Nursery words for mother and related words
Words for ‘mother’ and ‘father’ in many languages are formed
out of the first sounds that a child makes in the babbling stage, or babble
words, namely the syllables ma, ba, pa,
da, and ta. As you can see, the vowel is always the same, though the
consonant is either labial (m, b, p) or dental-apical (t, d) (cf. Part I,
Chapter 7). The association of any of these consonants with a particular parent
seems to be arbitrary, however. Thus, for instance, in Old Japanese, the word
for ‘mother’ was papa, a word
associated with ‘father’ in many European languages.
This source for pet names for parents results in a great
number of coincidences among the languages of the world.[i]
So, for instance, the word for ‘mother’ in Mandarin Chinese is māma and in Swahili mama, just like in many European countries. This is not due to a
common source or origin, but to coincidence, due the limited number of options
available. Thus, pairs of words such as Chinese māma and Swahili mama are
not cognates in the sense used in this book, since they do not share a
historical source, though they are cognates in the language learning sense.
The main nursery words for English mother (pronounced [ˈmʌ.ðəɹ]) are the following (some have more than one
pronunciation due to the vowel being pronounced differently in different
dialects): mamma [ˈmæ.mə]
(more common in British English), momma
[ˈmɒ.ma]/[ˈmɑ.mə], mom [ˈmɒm]/[ˈmɑm]
(more common in American English), mommy
[ˈmɒ.mi]/[ˈmɑ.mi], mum [ˈmʌm] and mummy [ˈmʌ.mi] (more common in British
English), and ma [mɑ],
which appeared in the 19th century as short for mamma.[1]
Each of the variants may be more popular in a particular region or within a
particular family, due to diverse origins in the old country.[2]
The main nursery words for ‘mother’ in Spanish are mama [ˈma.ma] and mamá
[ma.ˈma], the two
differing only on what syllable the stress falls. As in the case of the words papa vs. papá (see below), the version with penultimate stress is the original
one, stemming from Lat. mamma which
originally meant ‘breast, udder’ but which was used as a pet name equivalent to
Eng. mom. The version with final
stress, Sp. mamá, which is the most
common one today, came from Modern French, a language in which all words have
final stress. This Gallicism (French loanword), like many others in Spanish,
dates from the 18th century.
As we just saw, Lat. mamma,
besides being the pet name for ‘mother’, originally meant ‘breast, tit, boob’.
That is the meaning of Mod. Sp. mama,
with penultimate stress, though this is a learned loanword from Latin, not a patrimonial
Spanish word, used only in technical or scientific contexts. A more common and
‘modest’ word for ‘breast’ in Spanish is pecho,
a word that also means ‘chest’, its original and main meaning (from Lat. pĕctus, regular stem pĕctor‑), though in the
plural, pechos typically means
‘breasts’. (Note that the English word breast
also has both meanings.)[3]
From the Latin root mam‑,
Spanish has a derived verb mamar ‘to breast-feed, suckle’. It
comes from Lat. mammāre,
derived from the root mamm‑ of mamma (mamm-ār-e). (The verb desmamar
is a synonym of destetar, both
meaning ‘to wean’.) A related word in Spanish is amamantar ‘to
breast-feed, nurse’ (mamantar in Old
Spanish). This verb would seem to be a Spanish creation, derived from the stem
of the present participle of the Latin verb, mammantem (nom. mammans)
‘suckling, that suckles’.
Another word that derives from the same root is the
technical word mamífero ‘mammal(ian)’, which is a 19th century New Latin
creation made first in French (mammifère)
and which Spanish borrowed. The word mamífero
(mam-i-fer-o) has the root fer- ‘to bear’ besides de root mam‑, so it was made to mean something
like ‘breast bearing’.
Also from the same Latin root mamm‑ are the English equivalents of Sp. mamífero, namely mammal [ˈmæ.məɫ] and mammalian [mə.ˈmeɪ̯.li.ən], which are also
learned scientific words in English. The English noun mammal is an adaptation of the technical term Mammalia, a New Latin term created by Linnaeus (1758) to refer to a
class of animals, the mammals (in English, it is pronounced [mə.ˈmeɪ̯.li.ə]). The word mammalia is taken from a Late Latin
neuter plural form of mammalis ‘of
the breast’, an adjective derived from the noun mamma (minus the inflectional ending ‑a) and the derivational suffix ‑āl‑: mamm‑āl‑ia. An alternative term for ‘mammal’ in English is mammalian, which is an English creation from the same
word Mammalia and the Latinate adjectival
suffix ‑an.
There are some diminutives of mama/mamá, the most regular
one being mamita ‘mommy’, formed with
the root mam‑ and the diminutive suffix ‑it‑
(cf. Part I, Chapter 5,
§5.3).
In some dialects of Spanish, the equivalent mamaíta
and mamacita are also used. By adding
the suffix ‑it‑ to the root mama,
with or without the linking consonant ‑c‑,
shows that some speakers have analyzed the original word as only having one
morpheme (being monomorphemic) or, in other words, with the final ‑a not being interpreted as a feminine
inflection. This may be the result of the word having become oxytonic (with
final stress) mamá under the
influence of the French cognate.
GO TO PART 1D
GO TO PART 1D
[1] The
word, mum, which is more common in
British than American English, has the same vowel as the word mother, namely [ʌ], though in mother
it has the less common spelling 〈o〉 for this sound. The sound [ʌ] is typically spelled 〈u〉 in English, but it is spelled 〈o〉
in many words, such as love and glove.
[2] Note
that in all these words, the consonants m-m
remain the same, whereas the vowels differ. As often is the case in language
change, the consonants of a word tend to be more stable and less likely to
change than the vowels.
[3] A more ‘formal’, or perhaps ‘aseptic’, Spanish word for ‘breast’ is
seno, a patrimonial Latin word that
used to mean just ‘cavity’, since it comes from Lat. sinus ‘curve, cavity’. The meaning ‘breast’ for this word is a
Gallicism, derived from the sense ‘cleavage’ that the French cognate of this
word, sein, word adopted in that
language. The use of seno to mean
‘breast’ is common in some dialects of Spanish, but not in others (other than
in written form). The colloquial (some would say vulgar) term for a womans
breast is teta ‘tit’. This word is a
cognate of Eng. tit, which is a
variant of teat, a mid-13th century
loanword from Old French tete ‘teat’
(Mod.Fr. tette). Eng. teat/tit
and Sp. teta are thought to be of
Germanic origin, not Latin, though the exact source is not clear.
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