Mama/papa, was: ATTILA is a Turkish name....
I
<519d8f2c.03081...@posting.google.com>:
> As others have pointed out, words like 'ata' for 'father' are
> mama/papa words. These words are constantly created in languages all
> over the planet, and always in the same way the fond parents hear
> little Jennifer babbling, in the way that children always babble, and
> they seize on a couple of her early babbles and assign to these
> babbles the meanings they want to hear, most often 'mother' and
> 'father'.
That is a good point. Many explanations I have seen explain "mama" and
"papa" as invented by children ("mama" presumably meaning "Dear Mother,
I wish to be nursed at your convenience, sincerely, Baby.") which makes
little sense. Moreover, babies' first consonants sound to me like random
approximants, at least until they start imitating people who say to them
"mama" and "bébé" all the time. In fact I would go even farther, and say
that the parents are not imitating their babies, but are going along
with the common (culture-specific) iconic "baby" sounds.
> The inherited Indo-European words for 'mother' and 'father'
> still survive today in many languages, but not in all of them. Welsh,
> for example, has lost the inherited words, and it now has <mam> and
> <tad> -- new mama/papa words. So firmly established is <tad> for
> 'father' that a new baby-talk word for 'daddy' has already
> emerged><dada>. In Turkish, the inherited word for 'father', <ata>,
> has now been specialized to the sense of 'forefather, ancestor', and
> the ordinary word for 'father' is <baba> -- another mama/papa
> creation.
I am skeptical about this. In many cases, and perhaps most, baby-talk,
and other iconic words (such as animal calls) are borrowed, not created
ex nihilo. For example, Hebrew borrowed the Aramaic <?ima> and <?aba> as
baby talk, and French has borrowed <bébé>. The Turkish <baba> could be
invented, but more likely it is a borrowing from Arabic (Mr. Gursey, any
evidence, one way or the other?) For "mother" there seem to be at least
two patterns here: mVmV, more common in Europe, and VmV, more common in
Southwest Asia (compare also Tamil <ama>, <apa>). If these words were
created anew every time, you'd expect to see a random mixture of them in
each area. As it is, they seem to be confined to particular regions,
suggesting an areal phenomenon.
All the same, I do not deny that there is a strong pressure to replace
mother/father words with more iconic equivalents. This does seem quite
confined to less formal registers, though, as witness the large number
of IE languages which retained the PIE-derived forms in their higher,
more conservative registers.
An interesting question, to which I don't have the answer, is this: what
words are used for baby talk in languages which lack labial consonants
(such as some Iroquoian languages)? What is the baby-talk word for
mother in languages which lack nasals (e.g. those of the Puget Sound
linguistic area, or Piraha)?
> This sort of thing happens all the time. In Italian, the
> inherited words <madre> and <padre> are now under enormous pressure
> from the new mama/papa formations <mamma> and <babbo>, and some
> commentators fear that the traditional words are being driven out of
> the language. As for Gothic, I'm pretty sure that the inherited
> Germanic word for 'father' is attested in the Gothic Bible, but only
> in the elevated Christian sense, while <atta> is always used for a
> biological father. This is very similar to what has happened in modern
> Turkish. There is no need to look for external sources for mama/papa
> words. These are coined constantly, in language after language.
>
> Larry Trask lar...@sussex.ac.uk-
John A. Rea
Jack
Phil Healey
> In soc.history.medieval Larry Trask <R.L....@sussex.ac.uk> wrote in
> <519d8f2c.03081...@posting.google.com>:
>
> > As others have pointed out, words like 'ata' for 'father' are
> > mama/papa words. These words are constantly created in languages all
FWIW, my wife and I noticed our daughter (now just over 19 months)
starting to say "mamamamamamama" when she was hungry (I forget exactly
what age - maybe around 5 or 6 months), simply because she was
vocalizing and making the jaw movement necessary for eating. (Not
suckling, but eating - babies start on solid foods around 5 months.)
The connection between hunger and calling for mother was further
reinforced by the fact that in Japanese baby-talk "mamma" means food.
"Pappa" only came later, and through a lot of reinforcement, frankly. My
daughter could just as well have called me dada or any of the other
sounds she was making, if we had reinforced it, but "mamma" started
before she was old enough to respond to reinforcement of that type.
Another thing we noticed: shaking of the head to mean no comes from the
action to prevent a spoon with baby-food from being put in the mouth.
--
Phil Healey
Somewhere in cyberspace
I
Phil Healey <psa_h...@hotmail.com> wrote:
>FWIW, my wife and I noticed our daughter (now just over 19 months)
>starting to say "mamamamamamama" when she was hungry (I forget exactly
>what age - maybe around 5 or 6 months), simply because she was
>vocalizing and making the jaw movement necessary for eating. (Not
>suckling, but eating - babies start on solid foods around 5 months.)
>The connection between hunger and calling for mother was further
>reinforced by the fact that in Japanese baby-talk "mamma" means food.
>"Pappa" only came later, and through a lot of reinforcement, frankly. My
>daughter could just as well have called me dada or any of the other
>sounds she was making, if we had reinforced it, but "mamma" started
>before she was old enough to respond to reinforcement of that type.
It could also be that "ma" is one of the easiest language-like sounds to
make, requiring almost no tongue control. She might have realized at
that point the connection between vocalization and getting attention,
not so much between a particular vocalization and a particular wish.
Some research along these lines is at www.psj.gr.jp/pdf/mb3.pdf .
>Another thing we noticed: shaking of the head to mean no comes from the
>action to prevent a spoon with baby-food from being put in the mouth.
Adults do that too, for example when shaking off a mosquito, or when
turning away from a person to express disrespect or to stop a
conversation, so there's a strong universal iconic reason to adopt the
sideways head-shake to mean "no". Nevertheless, as I recall, some places
(Eastern Europe?) use an up and down head shake to mean "no".
Phil Healey
> In article <2003082201...@adlerpacific.com>,
> Phil Healey <psa_h...@hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> >FWIW, my wife and I noticed our daughter (now just over 19 months)
> >starting to say "mamamamamamama" when she was hungry (I forget exactly
> >what age - maybe around 5 or 6 months), simply because she was
> >vocalizing and making the jaw movement necessary for eating. (Not
> >suckling, but eating - babies start on solid foods around 5 months.)
> >The connection between hunger and calling for mother was further
> >reinforced by the fact that in Japanese baby-talk "mamma" means food.
> >"Pappa" only came later, and through a lot of reinforcement, frankly. My
> >daughter could just as well have called me dada or any of the other
> >sounds she was making, if we had reinforced it, but "mamma" started
> >before she was old enough to respond to reinforcement of that type.
>
> It could also be that "ma" is one of the easiest language-like sounds to
> make, requiring almost no tongue control. She might have realized at
> that point the connection between vocalization and getting attention,
> not so much between a particular vocalization and a particular wish.
Well, exactly. The first desire a baby expresses is hunger, and that
desire, for the most part, is satisfied by the mother. From there the
leap to getting the mother's attention for satisfaction of other desires
is not a large one.
>
> Some research along these lines is at www.psj.gr.jp/pdf/mb3.pdf .
>
Another Japanese connection!
>
> >Another thing we noticed: shaking of the head to mean no comes from the
> >action to prevent a spoon with baby-food from being put in the mouth.
>
> Adults do that too, for example when shaking off a mosquito, or when
> turning away from a person to express disrespect or to stop a
> conversation, so there's a strong universal iconic reason to adopt the
> sideways head-shake to mean "no". Nevertheless, as I recall, some places
> (Eastern Europe?) use an up and down head shake to mean "no".
I've heard they nod to say no in Greece.
mb
...
> >Another thing we noticed: shaking of the head to mean no comes from the
> >action to prevent a spoon with baby-food from being put in the mouth.
>
> Adults do that too, for example when shaking off a mosquito, or when
> turning away from a person to express disrespect or to stop a
> conversation, so there's a strong universal iconic reason to adopt the
> sideways head-shake to mean "no". Nevertheless, as I recall, some places
> (Eastern Europe?) use an up and down head shake to mean "no".
Without mentioning different cultures where the sideways shaking of
the head expresses approval (and sometimes is the prescribed polite,
frequent gesture while listening to a superior - try working with
Southern Indian graduate students, for example). One can't define
universals out of theory instead of a complete survey of facts.
Yusuf B Gursey
> * I <i...@nowhere.nowhere> [2003-08-21 11:36]:
> > In soc.history.medieval Larry Trask <R.L....@sussex.ac.uk> wrote in
> > <519d8f2c.03081...@posting.google.com>:
> >
> > > As others have pointed out, words like 'ata' for 'father' are
> > > mama/papa words. These words are constantly created in languages all
>
> FWIW, my wife and I noticed our daughter (now just over 19 months)
> starting to say "mamamamamamama" when she was hungry (I forget exactly
> what age - maybe around 5 or 6 months), simply because she was
> vocalizing and making the jaw movement necessary for eating. (Not
> suckling, but eating - babies start on solid foods around 5 months.)
> The connection between hunger and calling for mother was further
> reinforced by the fact that in Japanese baby-talk "mamma" means food.
also (unrelated) in turkish "mama" is "food" in baby talk and has
entered the standard language for baby food or pet food.
Yusuf B Gursey
> In article <2003082201...@adlerpacific.com>,
> Phil Healey <psa_h...@hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> >FWIW, my wife and I noticed our daughter (now just over 19 months)
> >starting to say "mamamamamamama" when she was hungry (I forget exactly
> >what age - maybe around 5 or 6 months), simply because she was
> >vocalizing and making the jaw movement necessary for eating. (Not
> >suckling, but eating - babies start on solid foods around 5 months.)
> >The connection between hunger and calling for mother was further
> >reinforced by the fact that in Japanese baby-talk "mamma" means food.
> >"Pappa" only came later, and through a lot of reinforcement, frankly. My
> >daughter could just as well have called me dada or any of the other
> >sounds she was making, if we had reinforced it, but "mamma" started
> >before she was old enough to respond to reinforcement of that type.
>
> It could also be that "ma" is one of the easiest language-like sounds to
> make, requiring almost no tongue control. She might have realized at
I must say. even one of my cats, who is always eager to respond to my
call "mama!" (food!) chirps "mia-mia!" in response :)
Yusuf B Gursey
see C. Rabin, "Ancient West-Arabian" p. 70-71. he rejects borrowing
from aramaic and sees an old semitic vocative form behind these.
(he gives Mishnaic Hebrew 'imma: and 'abba:)
> baby talk, and French has borrowed <bébé>. The Turkish <baba> could be
> invented, but more likely it is a borrowing from Arabic (Mr. Gursey, any
> evidence, one way or the other?) For "mother" there seem to be at least
I strongly reject borrowing from Arabic in this case. firstly ba:ba:
is only found in low registers of some colloquials in arabic (in the
NE borrowing from turkish, or other influence of turkish, cannot be
ruled out offhand) and Ibn Battuta recognizes turkish << baba >> only
from berber. furthermore, turkish only very rarely borrows from
colloquial arabic (Tietze has a list, but the great majority pertain
to village life in SE Turkey; of the handful that I know a couple
pertain to Bedouin life and a couple are regarded as slang in
turkish).
Doerfer in TMEN #678 discusses it as a tentative borrowing into
Persian (I would also reject Rabin's suggestion that persian borrowed
it from arabic). he also gives baba in the meaning of either "father"
or "grandfather" in quite a variety of turkic languages and some
asiatic turkic attestations of it in older texts, and in addition in
other "altaic" languages. OTOH similar words are found in other
indo-iranian languages. so they may be independent formations. (he
also has a list of it in various languages of the world). IMHO an old
turkic equivalent may be apa / aba , usually "(male) ancestor".
classical arabic dialects had ba: for 'abu: ( acc. to Rabin; construct
state, "father"). the only attestation of this in turkish is the
proper name Bayezid (which is frequently pronounced BeyazIt), the name
of two early ottoman sultans, but the etymology of it (ba: yazi:d <
'abu: yazi:d) is not generally known to turks, though modern arabic
encyclopedias recognize it as such.
(perhaps more later)
Yusuf B Gursey
:>
:> >Another thing we noticed: shaking of the head to mean no comes from the
:> >action to prevent a spoon with baby-food from being put in the mouth.
:>
:> Adults do that too, for example when shaking off a mosquito, or when
:> turning away from a person to express disrespect or to stop a
:> conversation, so there's a strong universal iconic reason to adopt the
:> sideways head-shake to mean "no". Nevertheless, as I recall, some places
:> (Eastern Europe?) use an up and down head shake to mean "no".
: I've heard they nod to say no in Greece.
In Turkey at least it is a slight upward nod, usually with an alveolar
click.
I know the case of Turk who understood the hand gestures of an
Italian-American to mean "great!" whereas "What are you doing!" was
intended. this was while giving parking directions and the result was a
crash!
Phil Healey
> Phil Healey <psa_h...@hotmail.com> wrote in message news:<2003082201...@adlerpacific.com>...
> > * I <i...@nowhere.nowhere> [2003-08-21 11:36]:
> > > In soc.history.medieval Larry Trask <R.L....@sussex.ac.uk> wrote in
> > > <519d8f2c.03081...@posting.google.com>:
> > >
> > > > As others have pointed out, words like 'ata' for 'father' are
> > > > mama/papa words. These words are constantly created in languages all
> >
> > FWIW, my wife and I noticed our daughter (now just over 19 months)
> > starting to say "mamamamamamama" when she was hungry (I forget exactly
> > what age - maybe around 5 or 6 months), simply because she was
> > vocalizing and making the jaw movement necessary for eating. (Not
> > suckling, but eating - babies start on solid foods around 5 months.)
> > The connection between hunger and calling for mother was further
> > reinforced by the fact that in Japanese baby-talk "mamma" means food.
>
> also (unrelated) in turkish "mama" is "food" in baby talk and has
> entered the standard language for baby food or pet food.
Well, you know what they say about Japanese being related to Turkish...
>
> > "Pappa" only came later, and through a lot of reinforcement, frankly. My
> > daughter could just as well have called me dada or any of the other
> > sounds she was making, if we had reinforced it, but "mamma" started
> > before she was old enough to respond to reinforcement of that type.
> >
> > Another thing we noticed: shaking of the head to mean no comes from the
> > action to prevent a spoon with baby-food from being put in the mouth.
--
Douglas G. Kilday
"Phil Healey" <psa_h...@hotmail.com> wrote in message ...
> * I <i...@nowhere.nowhere> [2003-08-21 16:43]:
> > Phil Healey <psa_h...@hotmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > >FWIW, my wife and I noticed our daughter (now just over 19 months)
> > >starting to say "mamamamamamama" when she was hungry (I forget exactly
> > >what age - maybe around 5 or 6 months), simply because she was
> > >vocalizing and making the jaw movement necessary for eating. (Not
> > >suckling, but eating - babies start on solid foods around 5 months.)
