The same thing goes for Simon and Garfunkel. If someone doesn't know who Simon and Garfunkel are and you would show them a picture, I'm 100% sure they would point them out correctly. Because I don't know what a "Garfunkel" might be, but I'm pretty sure it would look something like Art Garfunkel.
"Mama" and "papa" (or "dada", or "tata", etc.) has nothing to do with "over here" or "over there". It just happens that "ma" is the first proper syllable that almost any baby makes, after simple vowels (because all you need to do is exhale while opening and closing your lips), so most cultures associate that with the person typically closer to the baby (i.e., the mother). The next one after that is usually "da", "ta" or "pa", done by blocking the airflow at the start (using the tongue or lips), so it's generally adopted to mean the next person in line (i.e., the father, or a grandparent). Sometimes just "pa", sometimes "papa", "da da", "ta-ta", "atata", etc. Babies don't "learn" to say those words, nor do they _mean_ anything by them. They're just learning to use their mouth to produce sounds, and start with the simplest ones. It was adults that picked the meaning of those "words" based on the fact that babies make those sounds. Eventually babies they figure out that certain people react more to certain sounds (and start to understand concepts like names, etc.), but that comes much later in their development. So the next time your baby says "ma ma ma", remember: he's really just being lazy. ;-)
well not most. I'm sure that American tribes have different words. while Indo-Europeans have Ma, Pa (or something similar). In Inuktitut for example, mother is anaana and father is ataata
Alwin Priven it is still the exact same concept. m and n are both nasals. and OP gave atata as an example for fatherly name. b and t, v and b, b and p, p and f are easily switchable
Royland Maines That example may have been wrong but try this one on for size. In Marathi, an Indian language spoken by a few tens of millions, the word for mother is "aai". No m or n sounds. No use of lips at all actually. Or tongue. Also no resemblance to any other Indian language. Which is not to say that I disagree with OP's overall point. I think OP is right. I just don't think it is a universal thing.
"aai" is another sound that every baby makes naturally in the first weeks of its life (in most languages that wouldn't even be seen as a proper "word"). It's another example of adults attributing a convenient meaning to a sound that occurs naturally, not of babies _learning_ to say "mother" (let alone trying to encode any complex meaning like "over there" and "over here").
It's the other way round in Georgian, mama is father and deda is mother. While the Turkic words are much the same as the Inuktitut ones. Ana and ata. But the OP's point stands, it's about what sounds are easier to make physically.
Japanese also. Circle is Maru, the ma sound is very smooth and soft. triangle is sankakuke. its so staccato and sharp. ...Words like "bulbous" vs."prickle." I like the whole subject :)
The 'morot' comes from Scandinavian languages, for example in Swedish its 'morot' ([muuruut], long 'o's as in 'root'). And in that 'rot' means a root. So the name probably came with the vikings, representing a vegetable that grows underground.
The first time I saw this episode I said something along the lines of "Rob's eyes look a bit more flirty." and then just seconds after David came with the prostitution comment... XD
The Welch got it from the Saxons "moru", who got it from the Vikings "morot" (Swedish), who got it from Russia "mорковь". The English got it from the Romans "carōta", who got it from the Greek "karōton", who got it from some proto Indo-European language. Carrots originates from Iran/Afghanistan.
@Ansuzie I taste colours. Pale yellows and green are sherbet, electric blue is tuna, karki is rain water and mud and pink red is orange. I've been able to do that for most colours for as long as I remember. I too have been considered weird as I thought everyone did it. Oh and white for some strange reason doesn't taste of anything. Texture also plays a part because it depends on how the light is reflected off the surface of something. Someone else who has something similar. WOW!!!
There was an extra bit at 4:54, which was shown in the XL version. JV: I've given them different names SF: What names have you given them? JV: Mr Sneeze, and Gonorrhea SF: Whoa! RB: He DOES look like Mr Sneeze actually, but I've never seen Mr. Gonorrhea in the series, with Arthur Lowe's voice!
Reminds me a whole lot of a Monty Python sketch where they're describing words as either woody or tinny. "Gooooooooooooone... much better than newspaper or litter bin. Terrible tinny words."
The difference between Rob and Johnny's 'soft eyes' look is that Rob's got eyes that say carrot (crunchy!), while Johnny Vegas has eyes that say moron.
@Ansuzie I see 5 as 'O' and blue, and 6 as 'A' and red. 4 is green and 2 is yellow. 3 is Brown/orange and 8 is purple. Sometimes I even accidentaly say the Number instead of the vowel or the other way around.
