Ask LL: parents' beliefs or infants' abilities?

q 3 months ago on Wordpress

@Hellen Parker:

I think it has more to do with the fact that the "wai" in all those words is 外, meaning "outside" or "outer" - that is to say, the secondary relatives on the "outside" of the patriarchal family tree. This may tie into your statement that babies are more often surrounded by relatives from their father's family (not that I have personal knowledge of any such tendency) simply in that the words fit the ideology. ... See all content Hide content

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‘Mama’ and ‘Papa’ « Ken and Dot’s Allsorts 3 months, 1 week ago on Wordpress

[…] Language Log, I came across this […]

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marie-lucie 3 months, 1 week ago on Wordpress

what's the correct term for "coochicoo"?

Baby talk, or "motherese".

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John Cowan 3 months, 1 week ago on Wordpress

My 16-month-old grandson Dorian, who lives at my house, has not yet said anything that I would call a word using fairly strict criteria — he babbles quite a bit, and still coos a lot too (to say nothing of squeals and other clearly non-linguistic ape-like noises), but he has no semantics for any of it. However, the phones in the babbles are quite complex and don't correspond to anything much he hears around him, with plenty of front rounded vowels and so on. (I sing him a German lullaby or two, but there's no evidence that he picks up his babbles from me or anyone else in particular).

This suggests that Trask and m-l are right, and that babble sounds are explorations of the innate capabilities of the vocal tract rather than imitations of the surrounding speech. (He does, however, imitate the retroflex lateral clank, or whatever you call it — it starts out like a voiceless retroflex lateral, but the source of the sound is the tongue hitting the floor of the mouth — that I like to amuse him with.)

"Dorian is currently an ape teaching himself to be a person." –me, to Dorian's mother, explaining Dennett's theory of the origin of individual consciousness ... See all content Hide content

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vp 3 months, 1 week ago on Wordpress

@marie lucie

I have no idea whether my daughter meant anything by her voiced velar fricative. Her first word that had a clear (to us) referent was [kɐːkɯ] — "cookie". By this time she was already saying things like "mama" and "dada", but seemingly at random.

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marie-lucie 3 months, 1 week ago on Wordpress

Jonathan,

You never know what people are going to take seriously, or what crazy explanations some people might invent! I am not a PIE specialist, so I can't comment on why the PIE word is reconstructed without a vowel, something which seems to need attention, but there might be other explanations for the divergence between languages as opposed to the unanimity with the 'mother' vowel.

I wanted to emphasize the role of the parents in the transmission: if it was all left to pre-linguistic babies, parents might seize upon other syllables, since ma and pa are far from universal, and different families might have slightly different words. But parents know the words not from remembering what they themselves said at the age of 12 or 18 months but from their own knowledge of their language, transmitted through years of inteaction with other speakers. Even if babies can all produce labials, those are not usually their first sounds, but "gaga googoo" or the like do not remind parents of any actual words. It is only when parents think they recognize attempts at specific words that they start reinforcing those words, even if they have not already "primed" the baby with "Say Mommy", etc. In a family that uses "tata" or "daddy", "pa" from the baby will not be reinforced. ... See all content Hide content

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Jonathan 3 months, 1 week ago on Wordpress

@marie-lucie

The question is: why does the PIE 'father' root have no vowel at all? It's not 'papa' or 'pa', it's 'p'! It's strange because the 'mother' root does have a vowel, which is cross-linguistically expected. There is no actual answer to this question, so I made a humorous attempt at one. I thought the humor was obvious, but I guess I was wrong.

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Jonathan 3 months, 1 week ago on Wordpress

It may be worth mentioning that the reconstructed forms for PIE 'mother' and 'father' are not just different with respect to the initial consonants. The 'mother' word was *mV-H2te:r, that is, m + short vowel that's not /o/ + the kinship derivative suffix *-H2te:r (*H2 represents the so-called 'second laryngeal', some kind of dorsal fricative). I've seen the root vowel represented as /e/ or /a/; we can't tell because in every daughter language /e/ or /a/ plus the second laryngeal yields long /a:/ (in Proto-Germanic this later turned into /o:/, hence *mo:þe:r). If we reconstruct the root as *ma-, then at least the PIE form matches all those other languages typologically.

