
>
> Does that 'explain' Tata?

[t], [d] are among the stops that an infant produces at the earliest stage.

[Yusuf B Gursey]

The reason that avrat / awrat as "woman" is popular in the Turkic world may be due to the influence may be due to chance resemblance of Arabic ʕawra(t) "gentilia, private parts (esp. of a woman)" to early Middle Turkic urāġūt, urāγūt uraγut "woman"