> > >The connection between hunger and calling for mother was further
> > >reinforced by the fact that in Japanese baby-talk "mamma" means food.
> > >"Pappa" only came later, and through a lot of reinforcement, frankly.
My
> > >daughter could just as well have called me dada or any of the other
> > >sounds she was making, if we had reinforced it, but "mamma" started
> > >before she was old enough to respond to reinforcement of that type.
> >
> > It could also be that "ma" is one of the easiest language-like sounds to
> > make, requiring almost no tongue control. She might have realized at
> > that point the connection between vocalization and getting attention,
> > not so much between a particular vocalization and a particular wish.
>
> Well, exactly. The first desire a baby expresses is hunger, and that
> desire, for the most part, is satisfied by the mother. From there the
> leap to getting the mother's attention for satisfaction of other desires
> is not a large one.
Let's see ... in Georgian, <mama> means 'father', while <deda> means
'mother'. According to your explanation, South Caucasians must have a
peculiar custom whereby the father plays the role of the mother during the
formative months of a baby's life, satisfying its nutritional and other
desires. If you are psychologically inclined, perhaps you could explain
Stalin's career as an over-reaction to the stigma imposed by this cultural
role-reversal.
On the other hand, is it possible that you are merely indulging in the
common practice of making generalizations about "linguistic universals"
without bothering to examine all the relevant data?
DGK
Larry Trask
> In soc.history.medieval Larry Trask <R.L....@sussex.ac.uk> wrote in
> <519d8f2c.03081...@posting.google.com>:
>
> > As others have pointed out, words like 'ata' for 'father' are
> > mama/papa words. These words are constantly created in languages all
> > over the planet, and always in the same way the fond parents hear
> > little Jennifer babbling, in the way that children always babble, and
> > they seize on a couple of her early babbles and assign to these
> > babbles the meanings they want to hear, most often 'mother' and
> > 'father'.
>
> That is a good point. Many explanations I have seen explain "mama" and
> "papa" as invented by children ("mama" presumably meaning "Dear Mother,
> I wish to be nursed at your convenience, sincerely, Baby.") which makes
> little sense.
Yes; there is a widespread misconception that mama/papa words are
invented by children. But not so: it is parents who invent these
words.
> Moreover, babies' first consonants sound to me like random
> approximants, at least until they start imitating people who say to them
> "mama" and "bébé" all the time.
There is no need to speculate. First-language acquisition has been
very well studied, and the facts are clear.
At the so-called cooing stage, children produce no recognizable speech
sounds. The youngsters start producing recognizable speech sounds --
usually reduplicated -- when they reach the babbling stage. And all
children proceed in much the same way.
The first vowel produced is [a], because this is the easiest vowwel to
produce, since it requires no work from the tongue or the lips. All
other vowels are harder.
The first consonants produced are the labials, [m b p] These are the
easiest consonants to produce, because they require no work from the
tongue. Of the three, [m] is the easiest, since [b p] require some
work from the velum, not needed for [m].
Next to be produced are the coronals, [n d t]. All other consonants
are harder than these, and are produced later.
Consequently, the first babbles heard repeatedly by the fond parents
are typically [mama] ~ [ama}, followed by [baba], [papa], [ana],
[dada], and so on. And so the parents typically assign meanings to
the babbles in something like this order.
> In fact I would go even farther, and say
> that the parents are not imitating their babies, but are going along
> with the common (culture-specific) iconic "baby" sounds.
I can't agree. First, there is nothing "iconic" about mama/papa
words. Second, no such words are "culture-specific" until they become
established.
> > The inherited Indo-European words for 'mother' and 'father'
> > still survive today in many languages, but not in all of them. Welsh,
> > for example, has lost the inherited words, and it now has <mam> and
> > <tad> -- new mama/papa words. So firmly established is <tad> for
> > 'father' that a new baby-talk word for 'daddy' has already
> > emerged><dada>. In Turkish, the inherited word for 'father', <ata>,
> > has now been specialized to the sense of 'forefather, ancestor', and
> > the ordinary word for 'father' is <baba> -- another mama/papa
> > creation.
> I am skeptical about this. In many cases, and perhaps most, baby-talk,
> and other iconic words (such as animal calls) are borrowed, not created
> ex nihilo.
This is demonstrably not so. It is not impossible for mama/papa words
to be borrowed, but such borrowing is far from the norm.
Look at the evidence. In family after family of closely related
languages, we find that the mama/papa words differ substantially from
one language to another, showing clearly that they have been
independently invented. Look at Turkic, or at Slavic, or at Bantu, or
at any language family.
> For example, Hebrew borrowed the Aramaic <?ima> and <?aba> as
> baby talk, and French has borrowed <bébé>.
Isolated individual examples prove nothing, and anyway the French word
does not appear to be a mama/papa word.
> The Turkish <baba> could be
> invented, but more likely it is a borrowing from Arabic (Mr. Gursey, any
> evidence, one way or the other?)
Look at the Turkic languages collectively. You will see that the
mama/papa words vary substantially from one language to another,
making the hypothesis of borrowing indefensible. It is absurd to
suggest that every individual Turkic language has borrowed a different
set of mama/papa words from a different source. The truth is that
each language has simply invented its own.
> For "mother" there seem to be at least
> two patterns here: mVmV, more common in Europe, and VmV, more common in
> Southwest Asia (compare also Tamil <ama>, <apa>). If these words were
> created anew every time, you'd expect to see a random mixture of them in
> each area. As it is, they seem to be confined to particular regions,
> suggesting an areal phenomenon.
Areal preferences are not out of the question, but they have nothing
to do with the issue of independent creation.
> All the same, I do not deny that there is a strong pressure to replace
> mother/father words with more iconic equivalents.
Again, mama/papa words are in no way iconic.
> This does seem quite
> confined to less formal registers, though, as witness the large number
> of IE languages which retained the PIE-derived forms in their higher,
> more conservative registers.
Not only IE languages. All over the world, it is an *extremely*
common pattern to find that older words for 'mother' and 'father' are
in some way more formal or more elevated, while newer mama/papa
formations are more informal and more intimate. This comes about
because of the constant creation of new mama/papa words, which always
start off as intimate, but which may eventually be extended in use.
The older and more formal words are very frequently older mama/papa
creations. Look at Turkish, with its older <ata> 'father' and its
newer <baba>. Less obvious are cases like Irish /a'hi:r/ 'father',
Swedish <far> 'father' and Japanese <haha> 'mother'. These look very
little like mama/papa words, but mama/papa words is exactly what all
of them are in origin. It is merely that centuries or millennia of
linguistic change have largely disguised their mama/papa origin.
> An interesting question, to which I don't have the answer, is this: what
> words are used for baby talk in languages which lack labial consonants
> (such as some Iroquoian languages)? What is the baby-talk word for
> mother in languages which lack nasals (e.g. those of the Puget Sound
> linguistic area, or Piraha)?
A very good question indeed, and I'd like to know the answer, but so
far I haven't managed to find any mama/papa words from such languages.
But note that
<ana> is very frequent for 'mother' all over the world, and that there
are other possibilities, such as Old Japanese <papa> 'mother'.
Larry Trask
lar...@sussex.ac.uk
Yusuf B Gursey
> * Yusuf B Gursey <y...@theworld.com> [2003-08-21 18:41]:
> > Phil Healey <psa_h...@hotmail.com> wrote in message news:<2003082201...@adlerpacific.com>...
> > > * I <i...@nowhere.nowhere> [2003-08-21 11:36]:
> > > > In soc.history.medieval Larry Trask <R.L....@sussex.ac.uk> wrote in
> > > > <519d8f2c.03081...@posting.google.com>:
> > > >
> > > > > As others have pointed out, words like 'ata' for 'father' are
> > > > > mama/papa words. These words are constantly created in languages all
> > >
> > > FWIW, my wife and I noticed our daughter (now just over 19 months)
> > > starting to say "mamamamamamama" when she was hungry (I forget exactly
> > > what age - maybe around 5 or 6 months), simply because she was
> > > vocalizing and making the jaw movement necessary for eating. (Not
> > > suckling, but eating - babies start on solid foods around 5 months.)
> > > The connection between hunger and calling for mother was further
> > > reinforced by the fact that in Japanese baby-talk "mamma" means food.
> >
> > also (unrelated) in turkish "mama" is "food" in baby talk and has
> > entered the standard language for baby food or pet food.
>
> Well, you know what they say about Japanese being related to Turkish...
yes, and there are a number of "amazing coincidences" (see the thread
in sci.lang by that name some time ago) between them as well.
benlizross
>
> I only wish to mention here languages where "father" is /mama/.
> Zabana for instance (spoken on Santa Ysabel, Solomon Islands).
> So for instance, a priest (male!) is addressed as "Mama".
The title for a priest may be a loan from Mota (Vanuatu), spread widely
in the Solomons via the Anglican Church.
But /mama/ for "father" is found in a lot of languages in this area. I'd
guess it's a baby-talk derivation from Proto Oceanic *tama. You can also
find /tata/, reduplicating the other syllable. Then of course there's PO
*tubu 'grandparent' giving /bubu/ in some languages.
> I even seem to remember that in Lehali, "father" is /mam/
> and "mother" is /tat/. (Quoting from memory, but pretty sure).
> Lehali is one of the two languages of Ureparapara, Banks Islands,
> Vanuatu.
Likewise in Imere (central Vanuatu) /eemama/ 'father', /eetata/
'mother'.
Ross Clark
(The island is called /nOjpajpaj/ in Lehali, which
> I leave you to correlate with /ureparapara/)
I
y...@theworld.com (Yusuf B Gursey) wrote:
>I <i...@nowhere.nowhere> wrote in message
>>
>> I am skeptical about this. In many cases, and perhaps most, baby-talk,
>> and other iconic words (such as animal calls) are borrowed, not created
>> ex nihilo. For example, Hebrew borrowed the Aramaic <?ima> and <?aba> as
>
>see C. Rabin, "Ancient West-Arabian" p. 70-71. he rejects borrowing
>from aramaic and sees an old semitic vocative form behind these.
>
>(he gives Mishnaic Hebrew 'imma: and 'abba:)
I haven't seen the article, but that seems reasonable. Still, the use of
a fossil form not used elsewhere amounts to a recycling of an existing
word through borrowing from an otherwise dying dialect, rather than a
straight invention. Does Rabin eliminate the possibility of independent
invention?
>> baby talk, and French has borrowed <bébé>. The Turkish <baba> could be
>> invented, but more likely it is a borrowing from Arabic (Mr. Gursey, any
>> evidence, one way or the other?) For "mother" there seem to be at least
>
>I strongly reject borrowing from Arabic in this case. firstly ba:ba:
>is only found in low registers of some colloquials in arabic (in the
>NE borrowing from turkish, or other influence of turkish, cannot be
>ruled out offhand) and Ibn Battuta recognizes turkish << baba >> only
>from berber. furthermore, turkish only very rarely borrows from
>colloquial arabic (Tietze has a list, but the great majority pertain
>to village life in SE Turkey; of the handful that I know a couple
>pertain to Bedouin life and a couple are regarded as slang in
>turkish).
Well, nursery talk is a low register of speech, like slang. I am
suggesting a borrowing from Arabic into Turkish baby talk, which would
then be eventually promoted to the standard language.
"p" words for father seem much commoner than "b" words (in what I have
seen; I am not claiming to have surveyed the matter.) That suggests that
"baba" may have come into Turkish from a p-less language; Arabic does
not have a [p] (is that also true for dialects in contact with
Turkish?), but Turkish has both [b] and [p]. How does that seem to you?
Phil Healey
I was certainly making generalizations, but please point out where I
used the words "linguistic universals" in the above.
As for Georgian, isn't it a bit of an exception in this sense? Or is
your implication that there are as many languages which use m-sounds for
father as there are for mother? You've pointed out Georgian, now let's
see the other ... what is it? Two or three thousand?
You shouldn't have any problem coming up with them, since you *have*
bothered to "examine all the relevant data," right?
I
lar...@sussex.ac.uk (Larry Trask) wrote:
>I <i...@nowhere.nowhere> wrote :
>> In fact I would go even farther, and say
>> that the parents are not imitating their babies, but are going along
>> with the common (culture-specific) iconic "baby" sounds.
>
>I can't agree. First, there is nothing "iconic" about mama/papa
>words.
By iconic I mean, they directly convey the sense of baby speech (open
syllables, simple phones, as you discussed.)
>This is demonstrably not so. It is not impossible for mama/papa words
>to be borrowed, but such borrowing is far from the norm.
>Look at the evidence. In family after family of closely related
>languages, we find that the mama/papa words differ substantially from
>one language to another, showing clearly that they have been
>independently invented. Look at Turkic, or at Slavic, or at Bantu, or
>at any language family.
My point is that it's not "clear" that they were independently invented.
Sure, these are words which are _often_ created anew, but they are also
borrowed or inherited, and these are not possibilities which should be
dismissed offhand without more solid evidence.
>> For example, Hebrew borrowed the Aramaic <?ima> and <?aba> as
>> baby talk, and French has borrowed <bébé>.
>
>Isolated individual examples prove nothing,
Well, I admit this is anecdotal evidence. So are the Turkish examples.
It bothers me that you seem to be saying, on the one hand, "mama and
papa occur all over Western Europe, therefore they must have been
invented [in those exact forms] again and again", and on the other hand
"many different variations on the mama-ama-ata-etc. theme occur in
Turkic, therefore they must have been invented again and again." These
are different outcomes, presumably of different situations, and as
worthy of the attention of historical linguistics as with any other
words.
>and anyway the French word does not appear to be a mama/papa word.
It's a nursery word (originally), so just as borrowable as others,
unless there is evidence to the contrary.
Let me bring some comparisons here. The word for "cuckoo", an obvious
onomatopeia, is /kuku/ in English, /kukuk/ in German, /kuko/ in Spanish,
/kuku/ in French, /kukos/ in Modern Greek, etc. We know that the word
can be easily created from scratch, that it can be borrowed, and that it
can be inherited. We cannot draw any conclusions whatsoever as to the
history of the word based on this data (except for the obvious endings
in Greek and Spanish).
