<div dir="ltr"><font face="times new roman, serif" size="4">Hi, Ian. In Cha'palaa, a language spoken in NW Ecuador, the root
<span style="line-height:107%">ču- appears in derivatives meaning "mother / breast / milk / drink". It is just a matter of adding nominal or verbal inflection.</span></font><div><font face="times new roman, serif" size="4"><span style="line-height:107%">Enrique</span></font></div></div><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">El mar, 26 oct 2021 a las 10:00, Daniel Ross (<<a href="mailto:djross3@gmail.com">djross3@gmail.com</a>>) escribió:<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><div dir="ltr"><div>Dear Ian,<br></div><div><br></div><div>The typical cross-linguistic association is with the form "mama" for mother, based on the phonetic articulation closest to nursing, which appears in too many languages to be coincidental or due to contact. (Variants of this follow, such as baba/papa for 'father' and some other CV-doublets. There's a whole series of them in Swahili, for instance: mama mother, baba father, dada sister, kaka brother, nyanya grandmother, and some others that aren't exact copies like babu father or mtoto child.)</div><div><br></div><div>My guess would be that this association with "mother" could block other lexical developments for the word. This might be encouraged by mothers who want their child's first word to be referring to them, or at least that's the impression I have from American culture.<br></div><div><br></div><div>On the other hand, there may be further uses or derivations of this form in some languages, such as Latin <i>mamma</i> 'breast' and other derivations like <i>mammalia</i> (class of animals producing milk, i.e. with breasts).</div><div><br></div><div>A related proposal of an ancient cognate in the (now disputed) Amerind family is maliq'a ('swallow, throat'), from Greenberg and Ruhlen's 1992 paper "Linguistic Origins of Native Americans": <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/24939295" target="_blank">https://www.jstor.org/stable/24939295</a> and Ruhlen then expanded this to claim a possible Proto-World etymology in his 1994 book <i>On the Origin of Languages</i>. While many of us would be hesitant to accept such an extreme reconstruction, the data provided there from various languages and families is directly relevant to your question, and in fact could be a better explanation for recurrent similar etymologies, rather than ancient relationship or coincidence, as appears to be the case with <i>mama</i>. (These etymologies seem tied together, with the Indo-European variants of maliq'a meaning "milk", for example.)<br></div><div><br></div><div>Daniel Ross</div><div>ALT Webmaster</div><div>Lecturer, UC Riverside<br></div><div><br></div></div><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Tue, Oct 26, 2021 at 12:35 AM JOO, Ian [Student] <<a href="mailto:ian.joo@connect.polyu.hk" target="_blank">ian.joo@connect.polyu.hk</a>> wrote:<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex">
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<div dir="auto">Dear typologists,<br>
<br>
Are you aware of any language that colexifies (uses the same lexeme for) the following four concepts: 'mother', 'breast', and 'eat/drink'?<br>
The logic is that, the mother's breast is usually the first thing that a newborn baby "eats", so it would be natural if a language colexified these concepts, especially in baby-talk vocabulary.<br>
I would much appreciate your help.</div>
</div>
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</blockquote></div><br clear="all"><div><br></div>-- <br><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_signature"><div dir="ltr"><div><div dir="ltr"><div><div dir="ltr"><div><div>Enrique Bernárdez</div>Profesor Honorífico de Lingüística General<div><div>Departamento de Lingüística, Estudios Árabes, Hebreos y de Asia Oriental</div><div>Facultad de Filología</div><div>Universidad Complutense de Madrid</div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div>