As the child’s first nourishment is its mother’s breast, its joyous mamama can also be taken to mean the breast. So we have the Latin mamma (with a diminutive ending mammilla, whence Fr. mamelle), and with the other labial sound Engl. pap, Norwegian and Swed. dial. pappe, Lat. papilla; with a different vowel, It. poppa, Fr. poupe, ‘teat of an animal, formerly also of a woman’; with b, G. bübbi, obsolete E. bubby; with a dental, E. teat (G. zitze), Ital. tetta, Dan. titte, Swed. dial. tatte. Further we have words like E. pap ‘soft food,’ Latin papare ‘to eat,’ orig. ‘to suck,’ and some G. forms for the same, pappen, pampen, pampfen. Perhaps the beginning of the word milk goes back to the baby’s ma applied to the mother’s breast or milk; the latter half may then be connected with Lat. lac. In Greenlandic we have ama·ma ‘suckle.’
Inseparable from these words is the sound, a long m or am, which expresses the child’s delight over something that tastes good; it has by-forms in the Scotch nyam or nyamnyam, the English seaman’s term yam ‘to eat,’ and with two dentals the French nanan ‘sweetmeats.’ Some linguists will have it that the Latin amo ‘I love’ is derived from this am, which expresses pleasurable satisfaction. When a father tells me that his son (1.10) uses the wonderful words nananæi for ‘chocolate’ and jajajaja for picture-book, we have no doubt here also a case of a grown person’s interpretation of the originally meaningless sounds of a child.
Another meaning that grown-up people may attach to syllables uttered by the child is that of ‘good-bye,’ as in English tata, which has now been incorporated in the ordinary language.[29] Stern probably is right when he thinks that the French adieu would not have been accepted so commonly in Germany and other countries if it had not accommodated itself so easily, especially in the form commonly used in German, ade, to the child’s natural word.
There are some words for ‘bed, sleep’ which clearly belong to this class: Tuscan nanna ‘cradle,’ Sp. hacer la nana ‘go to sleep,’ E. bye-bye (possibly associated with good-bye, instead of which is also said byebye); Stern mentions baba (Berlin), beibei (Russian), bobo (Malay), but bischbisch, which he also gives here, is evidently (like the Danish visse) imitative of the sound used for hushing.
Words of this class stand in a way outside the common words of a language, owing to their origin and their being continually new-created. One cannot therefore deduce laws of sound-change from them in their original shape; and it is equally wrong to use them as evidence for an original kinship between different families of language and to count them as loan-words, as is frequently done (for example, when the Slavonic baba is said to be borrowed from Turkish). The English papa and mam(m)a, and the same words in German and Danish, Italian, etc., are almost always regarded as borrowed from French; but Cauer rightly points out that Nausikaa (Odyssey 6. 57) addresses her father as pappa fil, and Homer cannot be suspected of borrowing from French. Still, it is true that fashion may play a part in deciding how long children may be permitted to say papa and mamma, and a French fashion may in this respect have spread to other European countries, especially in the seventeenth century. We may not find these words in early use in the literatures of the different countries, but this is no proof that the words were not used in the nursery. As soon as a word of this class has somewhere got a special application, this can very well pass as a loan-word from land to land—as we saw in the case of the words abbot and pope. And it may be granted with respect to the primary use of the words that there are certain national or quasi-national customs which determine what grown people expect to hear from babies, so that one nation expects and recognizes papa, another dad, a third atta, for the meaning ‘father.’
When the child hands something to somebody or reaches out for something he will generally say something, and if, as often happens, this is ta or da, it will be taken by its parents and others as a real word, different according to the language they speak; in England as there or thanks, in Denmark as tak ‘thanks’[30] or tag ‘take,’ in Germany as da ‘there,’ in France as tiens ‘hold,’ in Russia as day ‘give,’ in Italy as to, (= togli) ‘take.’ The form tê in Homer is interpreted by some as an imperative of teinō ‘stretch.’ These instances, however, are slightly different in character from those discussed in the main part of this chapter.[31]
[CHAPTER IX]
THE INFLUENCE OF THE CHILD ON LINGUISTIC DEVELOPMENT
§ 1. Conflicting Views. § 2. Meringer. Analogy. § 3. Herzog’s Theory of Sound Changes. § 4. Gradual Shiftings. § 5. Leaps. § 6. Assimilations, etc. § 7. Stump-words.