401–410 of 511 posts
My first thought was "mama" (and possibly "dada"), as I believe I've seen it attributed to the fact it's an easy word for babies to make since it mimics the first sounds we make. But it's not even mentioned..
No idea where that came from, but we understood pretty quickly.
These seem like very bad candidates. All are loan words, which is interesting, but we could go deeper if we're considering pineapple/ananas and coffee. And let's be real, words like robot and computer are mostly the same in this respect too, especially if we're considering taxi. But what about words that are more "native"? How about "mama" and "papa"? There are variations, but these seem to be pretty small and mostly…
> My understanding is that these are pretty early words and need to be pronounceable by infants. Anecdata, but one of my infants was able to “speak” papa at a really early age (it was more a continuous repeated use of the sound ‘pha’). I don’t think she learned the word per se or we taught it to her but it was a sound that she was able to reproduce easily. As regard for mama. Both my daughters don’t really say that w…
An addendum to your theory. Words with few short syllables, composed of vowels and labial consonants are probably the easiest to pronounce, therefore "independently discovered" by babies. They are not "invented" by adults in a sense that "hey let's use this word for this phenomena", but rather "assigned" in a sense that "the baby babbles this, so let's refer to this phenomena by it". I guess this process is similar to how onomatopoeias appear in languages.
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It won't exclude anything. Loanwords can only be expressed in the phonemic structure of the language, because the speaker isn't capable of doing anything else.
> [...], because the speaker isn't capable of doing anything else. Huh? Japanese people have the same vocal tracts as Germans who have the same vocal tracts as Egyptians. Just because someone's native languages don't have a particular sound or sound combination doesn't mean they can't learn. That's especially true for sound combinations: a Turkish speaker might find a word that doesn't follow Turkish vowel harmony a…
These seem like very bad candidates. All are loan words, which is interesting, but we could go deeper if we're considering pineapple/ananas and coffee. And let's be real, words like robot and computer are mostly the same in this respect too, especially if we're considering taxi. But what about words that are more "native"? How about "mama" and "papa"? There are variations, but these seem to be pretty small and mostly…
Try languages from outside Eurasia. K'iche (Mayan): chuch, qajaw Mam (Mayan): txu, man Kaurna (Pama-Nyungan): ngangkita, yarlita Gurindji (Pama-Nyungan): ngamayi, ngaji I doubt there are any words meaningfully conserved across all languages. That sort of thing would be the holy grail of phylolinguistics and a lot of very smart people have spent good chunks of their lives turning up nothing of the sort.
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> How about "mama" and "papa"? And then finnish is (of course) quite different. Mom = äiti, Dad = isä
All the Finnish children I know use äiti for mother, but I've seen a lot of variation with regards to naming fathers: isä, isi, and iska. I must admit I've always meant to look at the differences, and see where they come from, but I've never quite remembered.
These seem like very bad candidates. All are loan words, which is interesting, but we could go deeper if we're considering pineapple/ananas and coffee. And let's be real, words like robot and computer are mostly the same in this respect too, especially if we're considering taxi. But what about words that are more "native"? How about "mama" and "papa"? There are variations, but these seem to be pretty small and mostly…
Some examples from India Telugu/Kannada : mother is "amma" Hindi: "maa"
Surprised it didn't mention the word or rather not word, "uhhh" or "umm" when we don't know what to say and need to fill silence. I know other languages and cultures have slight variations but the ending sound as far as I have seen is the same.
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> The exception being the eastern part of the Roman Empire which historically spoke Greek and still speaks Greek (except for the parts of the Roman Empire that remain Islamic). Aren't there big chunks of the Eastern Roman Empire that now speak Slavic languages? Also, the parts of the Eastern Roman Empire that currently remain Islamic constitute nearly the entire Eastern Roman Empire, including the capital.
I'm much less familiar with Eastern European history but that appears to be due to another wave of migration in early medieval Europe where Slavic peoples who originally lived further east moved into those areas after the Huns drove the Germanic tribes westward.[0] [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavs#Migrations
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Robot intuitively sounds like it could be a good candidate. I don't think "computer" is quite that universal, though. AFAIK it's something else at least in French ("ordinateur"), Swedish ("dator"), Norwegian ("datamaskin"), Finnish ("tietokone"; lit. "knowledge/data machine") and Estonian ("arvuti"). I think Chinese has its own unrelated word, too. And about half of the African languages that I can easily check in Wi…
Robot isn't even an old word - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R.U.R .
"Tea" is ruined by my native language, Polish: herbata. Robot seems to be a good candidate though: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/robot