Is this just something we decided would symbolise baby speech or are children that grow up around English more likely to say this?

    • teft@piefed.socialEnglish
      10·
      2 days ago

      Baba is the word for father in a bunch of languages.

      As one of the first utterances many babies are able to say, baba (like mama, papa, and dada) has come to be used in many languages as a term for various family members:

      father: Albanian, Arabic, Western Armenian, Chinese, Hindi, Urdu, Punjabi, Bengali, Greek, Marathi, Marshallese, Mingrelian, Nepali, Persian, Swahili, Turkish, Yoruba, Shona, Zulu  
grandmother: many Slavic languages (such as Bulgarian, Czech, Russian, Serbo-Croatian and Polish; a doublet of bubbe), Romanian, Yiddish, Japanese  
grandfather: Azerbaijani, Zulu (father, grandfather)  
baby: Afrikaans, Sinhala, Hungarian  

      
You can hear the zulu one in the opening lines of The Lion King song Circle of Life. 

"Nants ingonyama bagithi baba." literally means "hear comes the lion, father"
      • AllNewTypeFace@leminal.space
        7·
        2 days ago

        “ba” and “ma” are probably the easiest syllables to utter when your brain is still figuring out your mouth and vocal chords, which is probably why they tend to be words for the parents.

      • Whats_your_reasoning@lemmy.world
        3·
        2 days ago

        You can hear the zulu one in the opening lines of The Lion King song Circle of Life.

        “Nants ingonyama bagithi baba.” literally means “hear comes the lion, father”

        Okay, this part blew my mind. I knew such terms were used around the world for parents, but that connection to The Lion King is still really cool to learn.