On the other hand, for the call of the rooster we have French
/kokoriko/, Italian /kukuruku/ and German /kikiriki/, contrasting with
English /kAkadudldu/ (also /kokaludltu/, /kAkadududu/, OED). Even though
all these are transparent onomatopeias, we have a pattern here: kVkVrVkV
on the continent, the other form in English. The implications are: 1.
there is more than one way to linguistically imitate a rooster, and 2.
these different forms don't pop up in arbitrary places. I would be
reluctant, in any event, to reconstruct an onomatopoeia to a
protolanguage, but here the case is obvious: German does not share the
pattern with its sister language English, but with its geographic
neighbors. The two possible explanations are:
1. Proto-IE had kVkVrVkV, reflected in its continental daughters, but
English innovated its own pattern, or
2. kVkVrVkV spread in the continent through contact.
In either case (and I prefer the second, just because I don't think
these kind of words are _that_ stable), there is real history to be
discerned.
The mama/papa words clearly are more similar to the "cock-a-doodle-do"
situation than to the "cuckoo" situation. We have several different
forms. In many cases they show geographical coherency, cutting across
language families. There is some baby here, not just bathwater.
>> An interesting question, to which I don't have the answer, is this: what
>> words are used for baby talk in languages which lack labial consonants
>> (such as some Iroquoian languages)? What is the baby-talk word for
>> mother in languages which lack nasals (e.g. those of the Puget Sound
>> linguistic area, or Piraha)?
>
>A very good question indeed, and I'd like to know the answer, but so
>far I haven't managed to find any mama/papa words from such languages.
There actually has been research on child language acquisition in some
Iroquoian languages (by Marianne Mithun), but I believe the published
material is mostly about grammar.
Larry Trask
> Jacques Guy wrote:
> >
> > I only wish to mention here languages where "father" is /mama/.
> > Zabana for instance (spoken on Santa Ysabel, Solomon Islands).
> > So for instance, a priest (male!) is addressed as "Mama".
This happens all over the planet. Somewhere I have a little list of a
few of these, but one I am sure of is Georgian, which has <mama> for
'father'.
On the other hand, Old Japanese is so far my only example of <papa>
for 'mother'.
Larry Trask
lar...@sussex.ac.uk
Yusuf B Gursey
> In article <222ae656.03082...@posting.google.com>,
> y...@theworld.com (Yusuf B Gursey) wrote:
>
> >I <i...@nowhere.nowhere> wrote in message
> >>
> >> I am skeptical about this. In many cases, and perhaps most, baby-talk,
> >> and other iconic words (such as animal calls) are borrowed, not created
> >> ex nihilo. For example, Hebrew borrowed the Aramaic <?ima> and <?aba> as
> >
> >see C. Rabin, "Ancient West-Arabian" p. 70-71. he rejects borrowing
> >from aramaic and sees an old semitic vocative form behind these.
> >
> >(he gives Mishnaic Hebrew 'imma: and 'abba:)
>
> I haven't seen the article, but that seems reasonable. Still, the use of
> a fossil form not used elsewhere amounts to a recycling of an existing
> word through borrowing from an otherwise dying dialect, rather than a
???
> straight invention. Does Rabin eliminate the possibility of independent
> invention?
he finds parallels in arabic, which is the main topic.
>
> >> baby talk, and French has borrowed <bébé>. The Turkish <baba> could be
> >> invented, but more likely it is a borrowing from Arabic (Mr. Gursey, any
> >> evidence, one way or the other?) For "mother" there seem to be at least
> >
> >I strongly reject borrowing from Arabic in this case. firstly ba:ba:
> >is only found in low registers of some colloquials in arabic (in the
> >NE borrowing from turkish, or other influence of turkish, cannot be
> >ruled out offhand) and Ibn Battuta recognizes turkish << baba >> only
> >from berber. furthermore, turkish only very rarely borrows from
> >colloquial arabic (Tietze has a list, but the great majority pertain
> >to village life in SE Turkey; of the handful that I know a couple
> >pertain to Bedouin life and a couple are regarded as slang in
> >turkish).
>
> Well, nursery talk is a low register of speech, like slang. I am
> suggesting a borrowing from Arabic into Turkish baby talk, which would
> then be eventually promoted to the standard language.
>
> "p" words for father seem much commoner than "b" words (in what I have
> seen; I am not claiming to have surveyed the matter.) That suggests that
> "baba" may have come into Turkish from a p-less language; Arabic does
> not have a [p] (is that also true for dialects in contact with
> Turkish?), but Turkish has both [b] and [p]. How does that seem to you?
baba is found elswehere in turkic and as I have said colloquial arabic
words in turkish are extremely rare, much less for such a common one
from an uncommon colloquial arabic word.
Yusuf B Gursey
:> >> and other iconic words (such as animal calls) are borrowed, not created
:> >> ex nihilo. For example, Hebrew borrowed the Aramaic <?ima> and <?aba> as
:> >
:> >see C. Rabin, "Ancient West-Arabian" p. 70-71. he rejects borrowing
:> >from aramaic and sees an old semitic vocative form behind these.
:> >
:> >(he gives Mishnaic Hebrew 'imma: and 'abba:)
:>
:> I haven't seen the article, but that seems reasonable. Still, the use of
:> a fossil form not used elsewhere amounts to a recycling of an existing
:> word through borrowing from an otherwise dying dialect, rather than a
: ???
:> straight invention. Does Rabin eliminate the possibility of independent
:> invention?
: he finds parallels in arabic, which is the main topic.
as I said he feels that it is unlikely to be borrowed.
:>
:> >> baby talk, and French has borrowed <bébé>. The Turkish <baba> could be
Andrew Yong
> also (unrelated) in turkish "mama" is "food" in baby talk and has
> entered the standard language for baby food or pet food.
I can confirm that in Malaysian Hokkien baby-talk, mum-mum is food.
andrew
mb
...
> On the other hand, Old Japanese is so far my only example of <papa>
> for 'mother'.
Different from the Slavic "baba"?
Douglas G. Kilday
You don't have to use that particular term, but you were talking about
language, and you were making universal claims about "a baby" and "the
mother". Incidentally, you have presented no evidence that such cognitive
concepts as "desire" and "expression" have any meaning to a 5-month-old
baby. This projection of mature personality traits onto infants is to some
degree forgivable; one can hardly expect parents to be detached, objective
observers of their offspring.
> As for Georgian, isn't it a bit of an exception in this sense? Or is
> your implication that there are as many languages which use m-sounds for
> father as there are for mother? You've pointed out Georgian, now let's
> see the other ... what is it? Two or three thousand?
An "exception"? My girlfriend expressed this notion somewhat differently.
When I mentioned this feature of Georgian, she remarked that "there must be
something wrong with that language", to which I responded "three million
speakers can't be wrong"! I don't need 2000, or even 2, counter-examples to
topple a faulty universal theory. All I need is 1.
No, my implication is that your explanation is flawed. A babbling baby is
not "expressing a desire" or attempting to communicate anything, but is
merely babbling. Adults impose their fantasies on this babbling to create
"baby words", but these fantasies are culturally and linguistically
conditioned. A Georgian would be very unlikely to make the same errors which
you did as a result of your conditioning. Note the following:
(1) A baby gets attention primarily by screaming at the top of its lungs and
throwing a tantrum, not by attempting to impress its guardians with its
skill in articulatory phonetics. The non-linguistic method is so effective
that many individuals continue to use it after babyhood, and even into
adulthood.
(2) Eating and continuously vocalizing with an egressive airstream are
mutually incompatible activities, self-defeating when attempted
simultaneously.
(3) Moving the jaw so as to repeatedly close the lips is not "necessary for
eating". What is essential to eating is swallowing. When this movement is
made without food, the result is an ingressive "glugging" or "clucking"
sound, which babies do indeed make. In our language, it happens that
ingressive pharyngeal stops are not used as phonemes, so parents do not
fantasize that their babies are "expressing a desire" or "communicating"
with these sounds. ("How cute! She recognizes [g`Vlk`]! Come to [g`Vlk`]!")
(4) "When she was hungry" is your, and your wife's, arbitrary
interpretation. You have no objective basis whatever for your claimed causal
connection between hunger and babbling. In my own limited (thank goodness!)
experience, screaming and tantrum-throwing are far better indicators of
hunger.
> You shouldn't have any problem coming up with them, since you *have*
> bothered to "examine all the relevant data," right?
I didn't make a universal generalization; I merely toppled one. The
distribution of kinship terms is an interesting topic, but it doesn't happen
to be a specialty of mine. Jarel, who loves wordlists, could probably
contribute some further comments on this matter.
DGK
Larry Trask
> As for Georgian, isn't it a bit of an exception in this sense? Or is
> your implication that there are as many languages which use m-sounds for
> father as there are for mother? You've pointed out Georgian, now let's
> see the other ... what is it? Two or three thousand?
No; <mama> for 'father' is much less common than <mama> for 'mother',
but it does occur in a number of languages. When I get a chance, I'll
try to dig out a few more examples. I know I have some others, but I
will complain once again that my office is in a state of near-chaos at
present.
Anyway, the point is this. Babbling infants *typically* produce
[mama] as the first repeated babble, or at least as one of the first.
And the fond parents *typically* assign to the first repeated babble
they hear the meaning 'mother', with 'father' being assigned to
another early babble soon after. The meaning 'mother' is typically
assigned first becuase infants spend more time with their mothers than
with their fathers.
But none of this is engraved in stone, and individual children and --
more readily -- individual parents may do something a little
different. Sometimes [mama] is assigned to 'father', as in Georgian,
and sometimes [papa] is assigned to 'mother', as in Old Japanese.
Then again, sometimes [mama] is assigned to 'breast', as happens, for
example, in Latin, Hausa and Xhosa. The assignment of meanings to
babbles is governed by statistical preferences, but not by iron laws.
Larry Trask
lar...@sussex.ac.uk
Larry Trask
[on mama/papa words]
> My point is that it's not "clear" that they were independently invented.
> Sure, these are words which are _often_ created anew, but they are also
> borrowed or inherited, and these are not possibilities which should be
> dismissed offhand without more solid evidence.
I am not dismissing them offhand.
First, when such words are inherited, they show the regular
developments in the languages possessing them. And, as I pointed out
earlier, very often that means that accumulated changes have disguised
the mama/papa origins of the words in question.
Second, borrowing should never be taken as the default hypothesis.
Since it is easily demonstrated that mama/papa words are constantly
created, borrowing should not be entertained unless there is very good
evidence to support such a hypothesis. In most cases, you can't
reasonably argue for borrowing unless you can point to a specific
source word in a specific language, and also to a specific pathway by
which the word was borrowed. Merely noting resemblances is not good
enough.
> >> For example, Hebrew borrowed the Aramaic <?ima> and <?aba> as
> >> baby talk, and French has borrowed <bébé>.
> >
> >Isolated individual examples prove nothing,
>
> Well, I admit this is anecdotal evidence. So are the Turkish examples.
As soon as I can get my hands on my Turkic glossary, I'll present the
Turkic examples, and we can talk about them.
> It bothers me that you seem to be saying, on the one hand, "mama and
> papa occur all over Western Europe, therefore they must have been
> invented [in those exact forms] again and again", and on the other hand
> "many different variations on the mama-ama-ata-etc. theme occur in
> Turkic, therefore they must have been invented again and again." These
> are different outcomes, presumably of different situations, and as
> worthy of the attention of historical linguistics as with any other
> words.
Of course. I won't disagree with that.
But there is more variation in western Europe than you appear to be
suggesting. For 'father', for example, we have English 'daddy', Welsh
<tad>, Basque <aita>, and Italian <babbo>, just to cite a few off the
top of my head. Western Europe does not exhibit an unrelieved expanse
of [mama] and [papa].
> Let me bring some comparisons here. The word for "cuckoo", an obvious
> onomatopeia, is /kuku/ in English, /kukuk/ in German, /kuko/ in Spanish,
> /kuku/ in French, /kukos/ in Modern Greek, etc. We know that the word
> can be easily created from scratch, that it can be borrowed, and that it
> can be inherited. We cannot draw any conclusions whatsoever as to the
> history of the word based on this data (except for the obvious endings
> in Greek and Spanish).
I agree that conclusions can be difficult in such cases, but you are
too pessimistic. We have historical records that can sometimes tell
us interesting things about the histories of these words.
> On the other hand, for the call of the rooster we have French
> /kokoriko/, Italian /kukuruku/ and German /kikiriki/, contrasting with
> English /kAkadudldu/ (also /kokaludltu/, /kAkadududu/, OED). Even though
> all these are transparent onomatopeias, we have a pattern here: kVkVrVkV
> on the continent, the other form in English. The implications are: 1.
> there is more than one way to linguistically imitate a rooster, and 2.
> these different forms don't pop up in arbitrary places. I would be
> reluctant, in any event, to reconstruct an onomatopoeia to a
> protolanguage, but here the case is obvious: German does not share the
> pattern with its sister language English, but with its geographic
> neighbors. The two possible explanations are:
> 1. Proto-IE had kVkVrVkV, reflected in its continental daughters, but
> English innovated its own pattern, or
> 2. kVkVrVkV spread in the continent through contact.
But this is no more than a template, at best. It is not a linguistic
form. And languages do not borrow templates: they borrow linguistic
forms.
When we borrow a word, such as Italian <vermicelli> or German
<Kindergarten>, we don't just borrow the consonantal skeleton and then
insert a set of vowels of our own choosing: we take over the whole
thing, as well as our phonology will let us.
Are you suggesting that words for animal noises -- and mama/papa words
-- are borrowed by some distinct and unique process that doesn't obey
the ordinary rules of borrowing?
> In either case (and I prefer the second, just because I don't think
> these kind of words are _that_ stable), there is real history to be
> discerned.
You are overlooking a third possibility: constant re-creation. I
don't think these forms are particularly stable over long periods of
time. Once again, I can't get at my reference books right now, but I
think examination will reveal that the conventional representations of
animal noises have changed noticeably over the centuries in English
and in other languages.
> The mama/papa words clearly are more similar to the "cock-a-doodle-do"
> situation than to the "cuckoo" situation. We have several different
> forms. In many cases they show geographical coherency, cutting across
> language families. There is some baby here, not just bathwater.
Perhaps. But, once again, if you want to make a case for borrowing,
then you must explain just which forms were borrowed from which
languages into which other languages, and you must explain how and
when this borrowing took place. And, in the case of your rooster
noises, you must explain how and why the vowels got changed so
dramatically during borrowing.
Until this is done, I think the weight of the evidence favors
independent creation.
Larry Trask
lar...@sussex.ac.uk
Brian M. Scott
<fuf...@chorus.net> wrote:
[...]
>("How cute! She recognizes [g`Vlk`]! Come to [g`Vlk`]!")
<snrch> Lovely image! (Though I'd write [g`l.k`].)
[...]
Brian
Adler Pacific Translations
Babies desire a lot of things: food, comfort, warmth, entertainment...
They may not have the concept, but they express it just fine.
Otherwise what would mothers throughout the world be responding to?
