Out of the mouths of babes
My daughter鈥檚 first word was 鈥渄uh,鈥� which my husband and I interpreted as 鈥渄uck鈥� because she loved her little yellow rubber duckie. (My son鈥檚 first word was 鈥渦nderdog,鈥� which is a different story). 鈥淒uh鈥� is typical of the early sounds babies make all over the world. When they are around six to eight months old, babies begin to babble, experimenting with consonant-vowel combinations like 鈥渄a da,鈥� 鈥渂i bi,鈥� or 鈥渒oy koy.鈥� This babbling has produced the only two words found in a majority of the world鈥檚 languages: mama and papa.听
It is not surprising that mama is an intimate word for mother in both German and Urdu, since these are distantly related Indo-European languages. But variations of mama are found across the globe in completely unrelated languages, from Mandarin (ma鈥�ma) in China to Igbo (mama) in Nigeria to Tamil (amma) in India. Papa varies a bit more: It鈥檚 tatay in Tagalog, baba in Persian, and daa in Chechen, for example. Linguist Roman Jakobson hypothesized that ma, closely followed by pa/da/ta/ba, are the easiest sounds for new human tongues to produce. Over and over, excited parents heard this 鈥渢alking鈥� and hopefully assumed that these sounds referred to them. Eventually the babbling was codified into words, and so wherever there are parents, there are children who refer to them with some form of mama and papa.听
Another of these baby sounds has been surprisingly productive of English words: 鈥渂a ba.鈥� This combination gives us babble itself, the name for babies鈥� early linguistic experiments as well as for any foolish, incoherent, or especially voluble speech. Babble is thus an example of onomatopoeia, since its 鈥渟ound suggests its sense,鈥� as Merriam-Webster鈥檚 dictionary puts it. Baby too comes from the 鈥渂a ba鈥� of infant vocalization.听
Baby babbling has also given rise to two quite negative words. The ancient Greeks famously considered anyone who did not speak Greek to be 鈥渦ncivilized.鈥� They mocked these people as barbaroi because they were thought to make incomprehensible noises 鈥� 鈥渂a ba鈥� or 鈥渂ar bar鈥� 鈥� like babies rather than speaking a 鈥渞eal鈥� language.听
In English, barbarian now means more or less the same thing, referring to a savage, uncultured person. In the 13th century, the 鈥渂a ba鈥� sound also produced the French word babewene, a foolish or stupid person. This became the English baboon, the common term for ground-dwelling monkeys with large canine teeth, of the genus Papio.
One word that seems as if it must have a similar origin is babel, but this word for 鈥渁 confusing hubbub or din鈥� doesn鈥檛 actually derive from baby noises. Babel and its tower, though, is our topic for next week.
