Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Bobby Isosceles]

One of my passions is linguistics, and here is an interesting article that tries to show that the near universal usage of 'mama/papa/nana/dada' and like terms for mothers are not related to any sort of nostratic Ur-language shared among humanity, but rather more related to the spontaneous babbling that all babies do:

article here (PDF)

One of the very cunning proofs is the fact that there is almost no preservation of the original Indo-European word for 'woman'. The French and Romanian terms look nearly identical but have vastly different origins: the original PIE word was *gwena and that is only preserved in certain languages. Examples given were Swedish, Irish, Welsh, Czech, Persian, and the first halves of the Russian and Greek words (kvinna, bean, benyw, zhena, zan, zhenschchina, and yineka respectively).

The *gwena root word did survive into English, but it no longer means "woman." It means a specific type of woman: a queen.

All in all, an interesting article.