Reader Jack write in to say , “ I ca n’t for the living of me forecast out where the term ‘ Dad ’ or its standardized cousins like ‘ pappa ’ or ‘ Dada ’ come from . What ’s the batch with “ papa ” and why has it become so prevailing in our society ? ”
“ Dad ” was first record in English sometime in the 1500s , but its ancestry is n’t clear . Even theOxford English Dictionarythrows its hands up and admit “ of the actual origin we have no evidence . ”
But , theOEDcontinues , “ the formsdadaandtata , meaning ‘ Father of the Church , ’ originating in infantile or childish speech , occur independently in many oral communication . ” In other words , “ daddy ” might get along from babe talking . Jack had consider this , too , when he wrote in , but then thought thatdsounds were not wanton ones for babies to make . Both the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders and the American Speech - Language - Hearing Association , however , say that sounds liketa , da , na , andlaare easy for child to make once some upper dentition come ( these “ dental consonant ” auditory sensation are made with the spit against the teeth ) . So , it ’s plausible thatdaoriginated as babe babble and enrol grownup mental lexicon from there as " pop , " but it ’s not a sure affair .
Jack did n’t ask about the source of “ mammy ” but I do n’t think it would be fair to leave female parent out of the billet . The answer here is mostly the same as for “ dad . ” “ Mom ” is first recorded in the 1800s and probably originates as a shortened form of “ mamma , ” which seem in the 1550s . at long last , they both look to come from baby talk . Linguist Roman Jakobson proffer this more specific line :
When these mouth movements and murmurs are made without anything to suck on nearby , Jakobson imagine , they come out as anmfollowed by a vowel auditory sensation , and may have eventually extend to pricy old “ momma . ”
