Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2018 December 1

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December 1

Mama and Dada

Why is "Dada" 5% more common than "Mama" as the first word for English-speaking babies? I thought I would find out more about babies' first words at Language acquisition but there seems to be nothing there. Where is this topic discussed? What are the most common first words in other languages? Thank you. 86.190.109.233 (talk) 21:12, 1 December 2018 (UTC)

What's your source for your initial claim? ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 23:38, 1 December 2018 (UTC)

A YouGov "national poll".[1] Clarityfiend (talk) 05:23, 2 December 2018 (UTC)

The passage beginning with the first full paragraph on p. 543 here may be of interest (the author is Roman Jakobson). This is cited in our article Mama and papa. Deor (talk) 06:31, 2 December 2018 (UTC)

Yes, that 2010 poll was "published by Jean Gross, England's first Communications Champion", so presumably is only for England, not even the whole of the UK, and whether the family is English-speaking or not. No details on total respondent coverage or sampling is given. Curiously it also says "Apart from variations on mum and dad, the most common first word was cat, listed by 2% of parents." That's quite a big jump down from the 15% for "dada/dadda" and the 10% for "mama/mamma". But still hard to believe so many English babies are being brought up by cats. Martinevans123 (talk) 11:55, 2 December 2018 (UTC)

It's entirely plausible that cats are so prominent. Cats are objects of great fascination for babies (softer but also sharper than dogs, for example). Henry^Flower 08:51, 3 December 2018 (UTC)

Original research, but my first word was alleged to be "fish" - we had a goldfish in an aquarium as well as a cat. Make of that what you will. I suspect that for many babies, their mother is an almost continuous presence and therefore doesn't require naming, but a reference for that eludes me. Alansplodge (talk) 11:33, 3 December 2018 (UTC)

Take a look at that link from Deor. Jakobson suggests that the real distinction is between "papa" for the parent present and "mama" for a request for the fulfillment of a need from the absent fulfiller of needs, which may or may not be the mother! My own OR experience is that parents are very inventive when it comes to hearing "a word" and will immediately do all they can to reinforce the repetition of the sound, even if it completely devoid of any actual meaning! Martinevans123 (talk) 11:43, 3 December 2018 (UTC)

Your phrasing makes it sound as if the goldfish was also in the cat. As many are. Matt Deres (talk) 15:29, 3 December 2018 (UTC)

Whereas I thought the cat was also in the aquarium. Henry^Flower 20:30, 3 December 2018 (UTC)

On my search for a reference, I found Semantic and Conceptual Knowledge Underlying Bilingual Babies' First Signs and Words which says that bilingual babies "produced translation equivalents in their very first lexicons" which suggests a greater insight than the link above gives credit for. It continues: "their early words (signs) in each language... reflected the meanings of their favorite things first". Alansplodge (talk) 16:26, 3 December 2018 (UTC)

And finally, A baby in the UK reportedly said 'Alexa' as his first word. Makes one proud to be British... Alansplodge (talk) 16:30, 3 December 2018 (UTC)

• I wonder what Salvador Dalí's first word was. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 20:35, 3 December 2018 (UTC)

The reported result is really strange though, since a) more mothers spend more time with their kids than fathers do, b) /m/ is easier to articulate than /p/ and related sounds, and c) the generally accepted theory is that words with a sound approximating mama are so common as words for 'mother' (especially among the very young) even across language families because it arises from babies smacking their lips and making noise – mmum-mmum-mmum – for milk (i.e., the word arises from attention-seeking vocalizations that are instinctive and not language-driven, and just becomes a word later). PS: Two members of my family swear that the first thing I was heard to say was a garbled approximation of "run you mother run" from spending so much time on grandpa's lap while he was watching football. I doubt it's true, but it's pretty amusing. PPS: Cat in the aquarium definitely happens, especially with a fat cat and a flimsy aquarium lid. I've never laughed so hard or seen a cat with such big, shocked eyes.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  08:51, 4 December 2018 (UTC)

I bet it was more like a garbled approximation of "proper nouns inherently require no capitalisation". But hey. I'm owed nothing here. Martinevans123 (talk) 22:22, 4 December 2018 (UTC)

Disko Bay

Where does the name of Disko Bay come from? What does it mean? It seems it's not a Greenlandic name. 93.136.57.116 (talk) 23:31, 1 December 2018 (UTC)

There appear to be several theories.[2] ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 23:41, 1 December 2018 (UTC)

Interesting. The Marmaduke theory seems the most reasonable to me. That and reading Straumfjörð#Directions indicates to me that we don't actually know what the Vikings called it, right? 93.136.57.116 (talk) 00:22, 2 December 2018 (UTC)