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Re:Are Any Words the Same in All Languages? by wodenokoto on Friday September 08, 2023 @03:00AM (#37430406)
Japanese has a lot of words for mother and unlike in English with mom, mommy and mother, they aren’t related.

The most common are okaasan (with a few variations of its own), haha and mama.

But mama is written with katakana suggesting it is a loan word. Which I find interesting in terms of the babble word theory.

It could also be katakana because it is considered derived from a sound like how onomatopoeia are often written in katakana, which would really support the babble theory.

Re:Are Any Words the Same in All Languages? by rizzaxc on Friday September 08, 2023 @06:08AM (#37431716)
haha is Chinese, so also a "loan" word
Re:Are Any Words the Same in All Languages? by wodenokoto on Friday September 08, 2023 @06:24AM (#37431815)
Wiktionary seems to disagree, saying it’s a Japanese origin word. https://ja.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/はは

At least in modern mandarin mom is “ma”, but Chinese has so many dialects …

Re:Are Any Words the Same in All Languages? by numpad0 on Friday September 08, 2023 @06:33AM (#37431886)
The literary character 母 is Chinese, spoken word はは is not, and some believe old pronunciation was closer to papa.
Re:Are Any Words the Same in All Languages? by naniwaduni on Friday September 08, 2023 @12:37PM (#37435911)
Bonus: ちち covers both titty and daddy. Food for thought. And babies too, I guess.