Mother and Father

[Kier Salmon]

Listeros,
I work as a spanish interpreter.  One of my populations is children  
with speech pathologies.  A lot of work has gone into making sure  
that children of "habla español" and other languages are properly  
evaluated within their cultural context and language development.
I was speaking to one of our people and he said that every language  
used "mama" and "papa" as the first syllables a child spoke.   
Something to do with dropping the jaw as a first sound exercise.
I immediately disagreed as I had had a mixteco speaking couple with a  
child with delayed speech just recently and I had heard them say  
"Mother" and, while I couldn't remember the phoneme, I could remember  
that it wasn't anything like mama, which surprised me at the time.
I looked up on the web (sigh, for a large library and linguistic  
resources at my fingertips!) and came up with the mixteco, the  
nahuatl and the maya (which is apparently also a Uto-Aztecan  
language) as

Mixtec                Nahuatl               Maya      English
naná'i                   Iye'                   Na'           Mama
  Tata                   Tata                   Taat           Papa


I don't know how much familiarty people might have with these... I  
couldn't find Cora, Huichol, or any other of the multiple languages  
in Mexico on the web... but the question he had was; how are they  
pronounced???  Any help?
Thanks
Kier in Portland, Oregon
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