GirlChat #744168
no
Posted by Tyrone Slothrop on 2024-November-26 16:57:48 EST, Tuesday
In reply to Probably "Mama" posted by Baldur on 2024-November-23 20:05:52 EST, Saturday
And the proto-world hypothesis of mama and papa-words is definitely false; for a detailed argument see Larry Trasks essay on "Where do mama/papa words come from?": http://web.archive.org/web/20051128091658/http://www.sussex.ac.uk/linguistics/documents/where_do_mama2.pdf .
mama/papa-words follow the same laws as all other words: they change their phonetic shape until they are unrecognizable, and they change their meaning or simply get lost and replaced by other words. Words that look like mama/papa are simply being recreated all the time.
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