There are two words that seem to defy the very field of linguistics! They’re found to be extremely similar in what linguists classify as completely unrelated languages, with no traces of borrowing! Can you guess what they are?
They’re the words “mother” and “father”, but more specifically, they’re the informal variants: like “mom”, “dad”, and “papa”.
As mentioned, the etymology of “mom” and “dad” took very similar routes across different language families!
For example, on the mom side, we have:
• Quecha: mama (Quechuan)
• Basque: ama (Isolate)
• Turkish: ana (Turkic)
• Swahili: mama (Bantu)
• Hungarian: anyu (Uralic)
• Hebrew: אִמָּא (imma) (Semitic)
• Korean: 엄마 (eomma) (Koreanic)
• Georgian: დედა (deda) (Kartvelian)
In addition, on the dad side we have:
• Quecha: taytu (Quechuan)
• Basque: aita (Isolate)
• Turkish: baba (Turkic)
• Swahili: baba (Bantu)
• Hungarian: apa (Uralic)
• Hebrew: אַבָּא (aba) (Semitic)
• Korean: 아빠 (appa) (Koreanic)
• Georgian: მამა (mama) (Kartvelian)
The most likely explanation for this phenomenon is that the etymology of “mom” and “dad” words stem from the babbling of infants, which frequently includes sounds like [m], [n], [p], [b], [t], [d], and [a]. The theory is that parents might misconstrue the babbling as referring to themselves, so they use the new “words” as names for “mom” and “dad”.
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