Can’t remember where I heard this, but I believe the terms themselves evolved around common infant mouth sounds. Hence why so many languages use the term “mama” for mother.
The baby makes random sounds, meaning is ascribed to them by the parents, the baby is given positive feedback and starts to make those sounds more frequently, and then the meaning eventually sticks for the child once they actually begin developing language.
I have a theory that those sounds are what a baby naturally says as their start tgeir vocal journey. So we adapted the words we use to mean mother /father accordingly.
Very convincing theories based solely on a vibe are the best
You might be on to something. There’s so many languages where the short word for mother is some variation of “ma”. Likewise with da/ba/pa for the father.
From everything I’ve read, that’s basically it. Babies get their linguistic start by just making babbling sounds “ba”, “ma”, “da”, etc, because they are easy to produce. We as adults attribute meaning to them, that meaning is reinforced for the infant, and then it is accepted.
What I was curious about was why so many unrelated languages seem to use the “ma” sound for mother. If babies make random sounds and we assign the meaning to them, how did unrelated cultures agree on what each sound meant?
There’s a section in this article that includes a suggestion of an explanation:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mama_and_papa
Linguist Roman Jakobson hypothesized that the nasal sound in “mama” comes from the nasal murmur that babies produce when breastfeeding
huh?
I think it’s trying to imply that Only a sociopath wouldn’t understand the mechanism.
The guy in the picture is Dokes from the TV show Dexter. He’s the only one that recognized there was something wrong with Dexter.
I think you’re reading too much into the meme format 😅
Emphasis, most likely
The first words from mine were… NO!! LOL
My son would’ve learned: “It’s Daddy.”, “I’m Daddy.” instead.