> baby. This projection of mature personality traits onto infants is to some
> degree forgivable; one can hardly expect parents to be detached, objective
> observers of their offspring.
So do you think that animals don't have desires either?
>
> > As for Georgian, isn't it a bit of an exception in this sense? Or is
> > your implication that there are as many languages which use m-sounds for
> > father as there are for mother? You've pointed out Georgian, now let's
> > see the other ... what is it? Two or three thousand?
>
> An "exception"? My girlfriend expressed this notion somewhat differently.
> When I mentioned this feature of Georgian, she remarked that "there must be
> something wrong with that language", to which I responded "three million
> speakers can't be wrong"! I don't need 2000, or even 2, counter-examples to
> topple a faulty universal theory. All I need is 1.
All you need is one, but since I never said that it was "m-sounds and
only m-sounds," I think you were tilting at windmills.
> No, my implication is that your explanation is flawed. A babbling baby is
> not "expressing a desire" or attempting to communicate anything, but is
> merely babbling. Adults impose their fantasies on this babbling to create
Babies aren't merely babbling when they are hungry, tired, hot, cold,
itchy, in pain, or otherwise in need of attention. They are expressing a
desire.
If you have better terms for it, let's use those, because I'm not an
expert. But whatever it is, it *is* a desire and it *is* expressed.
> "baby words", but these fantasies are culturally and linguistically
> conditioned. A Georgian would be very unlikely to make the same errors which
> you did as a result of your conditioning. Note the following:
>
> (1) A baby gets attention primarily by screaming at the top of its lungs and
> throwing a tantrum, not by attempting to impress its guardians with its
> skill in articulatory phonetics. The non-linguistic method is so effective
> that many individuals continue to use it after babyhood, and even into
> adulthood.
>
I'm going to wager here that you don't have children. In no conceivable
interpretation could the statement "a baby gets attention primarily by
screaming at the top of its lungs and throwing a tantrum" be true. To
begin with, babies don't have tantrums. Tantrums are thrown by older
children, generally starting from when they are toddlers.
Babies do sometimes scream at the top of their lungs, but screaming is
only one of a wide variety of vocalizations.
Even most non-parents I know have at least heard the old saw that "a
mother can distinguish between different kinds of crying." I can attest
to this.
> (2) Eating and continuously vocalizing with an egressive airstream are
> mutually incompatible activities, self-defeating when attempted
> simultaneously.
I said vocalizing while imitating the jaw movement of eating, not doing
them simultaneously.
>
> (3) Moving the jaw so as to repeatedly close the lips is not "necessary for
> eating". What is essential to eating is swallowing. When this movement is
> made without food, the result is an ingressive "glugging" or "clucking"
> sound, which babies do indeed make. In our language, it happens that
> ingressive pharyngeal stops are not used as phonemes, so parents do not
> fantasize that their babies are "expressing a desire" or "communicating"
> with these sounds. ("How cute! She recognizes [g`Vlk`]! Come to [g`Vlk`]!")
Babies open their mouths to eat. Open, close, open, close.
>
> (4) "When she was hungry" is your, and your wife's, arbitrary
> interpretation. You have no objective basis whatever for your claimed causal
> connection between hunger and babbling. In my own limited (thank goodness!)
> experience, screaming and tantrum-throwing are far better indicators of
> hunger.
>
Holy shit. As a parent, when I read that her being hungry is an
arbitrary interpretation, all I can do is shake my head. You really
don't know a thing about babies, do you? Well, at least you admit it,
although I don't think I'm alone in the feeling that raising a child is
one of the most fulfilling and amazing experiences a person can have, so
you should be lamenting your limited experience.
> > You shouldn't have any problem coming up with them, since you *have*
> > bothered to "examine all the relevant data," right?
>
> I didn't make a universal generalization; I merely toppled one. The
> distribution of kinship terms is an interesting topic, but it doesn't happen
> to be a specialty of mine. Jarel, who loves wordlists, could probably
> contribute some further comments on this matter.
>
Well, I didn't make any linguistic generalizations, so it doesn't really
matter. If there are any child-care experts here, they can correct my
generalizations regarding baby hunger and expression thereof. In any
case, you seem to be attributing to me something along the lines of
"babies determine the word for mother by saying mama," or something. I
never said that it had to be mama (I used that example because it's the
one I'm familiar with), but there must be at least two people for
language to take place, so what I'm saying is that the mother and child
"come to an agreement" that it's mama (or dada or papa etc.), based on
the fact of the jaw movement made during eating.
Adler Pacific Translations
> intended) and we have baby talk for mum and dad involving
> p, b, m, t, and d, a goodly proportion of any language's
> store of consonants. In fact, the common [a] starts to look
> more significant than the consonants!
No n, no back consonants, no liquids. I would say that p, b, m, t, and d
are a pretty limited grouping, especially taking into consideration the
fact that they share something in common, namely, that they are front
consonants.
>
> To think of constructing a phylogeny on this basis is
> comparing Coca-Cola with Johnny Walker: they come in
> bottles.
But the context is all the possible words in all languages that could be
used for expressing mother and father, so this kind of similarity seems
significant. In any case, you can't compare two things without an
outside reference. Sure Coke and JW come in bottles, but if drinks are
baby-talk, in your example, then what's the group of all possible sound
combinations in a language?
Coca-Cola -- Johnny Walker -- Pepsi-Cola
Coca-Cola -- Johnny Walker -- Glenlivet
But:
Coca-Cola -- Johnny Walker -- Niagara-Mohawk Power Grid
Coke and JW have more in common with each other than either does with
the last item.
LEE Sau Dan
Jacques> So far, we have seen papa, mama, tata, baba. Add dad
Jacques> (anagram intended) and we have baby talk for mum and dad
Jacques> involving p, b, m, t, and d, a goodly proportion of any
Jacques> language's store of consonants. In fact, the common [a]
Jacques> starts to look more significant than the consonants!
Common [a]? Do you mean you pronounce "dad" with the same vowel as
"mama"!!? Where are you from?
And you've not got all the consonants. What do you mean by the "p"
and "b" you wrote? [p] and [b]? In languages like Chinese, English,
German, one would use an aspirated [p'] for "p". And what's that
"papa" in Japanese? Is it [p'ap'a] or [papa]?
--
Lee Sau Dan 李守敦(Big5) ~{@nJX6X~}(HZ)
E-mail: dan...@informatik.uni-freiburg.de
Home page: http://www.informatik.uni-freiburg.de/~danlee
Phil Healey
> Adler Pacific Translations wrote:
>
> > No n, no back consonants, no liquids.
>
> either.
> What's a nanny? And, as someone else asked in this thread, what are
> those words in Iroquian, which lacks labials? And I ask: what are they
> in Rotokas and in Piraha, which lack nasals? (I do have a dictionary
> of Rotokas, but of course, I can't find when I need it). Looking
Right. Of course you can't find it. (A mottomo-rashii hanashi if I've
ever heard one.)
> very close by, at one idiolect, my wife had [nanã] for "mummy"
> instead of the standard "maman". She also had [tete] for "pépé".
> The little I was able to elicit of what she remembered of her baby
> talk showed it lacked labials, which were replaced by dentals.
> Plenty of back consonants too, viz. [akakuNga] "my hat", [akakwa]
> "cake". Perhaps the reincarnation of an Iroquois squaw, eh?
Ummm... I don't know. With all your nantoka-bushi "Japanese drinking
songs" (the only drinking song in Japanese I know is IKKI IKKI IKKI
IKKI) and your wife's baby-talk, I don't get half the references you
make, anyway.
But still, your examples above still don't answer my question/comment.
If the phonetic system of a language precludes nasals, well of course
they aren't going to exist in words for mother. I'm willing to add n to
the list, but none of the other threads discussing this topic mention
liquids or back consonants. (I'm not sure why you mention "my hat" and
"cake" in this regard ... but the divergence from the topic, and the
last squaw comment, make me think that maybe you weren't in a state of
total and complete sobriety when you made the post.) (But that goes both
ways.)
And I can't get this one out of my mind, either: how the hell can an
expression be latent? That's been bothering me for days now.
benlizross
Actually Slavic "baba" means "old woman", doesn't it?
Ross Clark
benlizross
>
> Adler Pacific Translations wrote:
>
> > No n, no back consonants, no liquids.
>
> either.
> What's a nanny? And, as someone else asked in this thread, what are
> those words in Iroquian, which lacks labials? And I ask: what are they
> in Rotokas and in Piraha, which lack nasals? (I do have a dictionary
> of Rotokas, but of course, I can't find when I need it).
You have? Where'd you get it? Can I borrow it?
Ross Clark
Looking
> very close by, at one idiolect, my wife had [nană] for "mummy"
Douglas G. Kilday
"Adler Pacific Translations" <ad...@adlerpacific.com> wrote in message ...
> * Douglas G. Kilday <fuf...@chorus.net> [2003-08-23 23:13]:
> >
> > "Phil Healey" <psa_h...@hotmail.com> wrote in message ...
> >
> > > [...]
> > > I was certainly making generalizations, but please point out where I
> > > used the words "linguistic universals" in the above.
> >
> > You don't have to use that particular term, but you were talking about
> > language, and you were making universal claims about "a baby" and "the
> > mother". Incidentally, you have presented no evidence that such
cognitive
> > concepts as "desire" and "expression" have any meaning to a 5-month-old
>
> Babies desire a lot of things: food, comfort, warmth, entertainment...
> They may not have the concept, but they express it just fine.
That makes no sense whatsoever. If they have no concepts, they have nothing
to express.
> Otherwise what would mothers throughout the world be responding to?
Maternal instinct. Empathy. Projection of their own feelings onto the
infants.
> > baby. This projection of mature personality traits onto infants is to
some
> > degree forgivable; one can hardly expect parents to be detached,
objective
> > observers of their offspring.
>
> So do you think that animals don't have desires either?
I never said that. Cerebrally mature animals certainly do have desires and
express them. My sister's dog, when she wanted to play "fetch", would find a
stick and toss it into the air repeatedly (using her jaws) until a human
responded. However, I have never heard of a 5-month-old human doing anything
comparable. Nor have I ever heard of a puppy at the comparable stage (just
starting to accept solid food) "training" humans or other dogs in such a
specific manner to answer to specific desires.
> >
> > > As for Georgian, isn't it a bit of an exception in this sense? Or is
> > > your implication that there are as many languages which use m-sounds
for
> > > father as there are for mother? You've pointed out Georgian, now let's
> > > see the other ... what is it? Two or three thousand?
> >
> > An "exception"? My girlfriend expressed this notion somewhat
differently.
> > When I mentioned this feature of Georgian, she remarked that "there must
be
> > something wrong with that language", to which I responded "three million
> > speakers can't be wrong"! I don't need 2000, or even 2, counter-examples
to
> > topple a faulty universal theory. All I need is 1.
>
> All you need is one, but since I never said that it was "m-sounds and
> only m-sounds," I think you were tilting at windmills.
We are in agreement that /mama/ does not have to mean 'mother', and
hopefully that languages in which it means something else are not weird, so
I will not pursue this further.
> > No, my implication is that your explanation is flawed. A babbling baby
is
> > not "expressing a desire" or attempting to communicate anything, but is
> > merely babbling. Adults impose their fantasies on this babbling to
create
>
> Babies aren't merely babbling when they are hungry, tired, hot, cold,
> itchy, in pain, or otherwise in need of attention. They are expressing a
> desire.
>
> If you have better terms for it, let's use those, because I'm not an
> expert. But whatever it is, it *is* a desire and it *is* expressed.
The asterisks emphasize your dogmatism on this matter. For some obscure
psychological reason, you are unwilling to accept that babbling is not
communication, any more than crawling or puking.
> > "baby words", but these fantasies are culturally and linguistically
> > conditioned. A Georgian would be very unlikely to make the same errors
which
> > you did as a result of your conditioning. Note the following:
> >
> > (1) A baby gets attention primarily by screaming at the top of its lungs
and
> > throwing a tantrum, not by attempting to impress its guardians with its
> > skill in articulatory phonetics. The non-linguistic method is so
effective
> > that many individuals continue to use it after babyhood, and even into
> > adulthood.
>
> I'm going to wager here that you don't have children. In no conceivable
> interpretation could the statement "a baby gets attention primarily by
> screaming at the top of its lungs and throwing a tantrum" be true. To
> begin with, babies don't have tantrums. Tantrums are thrown by older
> children, generally starting from when they are toddlers.
I misused the technical term "tantrum". "Din" or "commotion" would have been
better. And I certainly have witnessed infants, not only toddlers, engaged
in behavior which goes beyond merely making vocal noise.
> Babies do sometimes scream at the top of their lungs, but screaming is
> only one of a wide variety of vocalizations.
>
> Even most non-parents I know have at least heard the old saw that "a
> mother can distinguish between different kinds of crying." I can attest
> to this.
Anecdotal evidence of this sort is of little value. Get the mothers and
babies into a laboratory and perform double-blind experiments with
reproducible results. Then we'll see how sharp the old saw is.
> > (2) Eating and continuously vocalizing with an egressive airstream are
> > mutually incompatible activities, self-defeating when attempted
> > simultaneously.
>
> I said vocalizing while imitating the jaw movement of eating, not doing
> them simultaneously.
"Imitating the jaw movement of eating"? That's a whale of an interpretation
of a 5-month-old! Your incredibly precocious infant is able to separate, in
her advanced mind, the various physical processes which constitute eating:
simple jaw movement, gumming/chewing, salivation, swallowing, esophageal
peristalsis, etc. Out of these she selects one, and while performing that
one, she adds others not associated, and indeed incompatible, with eating:
egressive oral airstream, glottal vibration (voice), and velar aperture
(nasalisation). With her keen intellect, she knows that this peculiar
selection of one component of eating, combined with certain non-eating
functions, will express her desire of eating to her slave-like guardians!
You had best be careful, or by the age of 6 years this prodigy will have
taken over the neighborhood, if not the whole town! She already makes
Einstein look like Barney Fife!
> >
> > (3) Moving the jaw so as to repeatedly close the lips is not "necessary
for
> > eating". What is essential to eating is swallowing. When this movement
is
> > made without food, the result is an ingressive "glugging" or "clucking"
> > sound, which babies do indeed make. In our language, it happens that
> > ingressive pharyngeal stops are not used as phonemes, so parents do not
> > fantasize that their babies are "expressing a desire" or "communicating"
> > with these sounds. ("How cute! She recognizes [g`Vlk`]! Come to
[g`Vlk`]!")
>
> Babies open their mouths to eat. Open, close, open, close.
Have you ever tried eating without swallowing? Cram, plop, cram, plop.
