Press your lips together and hum. That is /m/, a nasal consonant, a sound that leaves through the nose instead of the mouth. The soft palate, the fleshy back part of the roof of your mouth, drops away from the wall of your throat. That opens the door to your nasal cavity. Your lips never part. It is the only sound you can make with your mouth shut.

Now think what a baby’s mouth is doing for most of its first months. Lips sealed. Mouth full. The way out through the mouth is blocked. The way out through the nose is not.

Roman Jakobson saw this and built a case on it. “Often the sucking activities of a child are accompanied by a slight nasal murmur, the only phonation which can be produced when the lips are pressed to the mother’s breast or to the feeding bottle and the mouth is full.”1 That murmur is not speech. Nobody is being spoken to. It is the noise a working mouth makes when the mouth is busy. Jakobson’s next step is a proposal rather than a measured result, and worth flagging as one. He says the baby later makes the same sound when it wants the feed rather than has it, so the murmur moves from during to before. The body claim under it is not in doubt. If your lips are busy, /m/ is what is left.

The vowel that needs no shape

The other half of mama costs even less.

Go back to the source and the filter. The folds make one buzz. The tube above them shapes that buzz into a vowel. The vowel lives in the shape, not in the buzz. So ask the next question. What comes out when the tube is not shaped at all?

If the tube is a plain even pipe, about the same width from the voice box to the lips, you get a schwa, the flat, colourless uh in the second syllable of sofa. For an adult tract of about 17 cm, that shape puts the resonant peaks near 500, 1500 and 2500 Hz. That is the simplest number in all of speech acoustics.2 Now drop your jaw and leave the tongue lying where it lies. You have not aimed the tongue at all. You have not rounded, spread, bunched or curled a thing. What comes out is close to /a/, the open vowel in father.

So mama is not a word a baby has picked out of the sounds on offer. It is the two cheapest moves the vocal tract owns, taking turns. Shut the lips and let the voice out through the nose. Then open the jaw and let the voice out through the mouth. Repeat. Babies start making these same repeated consonant-and-vowel strings at about six months. The consonants that rule that stage are made at the front of the mouth with big, forgiving moves — b, d, m, n, p, t. Babies do this everywhere, before anyone has taught them a thing.3

The first word is not chosen. It is the sound left over.

Why the adults hear a name

George Murdock went through parent words in a large sample of the world’s languages. He found that four sound shapes — ma, na, pa, ta — turn up as words for mother and father far more often than chance allows. They turn up in languages with no shared parent and no contact with each other.4 That pattern is not handed down. You cannot inherit a word from a language you never touched. It is made fresh each time, over and over. Every new set of babies is issued the same mouth and finds the same easy noises in it.

What happens next is the good part, and it is done by the adults. A baby makes a nasal murmur that means nothing. The nearest adult hears it, decides it is a name, decides it is her name, and answers to it. Answering is what makes it a word. The baby seems to have said “mother”. What the baby did was breathe with its lips together.5

You have seen this happen with concrete. Walk across a college campus and you will find worn dirt lines cutting the corners off the lawn, right where the paved path was a nuisance. Nobody designed those lines. They are what thousands of people do when they take the shortest route. Which is to say they are the leftover of effort, not a choice. And then the grounds crew paves one, gives it a name, and puts up a sign. The path came from physics. The name came from a school looking at the path later and deciding what it meant.

Georgian pays it out the other way

The claim you often hear is that ma means mother in every language on earth. It does not. And the exception is the best part of the story.

Georgian is spoken in the Caucasus, and its language family has no proven relatives anywhere. It uses mama for father.6 Mother is deda.7 Same easy syllables, same babbling mouth, the jobs swapped. Papa in Georgian is grandfather.

That does not weaken the case. It is the case. The sounds are the same everywhere because mouths are the same everywhere. A Georgian baby’s lips and jaw do just what yours did. The meanings are not the same everywhere. Meanings are handed out by whoever is listening, and listeners belong to cultures rather than to anatomy.

Which is the source and the filter again, one level up. Down in your throat, the body gives a buzz and the shape gives the meaning. Out here, the body gives a small set of noises it is cheap to make. And the culture standing over the crib decides which noise is a mother and which is a father. In both cases the raw stuff carries no information at all. The shaping is where all the information lives.

It gets harder from here

Enjoy that first sound. It is the only free one you will ever get.

Mama is the one moment in your life when your voice does just what your body makes easiest, and the world answers as though you meant it. The rest of this half is the opposite of that. Speaking clearly means holding shapes your tongue does not fall into on its own. Singing means asking two muscles that disagree to hand a note back and forth without dropping it. Dictating to a machine means making a signal clean enough for a decoder that has no idea what you meant and no face to read.

None of that is left over. All of it is work.

References

  1. Roman Jakobson, “Why ‘Mama’ and ‘Papa’?” — first published in Bernard Kaplan and Seymour Wapner (eds.), Perspectives in Psychological Theory: Essays in Honor of Heinz Werner (International Universities Press, 1960), reprinted in Selected Writings I: Phonological Studies (Mouton, 1962). Record

    “Often the sucking activities of a child are accompanied by a slight nasal murmur, the only phonation which can be produced when the lips are pressed to the mother’s breast or to the feeding bottle and the mouth is full.” ↩

  2. Macquarie University Department of Linguistics, Vocal Tract Resonance; see also National Center for Voice and Speech, How the Vocal Tract Filters Sound.

    A vocal tract of uniform cross-section, about 17 cm long, resonates at approximately 500, 1500, 2500 and 3500 Hz — the acoustic definition of a neutral vowel. ↩

  3. Babbling, Wikipedia — canonical (reduplicated) babbling begins around six months; the early consonant set is dominated by p, b, t, d, k, g, m, n, and infants worldwide follow the same broad tendencies before native-language influence appears. ↩

  4. George Peter Murdock, “Cross-Language Parallels in Parental Kin Terms”, Anthropological Linguistics 1 (1959), 1–5. JSTOR · HRAF record

    The survey found “the universal tendency for languages, regardless of their historical relationships, to develop similar words for mother and father on the basis of nursery forms”, with Ma, Na, Pa and Ta significantly over-represented. ↩

  5. Mama and papa, Wikipedia — the cross-linguistic pattern, Jakobson’s account, and the counter-examples including Georgian. ↩

  6. Wiktionary, მამა (mama) — Georgian for “father”, from Old Georgian მამაჲ, from Proto-Kartvelian. ↩

  7. Wiktionary, დედა (deda) — Georgian for “mother”. ↩