Transcript of “The Complicated Reasons So Many Languages Have Words for Mother That Start With “M””
Hello, you have A Way with Words.
Hi, Martha. This is Santosh Koshil, and I am calling from D.C. Metro.
You know, in many languages, mother, madre, ma, mata, they all start with, for a mother, they all start with M.
I was not sure if there is a significant, like there’s a scientific significance that the child picks up or what is that?
You know, how does, because it’s been going on for millions of years before even Internet and, you know, global connections were.
Why is it so common?
I mean, there are other languages there.
There’s some other word used for mother, but in so many of them.
It starts with M.
Yeah, that’s a fantastic question.
You mentioned English and Spanish.
What other languages did you mention?
Yeah, in Hindi, I am from, originally was born and raised in India.
And in Hindi, so like in India, we have so many different dialects almost in different states.
And there are several words for mother, you know, ma, mataji, mai, and even the goddess, you know.
We have, you know, we believe in a whole bunch of goddesses, and we always address them as a mata, which is M, you know.
It’s not a coincidence, actually.
There’s a couple of really strong reasons for this.
And they’re actually not really conflicting reasons, but they’re intersecting reasons.
And I guess the easiest one to talk about first is biological.
There is something that happens with children where some of the first sounds that they produce is what’s called a bilabial sound with an open vowel.
And that is where the lips come together and they make kind of an sound.
And it can either sound like a B or an M, whether or not they’re using their vocal cords.
Which is why you also get words for mother and father that sound like baba or papa, right?
In Indian languages, aren’t there words for father that are baba?
Yeah, in India, yes.
And another sound you’ll also hear is N, but this comes about from the nursing stage.
The noises that children make when they’re nursing tend to be nasalized.
Again, these sounds come about.
And then we have this second thing that happens where the parents often interpret these noises and have assigned meaning to them.
So the caregivers interpret these sounds, sometimes taking them historically.
We’re talking many, many, you know, tens of thousands of years ago or even thousands of years ago.
Take them to refer to themselves and decide that the children means the parent.
The children is referring to the parent.
And this has happened across all human cultures.
And it is possible that the child actually was referring to the parent.
Because these are the first sounds that the child makes.
The m and the b and the n and the a.
So what we have here is if the child does decide to refer to the parent in any way,
Those sounds are going to be the first ones that they make.
But there’s another thing that has happened.
Beyond that biological factor, we have things like language descendants.
So in the Indo-European languages, which I think all of the languages that you referred to so far are Indo-European languages,
We have this shared historical linguistic fact that we come from common linguistic roots.
So this is where you’ll get like madre and mer, the Spanish and French words, are linguistically related.
They are descended.
And almost all of the Indian languages spoken on the subcontinent, almost all of them, not all of them, are descended from the same linguistic roots.
And those fundamental words for kinship terms tend to come from the same sources.
So in other words, that initial M sound isn’t universal, but there are a lot of cases.
Yeah, not universal, but common.
But if you add in the ma sound and the buh sound and the puh sound and the nuh sound and the duh sound,
You get most of the names from mother and father.
Thank you.
And I honestly love your show.
I really enjoy.
I’ve been listening for 20 years.
Oh, amazing.
Well, you are delightful.
You need to call us again sometime and tell us some more, all right?
Okay.
All right.
Be well and take care of yourself.
Bye.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
Well, no matter what language you grew up speaking or what language you acquired, we know you have a lot to say about it, and we’d love to hear from you.