> >
> > (4) "When she was hungry" is your, and your wife's, arbitrary
> > interpretation. You have no objective basis whatever for your claimed
causal
> > connection between hunger and babbling. In my own limited (thank
goodness!)
> > experience, screaming and tantrum-throwing are far better indicators of
> > hunger.
[Here, "tantrum-throwing" should be replaced by "din-making" or the like.]
> Holy shit. As a parent, when I read that her being hungry is an
> arbitrary interpretation, all I can do is shake my head. You really
> don't know a thing about babies, do you? Well, at least you admit it,
> although I don't think I'm alone in the feeling that raising a child is
> one of the most fulfilling and amazing experiences a person can have, so
> you should be lamenting your limited experience.
This talk-show claptrap demonstrates conclusively that you are completely
incapable of objectivity in observing your child. On the other hand, it
would make excellent advertising copy for a diaper manufacturer. Perhaps you
should change careers. You have not given the details, faithfully recorded
in your notebook, which show that your 5-month-old daughter _always_ babbled
labial nasals when hungry and _never_ babbled labial nasals when not hungry,
which would be required to establish causality. Heck, you have not even
provided details of the means by which you determined and quantified your
daughter's hunger. All you have done is related some impressionistic
personal anecdotes and padded them with Oprah-style emotionalism.
> > > You shouldn't have any problem coming up with them, since you *have*
> > > bothered to "examine all the relevant data," right?
> >
> > I didn't make a universal generalization; I merely toppled one. The
> > distribution of kinship terms is an interesting topic, but it doesn't
happen
> > to be a specialty of mine. Jarel, who loves wordlists, could probably
> > contribute some further comments on this matter.
>
> Well, I didn't make any linguistic generalizations, so it doesn't really
> matter. If there are any child-care experts here, they can correct my
> generalizations regarding baby hunger and expression thereof. In any
> case, you seem to be attributing to me something along the lines of
> "babies determine the word for mother by saying mama," or something. I
> never said that it had to be mama (I used that example because it's the
> one I'm familiar with), but there must be at least two people for
> language to take place, so what I'm saying is that the mother and child
> "come to an agreement" that it's mama (or dada or papa etc.), based on
> the fact of the jaw movement made during eating.
The child is not even involved in the agreement. It is the adult speech
community which maintains the agreement, made generations earlier by other
adults, to interpret /mama/ as 'mother', 'father', 'breast', 'food', or
whatever. This is but one of the thousands of agreements among speakers
which constitute a particular language.
DGK
Phil Healey
>
> "Adler Pacific Translations" <ad...@adlerpacific.com> wrote in message ...
>
> > * Douglas G. Kilday <fuf...@chorus.net> [2003-08-23 23:13]:
> > >
> > > "Phil Healey" <psa_h...@hotmail.com> wrote in message ...
> > >
> > > > [...]
> > > > I was certainly making generalizations, but please point out where I
> > > > used the words "linguistic universals" in the above.
> > >
> > > You don't have to use that particular term, but you were talking about
> > > language, and you were making universal claims about "a baby" and "the
> > > mother". Incidentally, you have presented no evidence that such
> cognitive
> > > concepts as "desire" and "expression" have any meaning to a 5-month-old
> >
> > Babies desire a lot of things: food, comfort, warmth, entertainment...
> > They may not have the concept, but they express it just fine.
>
> That makes no sense whatsoever. If they have no concepts, they have nothing
> to express.
Mothers only imagine they understand their babies' cries? Babies don't
express anything?
Anybody who has raised a child is shaking his/her head at the sheer
ignorance of your comments. I'll do you a favor and I'll cut this off
right here before you embarrass yourself any further.
Go have some kids and come back. We'll discuss it once you actually have
some experience in the matter.
Brian M. Scott
<psa_h...@hotmail.com> wrote:
>* Douglas G. Kilday <fuf...@chorus.net> [2003-08-24 22:00]:
>> "Adler Pacific Translations" <ad...@adlerpacific.com> wrote in message ...
[...]
>> > Babies desire a lot of things: food, comfort, warmth, entertainment...
>> > They may not have the concept, but they express it just fine.
>> That makes no sense whatsoever. If they have no concepts, they have nothing
>> to express.
>Mothers only imagine they understand their babies' cries?
Experienced ones frequently recognize that they *don't*.
>Babies don't express anything?
Babies react to stimuli, including hunger and cold. In some
cases one can with better than chance frequency associate a
response with a stimulus; this does not mean that the baby is
consciously expressing anything.
[...]
Brian
Larry Trask
> But still, your examples above still don't answer my question/comment.
> If the phonetic system of a language precludes nasals, well of course
> they aren't going to exist in words for mother.
Interestingly, I'm not certain that this obvious-looking conclusion is
true. As I recall from the brief discussion in the published version
of the UPSID inventory of phonological systems, there exist languages
which lack the consonant /m/ altogether *except* in certain peripheral
items, which may be loan words, expressive formations or mama/papa
words.
That is, it is apparently possible for these peripheral items to
exhibit phonological properties which are at odds with the "ordinary"
phonology of the language, including even extraordinary segments.
Larry Trask
lar...@sussex.ac.uk
I
Phil Healey <psa_h...@hotmail.com> wrote:
>The connection between hunger and calling for mother was further
>reinforced by the fact that in Japanese baby-talk "mamma" means food.
>"Pappa" only came later, and through a lot of reinforcement, frankly. My
>daughter could just as well have called me dada or any of the other
>sounds she was making, if we had reinforced it, but "mamma" started
>before she was old enough to respond to reinforcement of that type.
As an aside, I just happened to read this yesterday, in Milton
Murayama's "All I asking for is my body":
"Mother did seem to have more superstitions than most people. She
insisted that rice always be scooped at least twice from the big bowl to
the individual bowls even if the second scoop was a token one without
any rice on the ladle. The double scooping protected the family from
seeing a second mother, meaning your first mother would not die or run
away. _Mama_ in Japanese meant cooked rice or mother."
I
>> I haven't seen the article, but that seems reasonable. Still, the use of
>> a fossil form not used elsewhere amounts to a recycling of an existing
>> word through borrowing from an otherwise dying dialect, rather than a
>
>???
What I meant was, the vocative -a has not survived elsewhere, if I
understand you correctly, but did exist in some dialect when "?aba" was
adopted from it as a nursery word.
>baba is found elswehere in turkic and as I have said colloquial arabic
>words in turkish are extremely rare, much less for such a common one
>from an uncommon colloquial arabic word.
Even in colloquial Turkish?
By the way, is the (Farsi? Arabic?) Baba in "Ali Baba" relevant to all
this?
Phil Healey
> Phil Healey wrote:
>
> > And I can't get this one out of my mind, either: how the hell can an
> > expression be latent? That's been bothering me for days now.
>
>
> businessman who had acted in amateur Noh troups. What's good
> for a Japanese speaker describing his first-hand experience
> of this "latent-expression art" is good enough for this
> gander. In English it's perhaps not clear. In Japanese, to
> me, it's clear: "senzai" conjures up the image of a fish under
> the surface of the water, invisible but there. I did not know
> the word, and only later thought of this possible French
> (and English) equivalent, "latent", and it did turn out to be
> what my dictionary gave for "senzai".
I'm still not clear on this. How can an expression be latent? Something
(an emotion, etc.) can be latent, but *until* it's expressed, when it stops
being latent. Right? I can only understand senzai hyougen as an oxymoron.
In your example, I'm not sure what the fish is. If it's below the
surface, it's latent, but if it's invisible it's not an expression. Is
it the thing (waiting) to be expressed? In that case I could understand
senzai hyougen to be an abbreviation for something like "senzai-teki na
mono no *chien sareta* hyougen," unless, of course, some kind of logical
conundrum (Zen koans, etc.) is at play, which may very well be the case.
Either way, Googling for 潜在表現 produces a very Zen-like zero hits, and
I can't find it in any dictionary. I'd like to learn more about Noh,
though, and this has piqued my curiosity.
I
R.L....@sussex.ac.uk (Larry Trask) wrote:
>Second, borrowing should never be taken as the default hypothesis.
>Since it is easily demonstrated that mama/papa words are constantly
>created, borrowing should not be entertained unless there is very good
>evidence to support such a hypothesis. In most cases, you can't
>reasonably argue for borrowing unless you can point to a specific
>source word in a specific language, and also to a specific pathway by
>which the word was borrowed. Merely noting resemblances is not good
>enough.
There are a few reasons to expect more borrowing with mama/papa words.
No hard evidence for any of these, they just seem reasonable:
- In cross marriages, even if the wife adopts her husband's language,
she'd be more likely to use her native baby talk when speaking to her
children. I know people who do not know their mother's (or
grandmother's) native language, except the word they address her by. I
couldn't say if this makes 'mother' words more borrowable than 'father'
words.
- Iconic words, by their nature, are easier to learn, since their sound
provides a hint as to their meaning. <Mama> is easier to remember as
meaning "a baby word" and <Kikiriki> is easier to remember as meaning
"rooster call" than, oh, "mother" or "cock". If you heard someone
addressing his mother in a language completely unknown to you, and
repeatedly heard the word "mama" or "mami" or "mom" or "ama" in their
speech, you'd probably catch that quicker than anything else.
>As soon as I can get my hands on my Turkic glossary, I'll present the
>Turkic examples, and we can talk about them.
I look forward to it. If possible, I'd like to see the nursery words in
neighboring non-Turkic languages, so as to make the case for or against
borrowing more clear.
>But there is more variation in western Europe than you appear to be
>suggesting. For 'father', for example, we have English 'daddy', Welsh
><tad>,
Don't you think Welsh <tad> could be a borrowing from English <dad>? Or,
as the OED mentions (and dismisses) that the English is a borrowing from
Welsh?
The OED (I checked the online version, including 2nd ed. and supplement)
has quite a bit on the etymology of mom/mama/dad/daddy etc. The British
"mama" with an accent on the last syllable, familiar from bad BBC
dramas, is taken to be a borrowing from the french maman.
Are there any examples of "dad" words between Slavic Europe and the
British Isles?
>Basque <aita>,
What is the history of <aita>?
>and Italian <babbo>, just to cite a few off the
>top of my head. Western Europe does not exhibit an unrelieved expanse
>of [mama] and [papa].
But statistically speaking, isn't the _majority_ of them of that nature?
Johanna Nichols, as I recall, made some reference to the particular pair
mama/papa as showing a distinctive cluster in W. Europe. I don't know if
she formally published any of this.
>> The word for "cuckoo"...
>
>I agree that conclusions can be difficult in such cases, but you are
>too pessimistic. We have historical records that can sometimes tell
>us interesting things about the histories of these words.
Sure, I meant just on the basis of the data I presented, consisting of
nearly identical words in various languages.
Since you are here, what are the Basque words for "cuckoo" and
"cock-a-doodle-do"?
>> On the other hand, for the call of the rooster we have French
>> /kokoriko/, Italian /kukuruku/ and German /kikiriki/, contrasting with
>> English /kAkadudldu/ (also /kokaludltu/, /kAkadududu/, OED). Even though
>> all these are transparent onomatopeias, we have a pattern here: kVkVrVkV
>> on the continent, the other form in English. The implications are: 1.
>> there is more than one way to linguistically imitate a rooster, and 2.
>> these different forms don't pop up in arbitrary places. I would be
>> reluctant, in any event, to reconstruct an onomatopoeia to a
>> protolanguage, but here the case is obvious: German does not share the
>> pattern with its sister language English, but with its geographic
>> neighbors. The two possible explanations are:
>> 1. Proto-IE had kVkVrVkV, reflected in its continental daughters, but
>> English innovated its own pattern, or
>> 2. kVkVrVkV spread in the continent through contact.
>
>But this is no more than a template, at best. It is not a linguistic
>form. And languages do not borrow templates: they borrow linguistic
>forms.
>
>When we borrow a word, such as Italian <vermicelli> or German
><Kindergarten>, we don't just borrow the consonantal skeleton and then
>insert a set of vowels of our own choosing: we take over the whole
>thing, as well as our phonology will let us.
>
>Are you suggesting that words for animal noises -- and mama/papa words
>-- are borrowed by some distinct and unique process that doesn't obey
>the ordinary rules of borrowing?
Not quite. In the case of the rooster, we have o/u alternation between
French and Italian, which is unremarkable as an historical
(post-borrowing) development. In the German <kikiriki> (as I heard it;
my dictionary has <kikeriki>) the /i/s could have developed by
assimilation from the /i/ in the third syllable, so as to make the word
"simpler", which is a common characteristic of iconic words.
Anttila (histling textbook) describes several cases in which
onomatopoeias and other iconic words resist regular sound change more
than other words, so as to preserve their iconic character.
Yusuf B Gursey
> In article <222ae656.03082...@posting.google.com>,
> y...@theworld.com (Yusuf B Gursey) wrote:
>
>
> >> I haven't seen the article, but that seems reasonable. Still, the use of
> >> a fossil form not used elsewhere amounts to a recycling of an existing
> >> word through borrowing from an otherwise dying dialect, rather than a
> >
> >???
>
> What I meant was, the vocative -a has not survived elsewhere, if I
> understand you correctly, but did exist in some dialect when "?aba" was
> adopted from it as a nursery word.
Rabin gives examples in older arabic, it may have survived elswhere in
the Hebrew of the time but had little attestation.
>
>
> >baba is found elswehere in turkic and as I have said colloquial arabic
> >words in turkish are extremely rare, much less for such a common one
> >from an uncommon colloquial arabic word.
>
> Even in colloquial Turkish?
yes, except where turks live amongst arabs.
>
> By the way, is the (Farsi? Arabic?) Baba in "Ali Baba" relevant to all
> this?
it exhibits turkish word order. the 1001 nights has much turkish and
persian influence, incl. the expresssion "1001". prior to turkish
influence, during the abbasid period, it was "1000".
Yusuf B Gursey
> In article <222ae656.03082...@posting.google.com>,
> y...@theworld.com (Yusuf B Gursey) wrote:
>
>
> >> I haven't seen the article, but that seems reasonable. Still, the use of
> >> a fossil form not used elsewhere amounts to a recycling of an existing
> >> word through borrowing from an otherwise dying dialect, rather than a
> >
> >???
>
> What I meant was, the vocative -a has not survived elsewhere, if I
> understand you correctly, but did exist in some dialect when "?aba" was
> adopted from it as a nursery word.
Rabin gives examples in older arabic, it may have survived elswhere in
the Hebrew of the time but had little attestation.
>
>
> >baba is found elswehere in turkic and as I have said colloquial arabic
> >words in turkish are extremely rare, much less for such a common one
> >from an uncommon colloquial arabic word.
>
> Even in colloquial Turkish?
yes, except where turks live amongst arabs.
