Forms with n are also found for ‘mother’; so Sanskrit naná, Albanian nane. Here we have also Gr. nannē ‘aunt’ and Lat. nonna; the latter ceased in the early Middle Ages to mean ‘grandmother’ and became a respectful way of addressing women of a certain age, whence we know it as nun, the feminine counterpart of ‘monk.’ From less known languages I may mention Greenlandic a'na·na ‘mother,’ 'a·na ‘grandmother.’
Now we come to words meaning ‘father,’ and quite naturally, where the sound-groups containing m have already been interpreted in the sense ‘mother,’ a word for ‘father’ will be sought in the syllables with p. It is no doubt frequently noticed in the nursery that the baby says mama where one expected papa, and vice versa; but at last he learns to deal out the syllables ‘rightly,’ as we say. The history of the forms papa, pappa and pa is analogous to the history of the m syllables already traced. We have the same extension of the sound by tr in the word pater, which according to recognized laws of sound-change is found in the French père, the English father, the Danish fader, the German vater, etc. Philologists no longer, fortunately, derive these words from a root pa ‘to protect,’ and see therein a proof of the ‘highly moral spirit’ of our aboriginal ancestors, as Fick and others did. Papa, as we know, also became an honourable title for a reverend ecclesiastic, and hence comes the name which we have in the form Pope.
Side by side with the p forms we have forms in b—Italian babbo, Bulgarian babá, Serbian bába, Turkish baba. Beginning with the vowel we have the Semitic forms ab, abu and finally abba, which is well known, since through Greek abbas it has become the name for a spiritual father in all European languages, our form being Abbot.
Again, we have some names for ‘father’ with dental sounds: Sanskrit tatá, Russian tata, tyatya, Welsh tat, etc. The English dad, now so universal, is sometimes considered to have been borrowed from this Welsh word, which in certain connexions has an initial d, but no doubt it had an independent origin. In Slavonic languages déd is extensively used for ‘grandfather’ or ‘old man.’ Thus also deite, teite in German dialects. Tata ‘father’ is found in Congo and other African languages, also (tatta) in Negro-English (Surinam). And just as words for ‘mother’ change their meaning from ‘mother’ to ‘aunt,’ so these forms in some languages come to mean ‘uncle’: Gr. theios (whence Italian zio), Lithuanian dede, Russian dyadya.
With an initial vowel we get the form atta, in Greek used in addressing old people, in Gothic the ordinary word for ‘father,’ which with a termination added gives the proper name Attila, originally ‘little father’; with another ending we have Russian otec. Outside our own family of languages we find, for instance, Magyar atya, Turkish ata, Basque aita, Greenlandic a'ta·ta ‘father,’ while in the last-mentioned language a·ta means ‘grandfather.’[28]
The nurse, too, comes in for her share in these names, as she too is greeted by the child’s babbling and is tempted to take it as the child’s name for her; thus we get the German and Scandinavian amme, Polish niania, Russian nyanya, cf. our Nanny. These words cannot be kept distinct from names for ‘aunt,’ cf. amita above, and in Sanskrit we find mama for ‘uncle.’
It is perhaps more doubtful if we can find a name for the child itself which has arisen in the same way; the nearest example is the Engl. babe, baby, German bube (with u as in muhme above); but babe has also been explained as a word derived normally from OFr. baube, from Lat. balbus ‘stammering.’ When the name Bab or Babs (Babbe in a Danish family) becomes the pet-name for a little girl, this has no doubt come from an interpretation put on her own meaningless sounds. Ital. bambo (bambino) certainly belongs here. We may here mention also some terms for ‘doll,’ Lat. pupa or puppa, G. puppe; with a derivative ending we have Fr. poupée, E. puppet (Chaucer, A 3254, popelote). These words have a rich semantic development, cf. pupa (Dan. puppe, etc.) ‘chrysalis,’ and the diminutive Lat. pupillus, pupilla, which was used for ‘a little child, minor,’ whence E. pupil ‘disciple,’ but also for the little child seen in the eye, whence E. (and other languages) pupil, ‘central opening of the eye.’
A child has another main interest—that is, in its food, the breast, the bottle, etc. In many countries it has been observed that very early a child uses a long m (without a vowel) as a sign that it wants something, but we can hardly be right in supposing that the sound is originally meant by children in this sense. They do not use it consciously till they see that grown-up people on hearing the sound come up and find out what the child wants. And it is the same with the developed forms which are uttered by the child in its joy at getting something to eat, and which are therefore interpreted as the child’s expression for food: am, mam, mammam, or the same words with a final a—that is, really the same groups of sounds which came to stand for ‘mother.’ The determination of a particular form to a particular meaning is always due to the adults, who, however, can subsequently teach it to the child. Under this heading comes the sound ham, which Taine observed to be one child’s expression for hunger or thirst (h mute?), and similarly the word mum, meaning ‘something to eat,’ invented, as we are told, by Darwin’s son and often uttered with a rising intonation, as in a question, ‘Will you give me something to eat?’ Lindner’s child (1.5) is said to have used papp for everything eatable and mem or möm for anything drinkable. In normal language we have forms like Sanskrit māmsa (Gothic mimz) and mās ‘flesh,’ our own meat (which formerly, like Dan. mad, meant any kind of food), German mus ‘jam’ (whence also gemüse), and finally Lat. mandere and manducare, ‘to chew’ (whence Fr. manger)—all developments of this childish ma(m).