Mama/Papa Linguistics

"How do you refer to your mother?"I say "mother", why is that not in the list of predefined answers!?!"Which of these words (if any) would you use for a baby?"Baby. I say "baby" to describe a baby. How is this also not in the list of common answers!I say many words for many things, e.g. I also say "sprog" for baby which was one of the predefined answers. What I can't understand is why these predefined answer sets don't cont

It's not that weird, people are just following the same grammatical pattern that is coming accepted for parental words like "mother" or "father".The noun becomes a contextual nickname or way to address them. Compare:For baby's brain, do X.For mommy's sanity, do Y.

What about ma the word for mother? That seems more universal.

I don't see where you disagree with the article. From what I understood, the article is suggesting that the reason we all have mama, papa or similar words in our languages is their relatively easy prononciation coupled with the baby's needs. Where is it saying that mama definitely means mother?

Language should be adequate to the context of a conversation. If you were writing a legal document, or some policy for a kindergarten it might make sense to make that distinction, but this is a public forum with many non-native speakers. Parents is a concept pretty much all of us are familiar with and if you say parents we'll understand you mean people using the service because they care for young kids.

Do you propose an explanation for why they are always this way round? Eg. you may expect some language to use 'mama' for father and 'papa' for mother based on your reasoning.

My grandmother occasionally calls her children by each others' names. She's done it her entire life. She even mixes up her son's name and her daughters'. What she named her children is "fundamental and basic", too, and she's certainly an expert in how they're named. Heck, they're not even spelled similarly.Please help keep HN a nicer place by giving others the benefit of the doubt.

Similarly to when people call their significant others "baby".

In my childhood, all of my parents' siblings, cousins relationship had specific names, like for elder brother of father, brother of mom, sister of parents, their spouses. But anybody outside of that closer circle was Uncle or Aunty. Plus, because enrolling your kids in an english medium was prestigious, & expensive, those schools taught us to use english words, like mummy, papa, daddy, uncle, aunty. It felt like us kids using the english words were making our teachers & parents spen

Doesn't "mother" work just fine to cover these cases as well? It just sounds like an unnecessary awkward neologism.