The word for father, on the other hand, was *p-H2te:r, i.e. the root was the single consonant *p- (the first vowel in Proto-Germanic *faðe:r reflects the PG reflex of the laryngeal). What happened to the vowel, assuming that like the root *ma-, we are dealing with a 'nursery word' with the expected unmarked CV structure? A theory is that there was a vowel, but that it was not a full vowel like the /a/ in *ma, but an unstressed vowel that later disappeared from the daughter languages. The problem, of course, is that evidence for a PIE */ə/ is pretty thin: in many daughter languages, laryngeals turn into short vowels between consonants, yet this can be accounted for by epenthesis of a short vowel in the ancestors of the daughter languages, followed by loss of the laryngeal consonant. There is no need to project the epenthetic vowel back into PIE (in other daughters, laryngeals between consonants simply disappear without trace).

Is it possible that PIE babies used the universally endearing nursery word 'ma!' for their mothers, but for their fathers the somewhat pejorative and possibly ptyalistic 'p!'? ... See all content Hide content

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marie-lucie 3 months, 1 week ago on Wordpress

p.s. By "baby talk" here I mean the way small children talk, not the way adults talk to children.

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2009-10-30 Spike activity | Yuvablog 3 months, 1 week ago on Wordpress

[…] Log discusses the hypothesis that words for mother and father (e.g. mama and papa) are so similar across languages because it's the first sounds children make and parents just assume their […]

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marie-lucie 3 months, 1 week ago on Wordpress

For what it's worth, the first consonant sound my baby made was a voiced velar fricative.

Was she saying things like "gaga" or "googoo", and nothing else, or was it in response to something specific? Just because a baby produces what appears to be an identifiable sound or syllable does not mean that the baby means something by it. At 3 or 4 weeks of age my daughter said "la" when whe was crying . That does not mean she was attempting to talk. As someone else mentioned, babies go through a period of incoherent sounds ("babbling") before they produce something that sounds like an attempt at reproducing a word, especially if the parents have been saying "Say Mommy" or "Say Daddy".

It is true that m or n for mothers and p or t for fathers (at least for "baby talk" or family address words) are extremely widespread, but they are by no mean universal as James C. shows with his Tlingit example. Another factors the "areal" one: words similar to the Tlingit one for 'mother' are found along the North Pacific Coast on both the American and the Asian side, in a variety of languages. This probably reflects intermarriage and/or slave-taking, which moves people across language boundaries, and puts in contact women from various origins with households where they are raising children (their own or those of their masters) and use some words of their own languages with the babies in their charge. ... See all content Hide content

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Shannon 3 months, 1 week ago on Wordpress

For another language point, in the Mayan K'iche' language, mother is naan and father is taat.

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Christian DiCanio 3 months, 1 week ago on Wordpress

This must fall apart in Oto-Manguean languages where bilabials are often restricted (there was no Proto-OM bilabial stop).

In Trique, for instance, 'mother' is /nni 3/ (but /nnãh 43/ for the vocative). 'Father' is /tʃe 3/, with no vocative/non-vocative distinction.

However, there may be some bias in different cultures for how much they wish to interpret infants' vocalizations. Some cultures simply don't pay much attention to children's speech until they are intelligible. One wonders if cultures with more child directed speech are more likely to have names for "mother" with a bilabial. ... See all content Hide content

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Alon Lischinsky 3 months, 1 week ago on Wordpress

Guarani has sy (IPA [sɨ]) for mother, and túva (IPA ['tuʋa]) for father. Mapudungun has ñuke and chaw, respectively. I do not know whether there are any more intimate terms, but in any case I've never heard them. None of these seem too easy to master for the infant learner…

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Stephen Jones 3 months, 1 week ago on Wordpress

Sinhalese 'ama' for 'mama' and 'tata' for 'papa/daddy'.

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Jo 3 months, 1 week ago on Wordpress

@John Cowan: I really wouldn't say "babbo" is replacing anything in Italian; aside from "Babbo Natale" - Santa Claus - it's really only used in Tuscany and has been for a long time (like, say, in Canto XXXII of the Inferno). Everywhere else, kids say papà or papi.

