But the three classes cannot always be kept apart, especially when the child imitates the grown-up person’s sound so badly or seizes the meaning so imperfectly that very little is left of what the grown-up person gives. As a rule, the self-created words will be very short-lived; still, there are exceptions.
O’Shea’s account of one of these words is very instructive. “She had also a few words of her own coining which were attached spontaneously to objects, and these her elders took up, and they became fixed in her vocabulary for a considerable period. A word resembling Ndobbin was employed for every sort of thing which she used for food. The word came originally from an accidental combination of sounds made while she was eating. By the aid of the people about her in responding to this term and repeating it, she ‘selected’ it and for a time used it purposefully. She employed it at the outset for a specific article of food; then her elders extended it to other articles, and this aided her in making the extension herself. Once started in this process, she extended the term to many objects associated with her food, even objects as remote from her original experience as dining-room, high-chair, kitchen, and even apple and plum trees” (O’Shea, 27).
To Class A I assign most of the words already given as the child’s creations, whether the child be great or small.
Class B is that which is most sparsely represented. A child in Finland often heard the well-known line about King Karl (Charles XII), “Han stod i rök och damm” (“He stood in smoke and dust”), and taking rö to be the adjective meaning ‘red,’ imagined the remaining syllables, which he heard as kordamm, to be the name of some piece of garment. This amused his parents so much that kordamm became the name of a dressing-gown in that family.
To Class C, where the child contributes only the sound and the older people give a meaning to what on the child’s side was meaningless—a process that reminds one of the invention of blotting-paper—belong some of the best-known words, which require a separate section.
VIII.—§ 8. ‘Mamma’ and ‘Papa.’
In the nurseries of all countries a little comedy has in all ages been played—the baby lies and babbles his ‘mamama’ or ‘amama’ or ‘papapa’ or ‘apapa’ or ‘bababa’ or ‘ababab’ without associating the slightest meaning with his mouth-games, and his grown-up friends, in their joy over the precocious child, assign to these syllables a rational sense, accustomed as they are themselves to the fact of an uttered sound having a content, a thought, an idea, corresponding to it. So we get a whole class of words, distinguished by a simplicity of sound-formation—never two consonants together, generally the same consonant repeated with an a between, frequently also with an a at the end—words found in many languages, often in different forms, but with essentially the same meaning.
First we have words for ‘mother.’ It is very natural that the mother who is greeted by her happy child with the sound ‘mama’ should take it as though the child were calling her ‘mama,’ and since she frequently comes to the cradle when she hears the sound, the child himself does learn to use these syllables when he wants to call her. In this way they become a recognized word for the idea ‘mother’—now with the stress on the first syllable, now on the second. In French we get a nasal vowel either in the last syllable only or in both syllables. At times we have only one syllable, ma. When once these syllables have become a regular word they follow the speech laws which govern other words; thus among other forms we get the German muhme, the meaning of which (‘aunt’) is explained as in the words mentioned, p. [118]. In very early times ma in our group of languages was supplied with a termination, so that we get the form underlying Greek mētēr, Lat. mater (whence Fr. mère, etc.), our own mother, G. mutter, etc. These words became the recognized grown-up words, while mama itself was only used in the intimacy of the family. It depends on fashion, however, how ‘high up’ mama can be used: in some countries and in some periods children are allowed to use it longer than in others.
The forms mama and ma are not the only ones for ‘mother.’ The child’s am has also been seized and maintained by the grown-ups. The Albanian word for ‘mother’ is ama, the Old Norse word for ‘grandmother’ is amma. The Latin am-ita, formed from am with a termination added, came to mean ‘aunt’ and became in OFr. ante, whence E. aunt and Modern Fr. tante. In Semitic languages the words for ‘mother’ also have a vowel before m: Assyrian ummu, Hebrew ’êm, etc.
Baba, too, is found in the sense ‘mother,’ especially in Slavonic languages, though it has here developed various derivative meanings, ‘old woman,’ ‘grandmother,’ or ‘midwife.’ In Tonga we have bama ‘mother.’