Liens de NerosQUESTION:
Unless I'm wrong, in most cultures and languages it's normal for children to call their parents by a name that's an equivalent to "Mother" or "Father" rather than their actual name. Is there a reason why this is such a global phenomenon, and why it's nowhere near as common for other levels of relationship, e.g. siblings?
REPONSE:
The answer is sort of backwards because it's really the parents' doing, not the children. The earliest sound shapes that infants tend to produce are usually a consonant followed by a vowel. The easiest consonants for a baby to produce are ones that don't require a lot of fine control of the tongue and lips, so sounds like /m/, /b/, /p/, /d/ tend to emerge first with a generic mid or back vowel sound, such as /a/. This results in early babbling and proto-words that often sound like /mama/, /dada/, or /papa/ across a large number of languages. Parents throughout history have likely assumed that the first sounds that their children were making were referring to them or seeking their attention, so these early proto-words became associated with or evolved into the words for 'mother', 'father', 'grandmother' and other caretakers. This also helps to explain why /mama/ is such a common word for 'mother' across many unrelated languages (Chinese, Swahili, English, Navajo...).
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