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Kellen Parker 3 months, 1 week ago on Wordpress

A friend pointed out the other week that in Mandarin, all the titles of paternal extended family are repeated syllables while for the maternal extended family they're not, e.g. nainai vs waipo, yeye vs waigong. Himself a recent father had noticed his child had little trouble with repeating syllables but much more with things like "wai-po", and that it may be related to the fact that babies are often surrounded by paternal relatives and far less often by maternal.

I buy it. ... See all content Hide content

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Filius Lunae 3 months, 1 week ago on Wordpress

Being that Blogger doesn't support Trackbacks (sadly), I tried to use a third-party plug-in, but, alas, it didn't work. So I have to do a manual one.

Mamá, Papá "[…] In Spanish, the standard word for mother is madre (from Latin MATREM). Mamá would be the equivalent, in usage, to the English mom; and mami would then be mommy. Amá and ma are also heard, depending on region and sociolect , though they are considered non-standard.

The paradigm for father is very similar: padre is father (from PATREM); papá, dad (equivalent, again, in usage); papi, daddy; and, non-standard apá and pa (the first one of this pair, as above, often stigmatized). […]" ... See all content Hide content

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Erin 3 months, 1 week ago on Twitter

Ask LL: parents' beliefs or infants' abilities?: Andrew Clegg asks "Is this true?"

I'm more familiar with a d.. http://bit.ly/1KNgNS

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lhc 3 months, 1 week ago on Wordpress

oh and the babyish word for breast is mimi

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Mark F. 3 months, 1 week ago on Wordpress

I don't think "parents' beliefs or infant abilities" is the right dichotomy. The limited speech abilities of infants is central to T-Rex's theory too. The question is what spin to put on parents' desire to hear the babies call them by name.

What struck me about the "where to mama and papa come from" paper was how rarely the two meanings are reversed. I wouldn't have expected that.

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TB 3 months, 1 week ago on Wordpress

Speaking of Japanese parent-words, I have always found it odd that the words for father (chichi) and breast/breastmilk (chichi) are homonyms in Japanese. Maybe T. Rex's theory has something to do with this as well.

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montgomery 3 months, 1 week ago on Wordpress

@ Craig Russell: In addition to the "mamma" word, it's pretty clear that "kakka" has a similar meaning across at least a few cultures as well.

FWIW, both "mama" and "kaka" refer to types of uncles in Nepali (mama on the mother's side, kaka on the father's). Mother is "aama", like in Hindi.

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Acilius 3 months, 1 week ago on Wordpress

@JWB: I don't think that Jakobson and Trask presuppose that no one speaks to babies or that babies listen to no one. On the contrary, they assume that babies do hear the languages that the people around them speak. That assumption raises a question. Languages differ considerably in the sounds they use; yet babies the world over babble using the same few sounds. Jakobson and Trask contradict those who might try to argue that babies focus on those sounds because they are struggling to produce words they have heard, words which have meanings of particular importance to babies. Rather, babies produce sounds as they exercise their growing vocal tracts. That adults assign particular meanings to particular sounds babies produce may tell us something about those adults, but tells us rather less about the babies, and nothing at all about the sounds. ... See all content Hide content

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J. W. Brewer 3 months, 1 week ago on Wordpress

As in the Bangs household (but without any Romanian speakers present), my older daughter could say "dada" several months before she could say "mama," much to her mother's chagrin. For a brief period she actually seemed to have two distinguishable variants of "dada" (which I unfortunately failed to write down in IPA notation at the time), one of which was used only to refer to me and the other of which seemed to refer generically to adult human beings of either sex.

The Jakobson/Trask hypothesis seems to assume that no one ever speaks to or in the presence of babies before the "babbling" stage begins, or at least that the babies lack the ability or interest to begin correlating the sounds they hear people making to particular referents. The first is obviously false, and I'm not sure what to make of the second one other than be dubious that either Trask or Jakobson had a basis for a scientifically-informed opinion. ... See all content Hide content

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Pavel 3 months, 1 week ago on Wordpress

Philip Spaelti said,

Incidentally a sound of the "ti/di/(ki)" variety is usually not far behind. And thus many languages also have (baby) words of the titi varitey meaning either "father", or "breast/milk", etc. So: English "Mommy/Daddy". In (Old) Japanese "papa" was mother and "titi" was both father and breast, breastmilk.

