As the evidence shows clearly, the mama/papa words are created by parents who are eager to believe that their children are trying to talk when in fact those children are merely producing the universal babbling noises.
Since every child babbles in much the same way, parents everywhere hear the same noises, and they almost always choose to assign the same meanings to the childish noises they hear.
Again and again parents create words like mama ‘mother’, and again and again these creations pass out of the nursery into adult speech, displacing other words in the process.
As a result, we find the mama/papa words in languages all over the planet, in much the same form everywhere, and we frequently find them in the process of displacing older and more formal words, which themselves may be the greatly changed remains of earlier mama/papa words."
"8. Conclusion.
As the evidence shows clearly, the mama/papa words are created by parents who are eager to believe that their children are trying to talk when in fact those children are merely producing the universal babbling noises.
Since every child babbles in much the same way, parents everywhere hear the same noises, and they almost always choose to assign the same meanings to the childish noises they hear.
Again and again parents create words like mama ‘mother’, and again and again these creations pass out of the nursery into adult speech, displacing other words in the process.
As a result, we find the mama/papa words in languages all over the planet, in much the same form everywhere, and we frequently find them in the process of displacing older and more formal words, which themselves may be the greatly changed remains of earlier mama/papa words."