>
> By the way, is the (Farsi? Arabic?) Baba in "Ali Baba" relevant to all
> this?
it exhibits turkish word order. the 1001 nights has much turkish and
Larry Trask
words for 'father' and 'grandfather' in eight Turkic languages.
'father' 'grandfather' language
ata baba Azerbaijani
äke ata Kazakh
ata chong ata Kyrgyz
ata babay Tatar
baba dede Turkish
kaka ata Turkmen
dada bova Uyghur
ota bobo Uzbek
As you can see, some languages have retained the inherited common
Turkic word for 'father', <ata>, while others have replaced it. The
new words are also mama/papa words, though the Kazakh and Turkmen
words are unusual in using back consonants. Forms like [kaka] are
fairly common as words for more distant relatives, like 'older
brother' and 'paternal uncle', but they are unusual for 'father' --
except to some extent in North America, I'm told.
Two of the languages have shifted <ata> to 'grandfather'. The others
show a variety of formations for 'grandfather', most of them also
transparent mama/papa words.
Now, I can see absolutely no reason to regard these numerous forms as
anything other than spontaneous creations in the individual languages.
If you want to claim instead that most of these items are borrowed,
then you must at least produce a set of source words in neighboring
languages. But why should the Turkic languages engage in a frenzy of
borrowing of mama/papa words?
Source:
K. Öztopçu et al. (1996). Dictionary of the Turkic Languages. London:
Routledge.
Larry Trask
lar...@sussex.ac.uk
David Thomas
<ad...@adlerpacific.com> writes:
>* Jacques Guy <jg...@alphalink.com.au> [2003-08-25 04:00]:
>> mb wrote:
>> >
>> > R.L....@sussex.ac.uk (Larry Trask) wrote
::snip::
>No n, no back consonants, no liquids. I would say that p, b, m, t, and d
>are a pretty limited grouping, especially taking into consideration the
>fact that they share something in common, namely, that they are front
>consonants.
:snip::
I don't think this is very significant, though: I'm betting the association
between them only exemplifies the ease with which a baby can produce them.
- Vae
David Thomas
R.L....@sussex.ac.uk (Larry Trask) writes:
>Phil Healey <psa_h...@hotmail.com> wrote in message
>news:<2003082507...@adlerpacific.com>...
>
>> But still, your examples above still don't answer my question/comment.
>> If the phonetic system of a language precludes nasals, well of course
>> they aren't going to exist in words for mother.
>
>Interestingly, I'm not certain that this obvious-looking conclusion is
>true. As I recall from the brief discussion in the published version
>of the UPSID inventory of phonological systems, there exist languages
>which lack the consonant /m/ altogether *except* in certain peripheral
>items, which may be loan words, expressive formations or mama/papa
>words.
>
>That is, it is apparently possible for these peripheral items to
>exhibit phonological properties which are at odds with the "ordinary"
>phonology of the language, including even extraordinary segments.
I had thought it was not uncommon for speakers of a language to make sounds
that don't occur in the phonology of the language, or are forbidden by it.
English speakers seem fond of using a velar fricative to express disgust, or of
violating English (or {insert native language here}) phonology when writing
about aliens. Also, despite their initial phonetic limitations, babies have a
tendency of making up 'words' that occur very much outside the phonologies of
their language, and in their experimenting can often produce sounds likewise.
At least, this is my experience.
- Vae
Larry Trask
> There are a few reasons to expect more borrowing with mama/papa words.
> No hard evidence for any of these, they just seem reasonable:
I can't agree. There are a few known cases of the borrowing of such
words, but I know of no evidence at all that such words are borrowed
frequently.
> - In cross marriages, even if the wife adopts her husband's language,
> she'd be more likely to use her native baby talk when speaking to her
> children. I know people who do not know their mother's (or
> grandmother's) native language, except the word they address her by. I
> couldn't say if this makes 'mother' words more borrowable than 'father'
> words.
This is not impossible, but you will need an awful lot of cross
marriages in the same direction before a word introduced in this way
can drive an established word out of the language. Can you cite a
*single* example in which a mama/papa word has been displaced in such
a way?
> - Iconic words, by their nature, are easier to learn, since their sound
> provides a hint as to their meaning.
For the 87th time, mama/papa words are *not* "iconic". Look up the
meaning of this term. Mama/papa words are phonologically simple, and
they consist of the speech sounds which are produced earliest by
children. But these facts have nothing to do with iconicity.
> <Mama> is easier to remember as
> meaning "a baby word" and <Kikiriki> is easier to remember as meaning
> "rooster call" than, oh, "mother" or "cock".
Really? Who says so? On the basis of what evidence? And what is
special about a word which is "easy to remember"?
Anyway, this is confused. The words <kikiriki> (or whatever) and
'cock' do not have the same meaning at all.
> If you heard someone
> addressing his mother in a language completely unknown to you, and
> repeatedly heard the word "mama" or "mami" or "mom" or "ama" in their
> speech, you'd probably catch that quicker than anything else.
First, you are cooking the books by telling me that the speaker is
addressing his mother. How would I know that?
Second, I might jump to the conclusion that I was hearing the word for
'mother', but I might be dead wrong. In Turkish, for example, the
very frequent word <ama> means 'but'.
> >But there is more variation in western Europe than you appear to be
> >suggesting. For 'father', for example, we have English 'daddy', Welsh
> ><tad>,
>
> Don't you think Welsh <tad> could be a borrowing from English <dad>? Or,
> as the OED mentions (and dismisses) that the English is a borrowing from
> Welsh?
No; I see no reason to take either suggestion seriously.
First, as far as I know, <tad> is the only word for 'father' recorded
in Welsh at any time (can anybody comment on this?). The word is
shared with Breton, which also has <tad>, suggesting that the word was
already established in common British *before* the Anglo-Saxon
settlement of Britain.
Second, the English word 'dad' is of recent origin, and Welsh loans
into English are vanishingly rare.
Third, English word-initial /d/ is consistently borrowed into Welsh as
/d/, not as /t/: Welsh <desg> 'desk', <damnio> 'damn', <delio> 'deal',
<dis> 'dice' and so on. And why would the aspirated Welsh /t/ be
borrowed into English as /d/?
> The OED (I checked the online version, including 2nd ed. and supplement)
> has quite a bit on the etymology of mom/mama/dad/daddy etc. The British
> "mama" with an accent on the last syllable, familiar from bad BBC
> dramas, is taken to be a borrowing from the french maman.
There is no doubt about this one, but 'mamá' was never more than an
upper-class affectation in English, and it never managed to establish
itself in the language. So far as I know, it is now extinct.
> Are there any examples of "dad" words between Slavic Europe and the
> British Isles?
How about Romanian <tata> 'father'?
There's also Lithuanian <tevas>, Latvian <tevs>, Old Prussian <taws>,
all 'father'. C. D. Buck assures me that these words are of nursery
origin.
> >Basque <aita>,
>
> What is the history of <aita>?
No history. It's a mama/papa word. The element ATTA-, which occurs
in male names in the sparsely recorded Aquitanian ancestor of Basque,
*might* be an early attestation of the word, but we can't be sure.
> >and Italian <babbo>, just to cite a few off the
> >top of my head. Western Europe does not exhibit an unrelieved expanse
> >of [mama] and [papa].
>
> But statistically speaking, isn't the _majority_ of them of that nature?
Quite possibly -- I don't have the words for more than a handful of
languages -- but so what? Areal preferences are not evidence for
borrowing.
> Since you are here, what are the Basque words for "cuckoo" and
> "cock-a-doodle-do"?
No surprises. The first is <kuku>. This word is recorded once in the
16th century, in one of our earliest and most archaic texts, but it is
not otherwise recorded before the 19th century. The second is
<kukurruku>, with a trilled rhotic, south of the Pyrenees, but
<kukuruku> north of the Pyrenees. This word is not recorded before
the end of the 18th century. Nothing is known about their ultimate
origins.
> >Are you suggesting that words for animal noises -- and mama/papa words
> >-- are borrowed by some distinct and unique process that doesn't obey
> >the ordinary rules of borrowing?
> Not quite. In the case of the rooster, we have o/u alternation between
> French and Italian, which is unremarkable as an historical
> (post-borrowing) development.
First, this is not an alternation. It is merely a difference in form.
Second, you are simply taking it for granted that the word must have
been borrowed, and you are trying to rationalize the difference in
form. Why can't you simply admit that French-speakers and
Italian-speakers have enough nous to create imitations of a rooster
noise?
> In the German <kikiriki> (as I heard it;
> my dictionary has <kikeriki>) the /i/s could have developed by
> assimilation from the /i/ in the third syllable, so as to make the word
> "simpler", which is a common characteristic of iconic words.
See above on "iconic".
Sure, and English 'soup' is borrowed from German <Zuppe>, by
"simplifying" all the bits that we English-speakers didn't care for.
Mr. anonymous letter of the alphabet, you are not doing linguistics.
You are choosing your conclusion in advance, and you are desperately
trying to force all the data into your required conclusions.
Elsewhere, I have dubbed this practice "Procrustean linguistics".
> Anttila (histling textbook) describes several cases in which
> onomatopoeias and other iconic words resist regular sound change more
> than other words, so as to preserve their iconic character.
This is true, but it's not relevant here. We are talking about
independent creation versus borrowing. Anyway, it is not true that
such words resist phonological change absolutely. Look, for example,
at the development of Middle English <tine> into modern 'tiny', via
the Great Vowel Shift, followed by the re-coining of 'teeny'.
And mama/papa words *definitely* do not resist regular phonological
changes, because they are in no way iconic.
Larry Trask
lar...@sussex.ac.uk
Larry Trask
> Phil Healey <psa_h...@hotmail.com> wrote in message news:<2003082301...@adlerpacific.com>...
>
> > As for Georgian, isn't it a bit of an exception in this sense? Or is
> > your implication that there are as many languages which use m-sounds for
> > father as there are for mother? You've pointed out Georgian, now let's
> > see the other ... what is it? Two or three thousand?
>
> No; <mama> for 'father' is much less common than <mama> for 'mother',
> but it does occur in a number of languages. When I get a chance, I'll
> try to dig out a few more examples.
Here are a few.
<mama> 'father', Pitjantjatjara (Australia)
<mam> 'father', Jacaltec (Guatemala)
<mamang> 'father', Xakriabá (Brazil)
There are also some oddities:
<man> 'father', Bella Coola (Canada)
<moon> 'father', Ocaina (Peru)
I don't know what to make of these forms. They are not canonical
mama/papa words, but they do look broadly like words of this type.
Larry Trask
lar...@sussex.ac.uk
Yusuf B Gursey
>
> >
> > By the way, is the (Farsi? Arabic?) Baba in "Ali Baba" relevant to all
> > this?
>
> it exhibits turkish word order. the 1001 nights has much turkish and
> persian influence, incl. the expresssion "1001". prior to turkish
turkish expression bi*ng* (modern standard << bin >>) bir "1001"
> influence, during the abbasid period, it was "1000".
name of the persian frame story: "1000 stories". it was translated
into arabic, updated, and arabic stories were added to it, but stories
form other sources translated into arabic were also included.
Yusuf B Gursey
> OK; I've got hold of my Turkic glossary. As promised, here are the
> words for 'father' and 'grandfather' in eight Turkic languages.
>
> 'father' 'grandfather' language
>
> ata baba Azerbaijani
> äke ata Kazakh
> ata chong ata Kyrgyz
> ata babay Tatar
> baba dede Turkish
> kaka ata Turkmen
> dada bova Uyghur
> ota bobo Uzbek
>
> As you can see, some languages have retained the inherited common
> Turkic word for 'father', <ata>, while others have replaced it. The
> new words are also mama/papa words, though the Kazakh and Turkmen
> words are unusual in using back consonants. Forms like [kaka] are
> fairly common as words for more distant relatives, like 'older
in the sense of "older brother" . *a:qa is very common in turkic.
dede in the sense of both "father" and "grandfather" is attested in
the 11th cent. by Kashgari, though he says that "dede" as "father" is
oghuz, and as "grandfather" eastern turkic, the reverse of the
situation in new uyghur vs.
turkish.
see also << ata >> in Doerfer, TMEN #414 .
Yusuf B Gursey
: in the sense of "older brother" . *a:qa is very common in turkic.
found in both the mongolian and turkic sections of TMEN, aqa, a*gh*a
: dede in the sense of both "father" and "grandfather" is attested in
TMEN #1179
: the 11th cent. by Kashgari, though he says that "dede" as "father" is
hhubey
aba I rare aba (an address of a child to the mother or to the father)
amma mother
ana mother
?nna balk. grandmother; old woman
?nnaka balk. grandmothers
anaka same as anakay
anakay affectionate mommy
ann(a, annya 1) mother, mum; (where n( is palatalized) 2) grandmother; ~
anay folklore affectionate mother
gel?a balk. old woman, grandmother; qart ~ old grandmother
baba karach. 1) ancestor, grandfather;
babas 1) obsolete grandfather 2) rel. priest, parson; father
ata 1. father; ancestor
atta,
atas obsolete father
akka karach. 1) grandfather; 2) old man;
appa grandfather
baba
ataka(y) affect the daddy
ata-baba ancestors
tis,iriw 1) woman; 2) lady; 3) rare wife; 5) mother, ma, lady, aunt
ög ‘mother’; the oldest Turkish word with this sense [Clauson72: 98];
Aaron J. Dinkin
> I <i...@nowhere.nowhere> wrote in message news:<i-EB2E2A.12...@news06.west.earthlink.net>...
>
>> Are there any examples of "dad" words between Slavic Europe and the
>> British Isles?
>
> How about Romanian <tata> 'father'?
Also Yiddish "tate". I don't know if either Yiddish or Romanian counts as
"between", though.
-Aaron J. Dinkin
Dr. Whom
Yusuf B Gursey
> Karachay-Balkar dictionary: Tenishen and Siunchev
> appa grandfather
>
apa "grandfather, ancestor" is found in old turkic.
Yusuf B Gursey
> appa grandfather
Yusuf B Gursey
: Second, I might jump to the conclusion that I was hearing the word for
: 'mother', but I might be dead wrong. In Turkish, for example, the
: very frequent word <ama> means 'but'.
that is a loanword from literary arabic 'ama: (a particle that introduces
a subject usually in contrast to the previous one, in arabic it would be
translated by "as for ..."
Yusuf B Gursey
: Second, I might jump to the conclusion that I was hearing the word for
: 'mother', but I might be dead wrong. In Turkish, for example, the
: very frequent word <ama> means 'but'.
that is a loanword from literary arabic 'amma: (a particle that introduces
Toni Keskitalo
>> Since you are here, what are the Basque words for "cuckoo" and
>> "cock-a-doodle-do"?