@urshoeonhead I haven't been contacted by anyone about the legality of this clip, so I'm not too worried. If the copyright holder contacted me asking to take it down, i would. I just posted it because I love this show and want to introduce it to others. :)
The first sounds a baby can make apart from vowels, without their teeth, are nasals and bilabials (m, n, p, b). Next in line come the alveolars (t, d, n) because still no teeth.
@Ansuzie That's called Synesthesia. It's where two (or more?) senses overlap when you experience them. Yours is called colour-grapheme. You have others, like colour-sound, and even sound-taste. So, you're not weird ;)
I love this show, I wish they'd air it over here in the US. Maybe the calming presence of Stephen Fry on our airwaves will bump the Average IQ up a bit.
While we're on the topic of synesthesia, I attach colours and shapes to writing styles. Really hard to explain, especially when I always remember the words I want to use in another language than the one I'm speaking. For instance, the part of the book I'm reading now is yellow and narrow. That does in no way means there's a narrow use of language. Most of the Harry Potter-books are kind of coarse, without being what you normally think of as coarse. As I said, really hard to explain.
@Ansuzie Actually this is popular in people. Either relating color to letters and numbers or color to music. It has to do something in the outer lobes of the brain that deal with color, sound, language, ect. actually get some what tangled in their wiring and both parts fire. Of course the later part of the brain not directly associated with the current mental task plays but a small role in the background. They find that people who share this tend to associate the same colors and letters.
@Ansuzie Hope you liked the documentary. :) Epilepsy being the cause of what you experience seems quite plausable to me, I just red synesthesia has been tied to Temporal lobe epilepsy. But ofcourse the brain is incredibly complex and no 2 brains work exactly the same so this could have any number of causes. :)
@Ansuzie Theres actually people who have a condition called synesthesia i believe where the brain mixes up nerve signals so they will actually see sound, and theres versions of synesthesia of almost any of the senses mixing up, Sight/touch, sound/taste, etc.
This was practically a crossover! I wouldn't mind seeing an episode with this panel, but Lee Mack instead of Johnny. Especially if Lee and David are on the same side of the desk.
@Katanalikeskittens Maybe so, but there's a lot less of it. (Just like we all know, deep down, that 100 pounds of feathers weighs just a LITTLE BIT LESS than 100 pounds of lead!)
Actually I got it from the Wikipedia article for carrots. Looking in the left column for the links for article in other languages. You can see the spelling. For example, there are many Slavic languages that have spelling similar to Russian. I don't know if they adopted the Russian word, or if it was the other way around. I know that Swedish Vikings travelled far into Russia. It could be that the Vikings brought the name with them, who knows?
Someone has probably already pointed it out, but in Swedish a carrot is morot, so there's probably some old common root word for that, maybe in Old Norse?
It sounds like Ansuzie is just associating letters and numbers with colours, not that they actually see those colours when they read them. I can associate letters with colours, but I don't have synesthesia.
Indirectly, yes. Not Old Norse, but earlier. There is a Common Germanic noun *murhon- meaning ‘root (of a tree)’, which gives among others Old English ‘more’ (meaning ‘root’), German ‘Möhre’, and the first part of Old Norse ‘mor(a)rót’ => Swedish ‘morot’, a ‘more-root’. I would guess the Welsh ‘moron’ is simply an early loan from Germanic into Celtic. Would have to be very early, though, for the n to be kept intact …
Speaking of Onomatopoeia. A freudian enterpretation would be that "ma" or "mama" could be a variation of "om nom" or "nam"... Like mom. The baby noms on his mom XD
@JustAnotherHumanist If you listen to S Fry 1st pronounces the Greek word for blunt (moron) at around 2:27 (very short 'o' sounds and a rolling 'r' sound) you'll hear roughly how the word is pronounced in Welsh - not as Brydon says it (I'm assuming you can distinguish between how S Fry says the Greek word 'moron' and how English word is pronounced). Brydon makes a thing about the Welsh word for a carrot whilst not knowing how to pronounce it - he is known (cont....)
It's also Möhre in German, morkov in Russian, morka in Lithuanian and murok in Hungarian among others. Seems that quite a few languages have this m-r base for the word carrot in them.
Oops, didn’t see your post there. Sorry! (The Germanic *murhon- is naturally a perfectly regular -ōn- expansion of the zero grade: *mr̥k-ōn- => *murhon-. The Welsh would still have to be a loan from Germanic at some stage, though, or it would have retained the velar, à la †morch or †mwrch or something.)
