Re: Etymology of PIE *ph2ter

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Patrick Ryan" <proto-language@...>
wrote:

> Don't forget bilingualism. In our family, the baby word for 'food' is
> Chinese - my wife interpreted some of our daughter's babbling as being
> this Chinese word, and wondered how she could know it.
>
> ***
> Patrick:
>
> I presume this is some variety of /tshi/?

No. It's /m&mVn/ - which doesn't seem Chinese to me, but that isn't
the point of the anecdote.

> I believe the choice of the parents to reinforce baby's babbled 'ma'

for

> 'mother' is a linguistically determined choice based on a special
> introductory vocabulary for the Kinderstube. What I find most

interesting is

> that it seems, in a PIE context, that some rather persistent forms

have been

> maintained in that special environment that appear not to have been

subject

> to sound change going on outside the nursery.

But what are the early Germanic words for 'daddy'?

> The big question is: why was this selection made at its earliest

instance?

>
> If I understand some others correctly, the best they can offer is

the early

> appearance in babbling of /ma/ (I will continue to write phonetic
> transcription in slants because brackets potentially mess up HTML).

But this

> cannot suffice because babbling studies have shown that babies

usually start

> with oral rather than nasal articulations.
>
> That's why it's called 'babbling', stupid. Pun, pun, pun. And not

*mamling.

Impossible unattested form. Cut the insults and predict _mumbling_ -
which is already in use with a different meaning!

> If there were any real validity in that explanation, we would expect a
> proliferation of /ba/ and /baba/ for 'mother', baby's usual object of
> reference (we think) once he/she has an object of reference.
>
> Although /ba/ can be seen occasionally connected with 'father', it

is rare

> for 'mother' (if at all - I know of none).

Vai and Bambara _ba_ 'mother'. Both these Mande languages have the
usual Mande _fa_ for 'father'.

There are 20 formal *(p)apa~(b)aba words meaning 'mother' in the 1029
relations over 666 languages recorded in Appendix A of de l'Etang and
Bancel in Mother Tongue Issue IX. 11% of the words refer to females,
but some of them don't really belong, such as the _a:pÉY_ (sp?)
'uncle's wife' word from Lao, which seems to be a compound of _a:_
'parent's younger sibling' (? - it's just father's younger's sibling
in Thai) and _pÉY_ '(junior) female relative by marriage'. On the
other hand, the Thai transcription _phâi_ of the second element (as
pronounced in Thailand) would have got in - the Thai form _saphái_
must have been excluded because of the prefix.

> My conclusion from all this is that, at some _very_ early time, /ma/,
> 'breast', was a word that existed outside of the Kinderstube
> ('breast-men[???]; another attempt at humor). Mothers want their

kids to get

> with it and join the community, so a conscious selection is made to
> reinforce /ma/ for either 'breast' or 'mother' as a basis for a later
> elaboration into /mama/ or /ama/ or something similar.
>
> What do you think, Richard. Does this sketch make any sense to you?

Yes, but the process clearly leaks. I suspect bilingualism has done a
lot of repair work.

Richard.