>
> No surprises. The first is <kuku>. This word is recorded once in the
> 16th century, in one of our earliest and most archaic texts, but it is
> not otherwise recorded before the 19th century. The second is
> <kukurruku>, with a trilled rhotic, south of the Pyrenees, but
> <kukuruku> north of the Pyrenees. This word is not recorded before
> the end of the 18th century. Nothing is known about their ultimate
> origins.
To consider Finnish might be interesting in this context... 'Cuckoo'
is, interestingly, <käki>. The verb for a cuckoo calling/crying is
<kukkua> (stem _kukku-_). 'Cock-a-doodle-do' is <kukkokiekuu>, which
seems to come from <kukko kiekuu> 'the rooster is calling'! The verb
<kiekua> is used mostly of roosters or other birds and sometimes of
noisy people as well.
And about "mother/father". 'Mother' is <äiti> and 'father' is <isä>.
The former isn't an old word, the original word being <emä>, now used
only of animal mothers in Finnish. It might be a loan, from Germanic
(Gothic had a similar word, I think) or a baby talk adaption. It's at
least in comics that babies are babbling "tät-tät ätä". <Mamma> for
'mom' seems to originate from Swedish; some other familiar forms are
<mutsi> (urban, I think Swedish-influenced) and <äitee>. Familiar
'father' forms are <isi>, <iskä>, <isukki> and <fatsi> (<Swedish,
urban).
<Taatto> is oldfashioned for 'father', <taata> for 'grandfather'.
Grandmother is often called <mummi>, <mummu> or <mummo>, probably
influenced by <mormor> 'maternal grandmother'. <Pappa> 'granpa' seems
very much to be Scandinavian influence.
'Nipple' is <nänni>.
Toni
--
# Replace .invalid with .fi for personal mail only #
"Jos aivastan, koko seinä kaikuu." (Tommi Liimatta)
I
dictionaries were in my public library, on the internet, or in this
group, so their quality may vary. The general picture is interesting.
I'll start with "papa" words in Indo-European (mostly European)
languages.
Celtic: All dad/tad words. Scottish Gaelic <daidein>, Irish <daidín>,
<daid>, Welsh <tad>, Cornish <tat>, Breton <tad>. Incidentally, in all
these languages the "dad" word exists alongside the regular IE reflex,
except in Welsh which has it only in compounds.
Romance: Most are papa words. French <papá>, Spanish <papá> but also
<tata>, Portuguese <papai>, Italian <papa> but also <babbo>, Latin
<papa> or <tata> (both examples from Varro, not clear which is
commoner), Daco-Rumanian <tata>.
Germanic: Most are papa words. German <papa>, Dutch <paatje> or <papa>,
Swedish <pappa>, Danish <papa>, but Norwegian <dadda>, English <dad>.
Slavic: Most are tata words. Polish <tata>, Ukrainian <tato>, Serbian
<tata>, but Russian <papa> (and <dyedya>, grandfather), Slovene <papa>.
Baltic: Formerly tata words. Lithuanian <tevas>, Latvian <tevs>, Old
Prussian <taws>.
Albanian: <tatë>, <lalë>
Modern Greek: <babas>
Hindi: <ddaida>
The general picture is that each language family is fairly uniform,
using either <tata> or <papa>. These are the exceptions (about 20% of
the total, excluding secondary words like Spanish <tata>, whose
significance I can't judge):
- Rumanian: <tata> (as in Slavic), not <papa>, but language borrowed
heavily from Bulgarian (and Old Church Slavonic, probably not relevant).
- Slovene: <papa> (as in Germanic and Romance), not <tata>, but language
was heavily influenced by German.
- Russian: <papa> not <tata>. Can't tell, I'd have to find an
historic/etymological dictionary, and/or a dialect atlas to figure this
one out.
- Norwegian: <dadda>, not Germanic <papa>. This seems the best candidate
for spontaneous replacement, along with the Albanian <lalë>.
- English: <dad>, <daddy> is the earliest recorded form (OED), going
back to 1500. Florio's Italian-English dictionary of 1598 (see later
edition at http://www.pbm.com/~lindahl/florio/370small.html) gives
"Páppa, the first word that children are taught to call their Fathers
by, as ours say Dad, Daddie, or Bab." [Note Florio's correct observation
that nursery words are taught to children, not vice versa.] <bab> isn't
mentioned anywhere else in the OED. It could be an earlier word replaced
by <dad>, a late reinvention which never took hold, or a dialectal form
Florio happened to be familiar with.
What do we do with English <dad>? That particular form doesn't occur
anywhere in this list except in Celtic. While I concede that Welsh is an
unlikely source (though Skeat apparently lists it as such), a British
Celtic substratum seems like a reasonable one, assuming that its form
was <dad>/<tad> at the time of the Saxon invasion.
For "mother", there is much less to work with. <máma> is pretty much
universal here, so it's hard to distinguish different processes. Some
exceptions are:
- French <maman>, Spanish <mamá>, Portuguese <mama~e>. The OED suggests
that the Spanish and Portuguese forms are borrowings from French. I
don't know if that is plausible.
- Albanian <nënë>, <mëmë>, <ëmë>. <nënë> may be an independent invention.
- English <mam>, could have been formed by analogy to <dad>.
So, my conclusions so far: mama/papa words are commonly inherited,
sometimes borrowed, rarely (but significantly) recreated; they are not
so very different than any other words, except that when they are
recreated it is within a limited (though not trivial) set of forms.
<papa> is not as universal as is commonly thought, and is mostly
confined to one geographical area.
The most controversial thing I am suggesting is that the Germanic and
Romance <papa> are related, through areal/contact processes. This isn't
any more radical than any of dozens of documented isoglosses throughout
Europe which encompass different language families. Some encompass only
Italic and Germanic, as here.
Now, for some of L. Trask's specific points:
>> - Iconic words, by their nature, are easier to learn, since their sound
>> provides a hint as to their meaning.
>
>For the 87th time, mama/papa words are *not* "iconic". Look up the
>meaning of this term. Mama/papa words are phonologically simple, and
>they consist of the speech sounds which are produced earliest by
>children. But these facts have nothing to do with iconicity.
From Trask's _Dictionary of Grammatical Terms_: "A direct correlation
between a conceptual notion or distinction and its linguistic
representation." Usually that is taken to include phonetic
representation, e.g. in onomatopoeia or sound symbolism. What exactly is
your complaint?
>Anyway, this is confused. The words <kikiriki> (or whatever) and
>'cock' do not have the same meaning at all.
I didn't mean to imply they were.
>First, this is not an alternation. It is merely a difference in form.
>
>Second, you are simply taking it for granted that the word must have
>been borrowed, and you are trying to rationalize the difference in
>form. Why can't you simply admit that French-speakers and
>Italian-speakers
>have enough nous to create imitations of a rooster noise?
??
I don't understand the typo, but I get your general meaning. Well,
rooster calls are not easily imitated by the standard sounds of any
human language, so there's a lot of variability (Japanese <kokekokko>,
Vietnamese <kukuku>, Tongan <kokoo> (more generally crowing; also
cognate Hawaiian ?o?oo). Not many kokorikos in the bunch. These are not
very many examples; if you demonstrate to me that kokoriko words are
abundant all over the world, I'll gladly withdraw my claim for an areal
feature in Europe.
N.B. A nice article on the phonetics of "cuckoo" in
www.trismegistos.com/IconicityInLanguage/Articles/Tsur/default.html
>Mr. anonymous letter of the alphabet, you are not doing linguistics.
>You are choosing your conclusion in advance, and you are desperately
>trying to force all the data into your required conclusions.
>Elsewhere, I have dubbed this practice "Procrustean linguistics".
No need to be huffy. I am not clear on what it is that you think I am
claiming and which you find objectionable. So for the record: I do _not_
think mama/papa words should be used to establish remote family
relationships. I do _not_ deny that they are sometimes created out of
nothing. I do _not_ think that they are always borrowed from other
languages. I do _not_ think the Phaistos disk is written in the parent
language of Sumerian, Esperanto and rooster calls.
However, I do think that mama/papa words should be given the benefit of
the doubt, and that their history often can be traced like any other
words, although there will always be some extra uncertainty because of
independent creation. I do object to the idea that mama/papa words are
recreated so often that there is no point in looking at them from an
ordinary historical perspective. I do suspect (though I never claimed to
prove) that the nursery word register has some unique and interesting
paths of transmission through contact.
David Thomas
<i...@nowhere.nowhere> writes:
[omit rest]
>I do _not_ think the Phaistos disk is written in the parent
>language of Sumerian, Esperanto and rooster calls.
Darn!
And Grapheus is nowhere to be seen...
- Vae
grapheus
But the clown David is here !...
grapheus
David Thomas
>> I do _not_ think the Phaistos disk is written in the parent
>> language of Sumerian, Esperanto and rooster calls.
>
>is clearly an anthropomorphic representation of a rooster's
>head, the "Mohawk hair" being the comb, as I have demonstrated
>in my forthcoming decipherment of the Phaistos disk (see
>especially volume LXXXIII)
LMAO
For the duration of the first line, I actually thought you were... well... you
know who. Then I saw the header.
'Ignarrogant' is actually an interesting coining, despite that it's something
of an oxymoron in my idiolect's set of connotations for its units.
Besides, I somewhat prefer my high-school AP Physics teacher's 'presumptu-ass.'
- Vae
Larry Trask
[snip data]
> So, my conclusions so far: mama/papa words are commonly inherited,
> sometimes borrowed, rarely (but significantly) recreated; they are not
> so very different than any other words, except that when they are
> recreated it is within a limited (though not trivial) set of forms.
> <papa> is not as universal as is commonly thought, and is mostly
> confined to one geographical area.
I am happy with this, except that I believe you underestimate the
frequency of independent creation.
> The most controversial thing I am suggesting is that the Germanic and
> Romance <papa> are related, through areal/contact processes. This isn't
> any more radical than any of dozens of documented isoglosses throughout
> Europe which encompass different language families. Some encompass only
> Italic and Germanic, as here.
I have no objection to this proposal, though I'm not prepared to
accept it as gospel. When we are looking at identical forms in
geographically adjacent languages, then borrowing is at least a
reasonable hypothesis.
But I seem to recall that you were earlier claiming that [kikiriki] in
one language was borrowed from [kokoriko] in another, or something
like that, with vowel assimilations. And I can't take that seriously.
> Now, for some of L. Trask's specific points:
>
> >> - Iconic words, by their nature, are easier to learn, since their sound
> >> provides a hint as to their meaning.
> >
> >For the 87th time, mama/papa words are *not* "iconic". Look up the
> >meaning of this term. Mama/papa words are phonologically simple, and
> >they consist of the speech sounds which are produced earliest by
> >children. But these facts have nothing to do with iconicity.
>
> From Trask's _Dictionary of Grammatical Terms_: "A direct correlation
> between a conceptual notion or distinction and its linguistic
> representation." Usually that is taken to include phonetic
> representation, e.g. in onomatopoeia or sound symbolism. What exactly is
> your complaint?
My complaint is that mama/papa words do not fit the definition. There
is no direct correlation between form and sense.
It is predictable, *from the meaning*, that a rooster noise is more
likely to be linguistically represented by something like [kokoriko]
than by something like [muu] or [fifi]. So [kokoriko] is iconic.
But there is no way of predicting, *from the meaning*, that 'mother'
is more likely to be linguistically represented by something like
[mama] than by something like [fifi] or [muu]. In terms of meaning,
the form [mama] is completely unpredictable and unexpected. It
becomes predictable only when we leave the meaning and look at other
facts -- in this case, the universal babbling behavior of children.
So, [mama] for 'mother' is in no way iconic.
> >First, this is not an alternation. It is merely a difference in form.
> >
> >Second, you are simply taking it for granted that the word must have
> >been borrowed, and you are trying to rationalize the difference in
> >form. Why can't you simply admit that French-speakers and
> >Italian-speakers
> >have enough nous to create imitations of a rooster noise?
> I don't understand the typo, but I get your general meaning.
There is no typo. The word 'nous' (rhymes with 'house') means
'intelligence, mental capacity, common sense'. Sorry; I hadn't
realized this word was strictly British.
> Well,
> rooster calls are not easily imitated by the standard sounds of any
> human language, so there's a lot of variability (Japanese <kokekokko>,
> Vietnamese <kukuku>, Tongan <kokoo> (more generally crowing; also
> cognate Hawaiian ?o?oo). Not many kokorikos in the bunch. These are not
> very many examples; if you demonstrate to me that kokoriko words are
> abundant all over the world, I'll gladly withdraw my claim for an areal
> feature in Europe.
But I have never objected to any claim for areal features. In fact, I
thought
*I* was the one suggesting that an areal feature was what we were
looking at. Your position, as I understood it, was massive borrowing.
> >Mr. anonymous letter of the alphabet, you are not doing linguistics.
> >You are choosing your conclusion in advance, and you are desperately
> >trying to force all the data into your required conclusions.
> >Elsewhere, I have dubbed this practice "Procrustean linguistics".
>
> No need to be huffy. I am not clear on what it is that you think I am
> claiming and which you find objectionable. So for the record: I do _not_
> think mama/papa words should be used to establish remote family
> relationships. I do _not_ deny that they are sometimes created out of
> nothing. I do _not_ think that they are always borrowed from other
> languages. I do _not_ think the Phaistos disk is written in the parent
> language of Sumerian, Esperanto and rooster calls.
Fine. But you *did* appear to be claiming, quite expressly, that
independent creation was rare and that massive borrowing was the
explanation of areal resemblances -- even in cases in which the
resemblances are very vague, like [kokoriko] and [kikiriki].
> However, I do think that mama/papa words should be given the benefit of
> the doubt, and that their history often can be traced like any other
> words, although there will always be some extra uncertainty because of
> independent creation. I do object to the idea that mama/papa words are
> recreated so often that there is no point in looking at them from an
> ordinary historical perspective. I do suspect (though I never claimed to
> prove) that the nursery word register has some unique and interesting
> paths of transmission through contact.
And I have no quarrel with this. My objection was only to your
apparent determination to see borrowing everywhere, evidence or no,
and to deny independent creation any significant role.
It seems to me undeniable that independent creation is commonplace.
The great variation in the mama/papa words found in, say, Bantu or
Turkic, or even the multiple words we find in European languages, such
as the ones you've collected, are more readily explained by creation
than by a mad frenzy of borrowing from unidentified source languages.
But perhaps we have now reached some common ground.
Larry Trask
lar...@sussex.ac.uk
Peter T. Daniels
> > >form. Why can't you simply admit that French-speakers and
> > >Italian-speakers
> > >have enough nous to create imitations of a rooster noise?
>
> > I don't understand the typo, but I get your general meaning.
