A word
extremely similar to “mom” occurs in almost every language on
Earth and they are surprisingly similar across nearly all of the most
commonly spoken languages. For example, if you wanted to address
your mother in Dutch you would say “moeder”, in Germany
“mutter”, in Italy “madre”. Here are a few more:
Chinese: Mãma
Hindi: Mam
Afrikaans: Ma
Swahili: Mama
French: Mère, Maman
Irish: Máthair
Italian: Madre, Mamma
Norwegian: Madre
Spanish: Madre, Mamá, Mami
Ukrainian: Mati
Romanian: Mama, Maica
Russian: Mat'
Welsh: Mam
Yiddish: Muter
The word “Papa”
is present in several languages including Russian, Hindi,
Spanish and English, while slight variations appear in German
(Papi), Icelandic (Pabbi), Swedish (Pappa) and a number of other
languages. In
Turkish, Greek, Swahili, Malay and several other languages the
word for dad is “Baba” or a variation of it.
It has been observed that babies, regardless of where in the
world they are born, naturally learn to make the same few sounds
as they begin to learn to speak. It has also been noted that
during the babbling stage, babies will create what is known as
“protowords” by combining combinations of consonants and vowels.
These protowords are consistent across different cultures. The
words babies make in this early babbling stage tend to use the
softer contestants like B, P and M, often leading to the
creation of otherwise non-words like baba, papa, and mama by the
children.
It is theorized that since these are
often the first sounds babies are able to make consistently,
parents tended
to use them to refer to themselves, which explains why words
like “mama”, “papa,” “dada”, “tata” and “baba” are present in so
many languages as a way of addressing parents.
These sounds are
usually less complex to say than parent’s real names. Popular
belief among many is the gibberish phrase da-da may have
transposed to the use of the word Dad. Aroana tadi, Aztec
tahtil, ta, Basque aita (father) and aitatxo (dad) and aitaita
(grandfather), Czech, Irish and Latin daid, German Vati, Greek
tata, Inca tayta, Inuit ataatak, Hungarian atya, Polish tatus,
Quechua tayta, Rumanian tata, Russian dyadya, Sanskrit Tatah,
Sumerian ada, Tagalog tatay, Turkish ata, Welsh tad.
Old English fæder, Proto-Germanic fader, Old Saxon fadar, Old
Frisian feder, Dutch vader, Old Norse faðir, Old High German
fatar, German vater, Greek pater, Latin pater, Old Persian pita. Seems children are very
intelligent.
They teach us to
use the names they give us.