I'd never heard this before, but amazingly, in Malay, 'breast' is tetek! (I don't know if it's a coincidence, but the word for 'drip' is titik.) The more formal terms for mother and father are ibu and ayah, respectively, while the less formal terms are (e)mak and bapak. ... See all content Hide content

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Craig Russell 3 months, 1 week ago on Wordpress

For what it's worth, Ancient Greek also has both "mamme" and "mamma" as baby words either specifically meaning "mother" or used by infants crying to be fed.

The comic playwright Aristophanes has a scene from his play "Clouds" (famous for including a parody of the philosopher Socrates written during his lifetime) in which a father Strepsiades is chewing out his son Phidippides for thinking that, now that he's gone to school, he's too good for his dad:

You shameless boy! It was me that raised you;

I figured what all your babbling meant:

If you said "bru", I understood to bring you something to drink;

When you said "mamma" I would bring you some food;

Before you could say "kakka" I would pick you up, take you outside,

And hold you out in front of me.

In addition to the "mamma" word, it's pretty clear that "kakka" has a similar meaning across at least a few cultures as well. ... See all content Hide content

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Philip Spaelti 3 months, 1 week ago on Wordpress

@Zubon: "Okaasan," yes, but "haha" is the less formal version, and babies rarely stand for formality.

"Haha" is not the less formal version. In fact it is the more formal version. "Haha" is the way one talks about mothers, while "Okaasan" is the (recent traditional) form of address. [An older (formal) address form was "haha-ue", which is still heard in period-piece movies ("jidaigeki").] Of course the increasingly common form of address nowadays is "mama".

The "h" in Japanese did indeed develop from a "p". When exactly is something of a debate, but the "p" sound is usually assigned to a Proto-Japanese period. In the historic period the sound is generally agreed to have been a labial fricative [ɸ], as is still used before [u]. In Old Japanese people could probably not distinguish p/ɸ, so borrowings from Chinese with [p] were reflected as [ɸ], and the ha-gyo characters were developped from Chinese syllables that had a [p]. The convention to add a small circle to distinguish [p] sounds was only developped late in the Edo or early Meiji period. ... See all content Hide content

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Zubon 3 months, 1 week ago on Wordpress

Did I learn an odd version of Japanese that I immediately thought of "haha" for "mother"? "Okaasan," yes, but "haha" is the less formal version, and babies rarely stand for formality. I don't know the proper linguistic term for how "ha" and "pa" are related in Japanese: the character is just the same, but ha° is pa (and ha" is ba). So "haha" is a version of "papa/baba," another win for T-Rex. See page 11 of the Trask PDF linked above for more. ... See all content Hide content

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nervechannel 3 months, 1 week ago on Twitter

just got namechecked on the world famous Language Log! Yay :-) http://bit.ly/1NFapT

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Faldone 3 months, 1 week ago on Wordpress

The perpetual rediscovery is in the University of Sussex article that Acilius and I almost simultaneously linked to

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Philip Spaelti 3 months, 1 week ago on Wordpress

And finally we shouldn't forget Latin "mamma" which means breast(milk) and gives us the word mammal. So all languages perpetually rediscover these baby words, give them the same meanings, and incorporate them into the language as "real" words.

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Skullturf Q. Beavispants 3 months, 1 week ago on Wordpress

I've sometimes seen baby talk represented in print as "goo goo ga ga". Is G typically one of the first consonants learned? (I also have a vague memory of reading that that consonant appears in most world languages but can no longer remember the source.)

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Faldone 3 months, 1 week ago on Wordpress

Here's an anonymous pdf from the University of Sussex Linguistic Department.

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languagelog 3 months, 1 week ago on Twitter

Ask LL: parents' beliefs or infants' abilities?: Andrew Clegg asks "Is this true?"

I'm more familiar with a d.. http://bit.ly/1KNgNS

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