>
> There is no typo. The word 'nous' (rhymes with 'house') means
> 'intelligence, mental capacity, common sense'. Sorry; I hadn't
> realized this word was strictly British.
I figured it was Greek ... but if that's the pronunciation, where'd the
spelling come from? I'd expect <nowse> like in <Rowse>.
--
Peter T. Daniels gram...@att.net
David Thomas
(grapheus) writes:
Have something against jesters, do you?
Truth hurts, and pain is funny.
- Vae
I
lar...@sussex.ac.uk (Larry Trask) wrote:
>But I seem to recall that you were earlier claiming that [kikiriki] in
>one language was borrowed from [kokoriko] in another, or something
>like that, with vowel assimilations. And I can't take that seriously.
There are two issues here: is there a pattern? and if there is, how is
it explained? I am pretty sure the pattern exists, namely kVkVrVkV in
Europe, rare elsewhere, though I'd want more data to confirm this before
I feel cocky about it (sorry.) There may be another pattern, witnessed
by Dutch <kukeleku>, Danish <kykeliky> and Swedish <kuckeliku>, but the
data here are even sparser.
As to the explanation, I am not married to anything I suggested; that
was more a matter of thinking out loud. I am sure historical
dictionaries and more dialect data would make the picture clearer. I was
suggesting a contact explanation because the pattern crosses some family
boundaries, but again, the map is too incomplete at present.
>It is predictable, *from the meaning*, that a rooster noise is more
>likely to be linguistically represented by something like [kokoriko]
>than by something like [muu] or [fifi]. So [kokoriko] is iconic.
>
>But there is no way of predicting, *from the meaning*, that 'mother'
>is more likely to be linguistically represented by something like
>[mama] than by something like [fifi] or [muu]. In terms of meaning,
>the form [mama] is completely unpredictable and unexpected. It
>becomes predictable only when we leave the meaning and look at other
>facts -- in this case, the universal babbling behavior of children.
The meaning I am talking about is the connotational meaning (is this
term still in use?), that is, the connotation of baby talk, not the
denotational meanings "mother" or "father". In other words, "mama",
"papa" and "choo-choo" work as nursery register words better than
"mother", "father" and "train".
>But I have never objected to any claim for areal features. In fact, I
>thought
>*I* was the one suggesting that an areal feature was what we were
>looking at. Your position, as I understood it, was massive borrowing.
My mistake was using "borrowing" instead of the more general "contact".
I know of nothing to suggest to me when or how Germanic and Romance (or
Italic) came to share "papa".
Would you happen to know what the extent of Gothic loanwords is in the
Romance languages? (though on second thought that wouldn't explain
Classical Latin <papa>.)
>And I have no quarrel with this. My objection was only to your
>apparent determination to see borrowing everywhere, evidence or no,
>and to deny independent creation any significant role.
To conclude, the only "massive" thing I see here is the Germanic/Romance
<papa>. After putting together the data, however, I was surprised to see
so much of what looks like direct inheritance, down to family-level time
depths.
I am not denying that in Turkic or some other language families the
picture might be different, but there ought to be some reason for that,
and I hope that you (or someone else) will figure that out.
David Thomas
lar...@sussex.ac.uk (Larry Trask) writes:
[omit discussion]
>> >have enough nous to create imitations of a rooster noise?
>
>> I don't understand the typo, but I get your general meaning.
>
>There is no typo. The word 'nous' (rhymes with 'house') means
>'intelligence, mental capacity, common sense'. Sorry; I hadn't
>realized this word was strictly British.
It's certainly the first time I've ever seen it, and I read *alot* of material.
In fact, I took it as somehow related to French 'nous,' and began wondering how
that worked. Heh...
- Vae
John Atkinson
"Peter T. Daniels" <gram...@worldnet.att.net> wrote ...
> Larry Trask wrote:
> > Peter:
> > > Larry:
It is Greek (Ancient Greek). Hence the spelling. But like Larry says, it's
part of British English (like, for example, hoi polloi, or kudos) --
especially university English. Like him, I didn't realise it wasn't used in
the USA.
John.
Torsten Poulin
> There may be another pattern, witnessed by Dutch <kukeleku>,
> Danish <kykeliky> and Swedish <kuckeliku>, but the data here
> are even sparser.
The officially sanctioned Danish form is actually <kykliky>, but
<kykeliky> is sometimes encountered in contemporary texts. Otto
Kalkar's 'Ordbog til det ældre danske sprog (1300-1700)' has
<kyklehy> as well as the verb <kykke> '(to) crow' and the nouns
<kykke> 'chicken', <kykle> 'cockerel', and <kykling> 'chicken'
(cf. ON <kjúklingr>). The last one is modern Danish <kylling>.
It is not unlikely that these words are related to <kok> 'cock',
'rooster', ON <kokr>, itself most likely an onomatopoeic word.
Swedish has <kukeliku>. The SAOB reports the following Swedish
forms: <kickilicki> (1800), <kuckeliku> (1795-1934), <kuckelku>
(1830), <kuckliku> (1732-1807), <kuckuliku> (1886-1906),
<kukeliku> (1784), <kukuliku> (c. 1740-1885), <ku ku li ku ku
li ku> (1688), <kukuluku> (c. 1755). It also reports two older
Danish forms not mantioned by Kalkar: <kykeleky> and <kykylyky>.
The doesn't seem to be much of a pattern when it comes to the
number of syllables in Scandinavian. In the quoted examples, we
have some with three, some with four, and even one with seven.
--
Torsten
Peter T. Daniels
Well then why don't they say "noose" or "know-us"?
natur...@webtv.net
Crows are known to have "dialects" and a survey of the rooster sounds at
FindSounds :
http://www.findsounds.com/ISAPI/search.dll?keywords=rooster
certainly hints that chickens may also. Try # 60 for a
cock-a-doodle-doo and #40 for a ko-ko-ri-co.
David Thomas
<gram...@worldnet.att.net> writes:
::clip::
>> It is Greek (Ancient Greek). Hence the spelling. But like Larry says, it's
>> part of British English (like, for example, hoi polloi, or kudos) --
>> especially university English. Like him, I didn't realise it wasn't used
>in
>> the USA.
>
>Well then why don't they say "noose" or "know-us"?
Those damned English speakers! Heh heh.
That's how I rendered it, myself.
- Vae
I
natur...@webtv.net wrote:
This is beautiful. Usually I haven't had the chance to listen to
roosters except at hours when I really didn't want to hear them (like 4
AM). However:
- Most of the roosters sampled were North American, with a few European
ones, and one Japanese rooster whose link wasn't working, so it's hard
to get the global picture.
- In my experience, even an individual rooster has plenty of variation.
The same rooster might have a four-syllable and a three-syllable crow
next to each other.
- I wouldn't be surprised if people picked the rooster samples which
sounded the most "typical" to them. That is, the sample might be biased.
- Whereas some birds (crows, sparrows) are typically wanderers, chickens
are not. Inter-chicken variations, if any, are probably due to genetic
factors, not regional ones.
For various rooster call words in various languages, I have found
http://www.kisa.ca/cock.html . The general pattern is:
- kVkVrVkV in Europe, except kVkVlVkV in Dutch and Scandinavian. Is
anyone here familiar with Frisian or North-sea-coast German dialects to
comment?
- Icelandic is odd: <gaggala gaggala gu>. The "papa" word, <pabbi>, is
also unique.
- Three-syllable words in Indic. Hindi <kukruukuu>, Punjabi <kukroku>
(also <kukrukaru>).
- No /r/ in East Asia: Japanese < kokekokkoo>, Korean < kkokkiyo>,
Cantonese <gokogoko>, Mandarin <gougou>, Tagalog <kukaok>, Thai
<ake-e-ake-ake>, and , as mentioned before, Vietnamese /kukuku/, Tongan
/kokoo/. The one exception is Indonesian /kikeriku/.
Torsten Poulin
> - kVkVrVkV in Europe, except kVkVlVkV in Dutch and Scandinavian.
Except when it is kVklVkV, kVklVhV, kVhVlkV, kVkVlVkVkVlVkV.
--
Torsten
mb
...
> For various rooster call words in various languages, I have found
> http://www.kisa.ca/cock.html . The general pattern is:
>
> - kVkVrVkV in Europe, except kVkVlVkV in Dutch and Scandinavian. Is
> anyone here familiar with Frisian or North-sea-coast German dialects to
> comment?
>
> - Icelandic is odd: <gaggala gaggala gu>. The "papa" word, <pabbi>, is
> also unique.
>
> - Three-syllable words in Indic. Hindi <kukruukuu>, Punjabi <kukroku>
> (also <kukrukaru>).
>
> - No /r/ in East Asia: Japanese < kokekokkoo>, Korean < kkokkiyo>,
What is given as the Turkish equivalent on that site is extremely
atypical (not to say unbelievable). The standard is always without
k/g: u"-u"ru"-u"u".
Larry Trask
[on rooster noises]
> What is given as the Turkish equivalent on that site is extremely
> atypical (not to say unbelievable). The standard is always without
> k/g: u"-u"ru"-u"u".
Roosters are in short supply here in Brighton, and I haven't heard one
in years. But I recall pretty clearly that the "consonantal" element
in a cock-crow sounds more like a glottal stop than like a [k]. I
would therefore predict that a language with phonemic glottal stop
might prefer something like [?V?V?V?V] to represent a cock-crow.
Turkish doesn't have phonemic glottal stop, except very marginally in
certain words borrowed from Arabic. Anybody know what the Arabic form
is?
Larry Trask
lar...@sussex.ac.uk
Yusuf B Gursey
I don't what "standard" you are using, but in one of Nurhan DamcIglu's
song's it is exactly as given in the website: kuk-kurri-kuuu!
(I personally do agree with your rendering of the rooster's call as
being "realistic")
I
Torsten Poulin <t_usen...@hotmail.com> wrote:
>> - kVkVrVkV in Europe, except kVkVlVkV in Dutch and Scandinavian.
>
>Except when it is kVklVkV, kVklVhV, kVhVlkV, kVkVlVkVkVlVkV.
In what languages?
I
having only <tata> for "dad" and <papa> (first a is long) for "the word
by which children ask for food or drink". <papa> as "father" appears in
Tertullianus and Prudentius, already with the secondary, Christian
meaning (addressing St. Paul and the Bishop Valerianus, respectively).
Makes me wonder if the spread of <papa> in Western Europe was aided by
Roman Christianity.
In article <i-973AF0.14...@news05.west.earthlink.net>,
I <i...@nowhere.nowhere> wrote:
>Romance: Most are papa words. French <papį>, Spanish <papį> but also
Torsten Poulin
>>> - kVkVrVkV in Europe, except kVkVlVkV in Dutch and Scandinavian.
>>
>>Except when it is kVklVkV, kVklVhV, kVhVlkV, kVkVlVkVkVlVkV.
>
> In what languages?
Danish and Swedish. As in the examples in my other post.
--
Torsten
mb
...
> > What is given as the Turkish equivalent on that site is extremely
> > atypical (not to say unbelievable). The standard is always without
> > k/g: u"-u"ru"-u"u".
>
> I don't what "standard" you are using, but in one of Nurhan DamcIglu's
> song's it is exactly as given in the website: kuk-kurri-kuuu!
Standard refers of course to the stereotype rendering in Istanbul and
the best-known provincial speech, plus literature (mainly schoolbooks
for the appropriate ages).
What's interesting is that onomatopoeia seems to have loan mechanisms
exactly like other words. The cock's crow is a good example here, out
of personal experience: in the neighborhood I grew up in (dominant
street language then was Greek) Turkish kids learned the standard
u"-u"ru" / o"-o"ro", hav-hav (for dogs) at school and from their
non-local parents but in their daily Turkish speech used the Greek
forms kok-koro-koko and ghav-ghav (most were fairly bilingual, at
least all could sing the Greek equivalent of Old McDonald's Farm). I
don't know Damcioglu and her song, but I'd suggest a Western loan; if
the song is well-known of course it can introduce a new alternative
onomatop.
Yusuf B Gursey
> ...
> > > What is given as the Turkish equivalent on that site is extremely
> > > atypical (not to say unbelievable). The standard is always without
> > > k/g: u"-u"ru"-u"u".
> >
> > I don't what "standard" you are using, but in one of Nurhan DamcIglu's
> > song's it is exactly as given in the website: kuk-kurri-kuuu!
>
> Standard refers of course to the stereotype rendering in Istanbul and
> the best-known provincial speech, plus literature (mainly schoolbooks
> for the appropriate ages).
>
> What's interesting is that onomatopoeia seems to have loan mechanisms
> exactly like other words. The cock's crow is a good example here, out
> of personal experience: in the neighborhood I grew up in (dominant
> street language then was Greek) Turkish kids learned the standard
> u"-u"ru" / o"-o"ro", hav-hav (for dogs) at school and from their
> non-local parents but in their daily Turkish speech used the Greek
> forms kok-koro-koko and ghav-ghav (most were fairly bilingual, at
> least all could sing the Greek equivalent of Old McDonald's Farm). I
> don't know Damcioglu and her song, but I'd suggest a Western loan; if
possibly of Balkan or Istanbul christian origin, yes.
Yusuf B Gursey
by e-mail a Palestinian friend says:
"My thought is that qu qoo qu qoo is about right"
I saked him if /q/ would be pronounced as a glottal stop and he said "no".
>
> Larry Trask
> lar...@sussex.ac.uk
Yusuf B Gursey
: azyt...@hotmail.com (mb) wrote in message news:<668d6151.03090...@posting.google.com>...
:>
:> What's interesting is that onomatopoeia seems to have loan mechanisms
:> exactly like other words. The cock's crow is a good example here, out
:> of personal experience: in the neighborhood I grew up in (dominant
:> street language then was Greek) Turkish kids learned the standard
:> u"-u"ru" / o"-o"ro", hav-hav (for dogs) at school and from their
:> non-local parents but in their daily Turkish speech used the Greek
:> forms kok-koro-koko and ghav-ghav (most were fairly bilingual, at
:> least all could sing the Greek equivalent of Old McDonald's Farm). I
:> don't know Damcioglu and her song, but I'd suggest a Western loan; if
: possibly of Balkan or Istanbul christian origin, yes.
and << koko rikoo >> is reportedly used by an nacestor of mine from the
Balkans.
:> the song is well-known of course it can introduce a new alternative
Alessandro Riolo
> also (unrelated) in turkish "mama" is "food" in baby talk and has
> entered the standard language for baby food or pet food.
Just yesterday I was feeding a 12 months old melek named Zeynep, and
she was happily singing mamamamama.. everytime I was approaching to
her mouth the little spoon filled with the soup her mother prepared
for her.
--
ale
http://www.sen.it