[Lingtyp] [Ext] Re: addressing the daughter as Mummy

Fri Aug 21 10:27:13 UTC 2020

Dear Sergey,

the practice you are referring to is indeed widespread among Kurds of 
North Iraq, particularly those that retain a strong sense of tradition.

There is a difference though to the practice mentioned by Nino (below) 
in Georgian, where a grandmother can apparently address her grandson 
with "granny" (Nino's example (b) below).

This would not be possible for Kurdish speakers; whichever replacement 
form of address they use, the gender must match the person addressed, so 
a mother could not address her son with 'mummy', only her daughter.

More generally this is part of a powerful tendency to avoid addressing, 
or referring to, close kin with their given names. Most clearly this is 
found among husbands and wives; traditionally, one never refers to one's 
spouse with his/her given name, but some kind of paraphrase, e.g. 
husband addresses / refers to wife with 'mother of X', where X is the 
name of the eldest daughter. There's a whole bunch of possibilities 
here,it gets complicated and is poorly researched. Furthermore, these 
customs are disappearing and younger generation Kurds do not taboo 
proper names in the same manner, so it is getting increasingly difficult 
to document this.

best

Geoff

Am 18.08.2020 um 23:00 schrieb Nino Amiridze:
> Dear Sergey,
>
> Georgian (Kartvelian) has the phenomenon. Young people may get 
> addressed by their older relatives by the term that refers to the 
> relatives themselves. For instance, if a grandmother addresses her 
> grandson (say, Giorgi), she may address him by uttering (a) or (b):
>
> (a) giorgi, modi chemtan!
> Giorgi, come to.me <http://to.me>
> " Giorgi, come to me!"
>
> or
>
> (b) bebia/bebiko, modi chemtan!
> grandmother/granny, come to me
> Lit.: grandmother, come to me!
> "Giorgi, come to me!"
>
> This phenomenon is discussed in Boeder 1988 
> (http://www.staff.uni-oldenburg.de/winfried.boeder/download/52_Boeder_1988_Ueber_einige_Anredeformen_imKaukasus.pdf), 
> where he mentions similar cases in Lebanese Arabic described in Ayoub 
> 1964 and Southern Italian dialects by Spitzer 1928. In both cases, the 
> phenomenon is known from baby talk, when grown ups try to lower 
> themselves to the level of children. As a result, a role substitution 
> happens. Boeder brings Willis 1977 as a reference, according to which 
> the role substitution is an important play when children and grown ups 
> communicate in English baby talk.
>
> For me, as a native Georgian speaker, the explanation does not exactly 
> make sense for Georgian. Rather, the address forms have always been a 
> shortened forms of affectionate formulas:
>
> bebia [genacvalos / shemogevlos], modi chemtan!
> grandmother [will.secrifice.herself.for.you], come to me
> '"X, come to me" (where X is a name of a grandkid)
>
> I wonder what other native speakers have to say about the role 
> substitution in Georgian. And I would be curious to learn whether the 
> mentioned languages or others illustrating the phenomenon can have the 
> 'role mirroring' due to shortening of blessing formulas.
>
> References:
>
> Ayoub, Millicent R. 1964. Bi-polarity in Arabic kinship terms. In 
> Horace G. Lunt (ed.). Proceedings of the Ninth International Congress 
> of Linguists. The Hague: Mouton, pp. 1100-1106.
>
> Boeder, Winfried, 1988. Über einige Anredeformen im Kaukasus. 
> Georgika, Heft 11, pp. 11-20.
>
> Spitzer, Leo, 1928. Über Personenvertauschung in der Ammensprache. In 
> L. Spitzer, Stilstudien. Hueber, München, 1928, pp. 26-38.
>
> Wills, Dorothy Davis, 1977. Participant deixis in English baby talk. 
> In: C.E. Snow and Ch. A. Ferguson (eds.), Talking to Children. 
> Language Input and Acquisition. Papers from a conference sponsored by 
> the Committee on Sociolinguistics of the Social Science Research 
> Council (USA). Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, pp. 271-295.
>
> Best regards,
> Nino
>
> On Sat, Aug 15, 2020 at 9:26 PM Sergey Loesov <sergeloesov at gmail.com 
> <mailto:sergeloesov at gmail.com>> wrote:
>
>     Dear colleagues,
>
>     In various cultures (those I know of happen to be mostly Islamic)
>     the form of address can be copied by the addressee. Thus, when a
>     daughter addresses her mother as “Mummy”, the mother often
>     reciprocates, saying to the daughter something like “yes, Mummy”,
>     or “what, Mummy…” (Same of course with a son and his father.)
>
>     In particular, I came across this kind of exchange in my fieldwork
>     with Kurdish (Kurmanji) and some contemporary Aramaic varieties in
>     Upper Mesopotamia and Syria, but this phenomenon is also current
>     in the Soqotri language, an unwritten Semitic language spoken on
>     the Socotra Island in the Indian Ocean, southeast of Yemen.
>
>     Are we aware of explanations for this kind of usage? Are there
>     cross-language studies of this kind of facts?
>
>     Thank you very much!
>
>     Sergey
>
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>
>
> -- 
> Dr. Nino Amiridze
>
> E-mail: Nino.Amiridze at gmail.com <mailto:Nino.Amiridze at gmail.com>
> WWW: https://sites.google.com/site/ninoamiridze/
>
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