Is there the same sound used to call “cat” globally? Obviously, the answer is no. To the French, a cat is a “chatte”, to Russians a “Kot”, to in Japanese a “Neko”, and to Vietnamese a “mèo”. Clearly, there is nothing in common between those words. Nevertheless, the word “mother” seems relatively familiar across several languages. They are often either to be “mama” or have a nasal sound similar to “m”, like “nana”. People call their mothers by words that sound like “mama”, “ma” or “nana” worldwide. In Vietnamese for instance, we call our mom “mẹ” or “má”.
Many people assume the reason was that the languages we use today share a common origin. It’s tempting to imagine this theory, and believe that first humans called their mother “mama”. Thus, that warm, hearty word has survived the slings and arrows of human history to remain in use today. Nonetheless, the notion is too optimistic to be true, even closely related languages have a way of morphing beyond recognition.
For example, Welsh is also a branch of that language from Ukraine which also includes French and English. However, Welsh has struck out pretty far on its own compared to not only these two languages but also the rest of the world. There is a town in Welsh named “lanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch” that recently became a viral sensation for pronouncing properly.
Yet “mother” in Welsh is “mam”.
According to Roman Jakobsonhe, a pioneering linguist, the answer lies with babies and how they start to talk. In their early life, babies often make random sounds. The easiest vowel is ah because they can make it without doing anything with their tongue or lips. Lately, when they are going to vary things at all, the first impulse is to break up the stream of ahhh by closing your lips for a spell. Hence, mmmm, such that they get a string of “mah”
.However, adults don’t receive this word that way. When a baby says “mama”, it sounds as if he’s addressing someone. And the person he’s most likely addressing so early on is his mother. The mother takes “mama” as meaning her, and speaks to her child refers to herself as “mama.” This phenomenon seemingly happened with baby humans worldwide, no matter what language they are speaking.
Over time in language, sounds smush along their way to becoming new ones, and even the meanings people assign to a word drift all over the place. But we can at least enjoy knowing why most of us call our mothers the “Mama”.
Source: The Atlantic
