Kirk from New Braunfels, Texas, wonders about the origin of the word dad. It’s one of many names for a parent that arose simply from the sounds an infant makes when trying to communicate. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Origin of “Dad””
Hi, you have a boy with words.
Hi, this is Kirk from New Braunfels, Texas.
Hi, Kirk. Welcome.
What’s up?
Thank you. So I was curious about the origin of the word dad. You know, a lot of the names we give our parents, like mom and father, mother, all that, you can kind of relate them back to things, but dad kind of seems to stand alone. So I wanted to get y’all’s take on that. What do you think? What’s your guess?
I know it’s obscure, but there’s a song called Daedalus, and it’s Icarus’s father. And I don’t know. So they kind of start spelled the same a little bit. And I don’t know if that connection makes any sense, but that’s my first thought.
That’s really interesting. So you know this story well, and you thought that’s like the father that people might automatically think of when they think of fathers?
Maybe. I wasn’t really sure, but it was the closest thing to it that I could come up with.
Okay. What an interesting idea. It’s an interesting idea. It isn’t the origin of it. There are two words or varieties of words. It’s called them clusters of words or word sounds that exist across the human species. And there’s a whole category of pa, pa, da, da words, and there’s a whole category of ma, ma, mother words. And one of those words is often used to refer to the father, and one of them is the mother. So these sounds that the baby makes at the presence of the parent. And so dad comes from the da-da-da-da-da noise that babies make. And there’s also the pa-pa-pa-pa noise that they make.
So again and again and again, throughout history, we find that there are pet names and formal names for the parents that often take a P, a B, or a D sound for the father, and often take the M sound for the mother. And so D is just one of those. So, for example, in India, the Baba might be father, Babiji would be father. And in the European cultures, Pa or Papa often be the father. There’s no etymological trace here. One of the sources that I have points out there’s a cross-linguistic similarity, but there’s no common ancestry. That is, that these words are separately derived because of the physiology and because of the nature of children trying out sounds of their mouths when they are tiny.
Wow. I never would have guessed that. It’s a lot deeper than I thought.
Yeah, it sure is. But you can take a baby from any culture on this planet, and they will start out with the same sets of sounds.
Okay. Yeah, cool, right? And one of those happens to often be the da-da-da sound. That’s really, I would have never guessed. Which later becomes dad, and daddy is a kind of more formal name. So, yeah, not Greek mythology.
Yeah. No, well, shoot. It was worth a shot.
Sure. Of course it was. We got to talk with you. Kirk, thank you very much.
All right. Thank you all. Bye.
Bye-bye.
