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Certainly, then, words like mama and dada wouldn’t necessarily stay the same, or even close to the same, in languages around the world and over tens of thousands of years. So what happened?
The answer lies with babies and how they start to talk. The pioneering linguist Roman Jakobson figured it out. If you’re a baby making a random sound, the easiest vowel is ah because you can make it without doing anything with your tongue or lips. Then, if you are going to vary things at all, the first impulse is to break up the stream of ahhh by closing your lips for a spell, especially since you’ve been doing that to nurse. Hence, mmmm, such that you get a string of mahs as you keep the sound going while breaking it up at intervals. […] Nichols has proposed that the reason a language like Yukaghir’s pronouns for I and you look so much like the mama/tata alternation—as well as why French has moi and toi and English once had me and thou—is because even as these languages have changed over time, the sounds of the words for I and you have been influenced by the way mama and tata differ. The m sound is used for what is closest—mama for Mommy and “me” for the self. The t sound—often learned just after m—is for what’s just one step removed from the closest: Daddy hovering just over there, which we can understand would feel like “you” rather than “(Mommy and) me.
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“Why ‘Mom’ and ‘Dad’ Sound So Similar in So Many Languages” from The Atlantic
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my sleeping pills just kicked in heavily and im genuinely on the verge of tears because i for some reaon remembered a misprint in a 1980s newspaper that switched the captions between Far Side and Dennis the Menace
(Source: beetledrink)
Stephen Bannon arrives on Capitol Hill and please ignore the Hampsterdance Song remix our computers are putting that on everything right now and we are unable to stop it
(Source: approximatenews)
