[Lingtyp] Colexification between 'mother', 'breast', and 'eat/drink'

Tue Oct 26 16:23:52 UTC 2021

If 'smoke (inhale)' is part of this system, then I include as well ha:sha
for 'breath' and ushku: for 'smoke'. And for 'kiss' u:pa:shu: in Yahgan.

Jess Tauber

On Tue, Oct 26, 2021 at 11:51 AM William Croft <wcroft at unm.edu> wrote:

> Dear Ian,
>
>    There is an excellent online resource for colexifications, the Database
> of Cross-Linguistic Colexifications (https://clics.clld.org/), with data
> from 3156 languages/varieties. For 'breast', there are 7 colexifications in
> 2532 varieties, involving 'chest', 'nipple', 'udder' and 'milk' (
> https://clics.clld.org/graphs/infomap_131_BREAST). For 'drink', there are
> 17 colexifications in 2079 varieties, involving most centrally 'bite',
> 'eat', 'suck', 'smoke (inhale)' and 'kiss' (
> https://clics.clld.org/graphs/infomap_47_DRINK). For 'mother', there are
> 18 colexifications in 2360 varieties, most centrally involving 'mother's
> sister', not surprisingly from the typology of kinship systems (see infomap
> https://clics.clld.org/graphs/infomap_6_FATHER-IN-LAW%20(OF%20MAN). It is
> easy to explore these colexifications in detail with CLICS3.
>
> Best wishes,
> Bill
>
>
>
> ------------------------------
> *From:* Lingtyp <lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org> on behalf of
> Eric Melac <eric.melac at univ-montp3.fr>
> *Sent:* Tuesday, October 26, 2021 5:51 AM
> *To:* Ege Baran Dalmaz <ebarandalmaz at gmail.com>
> *Cc:* LINGTYP <lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org>
> *Subject:* Re: [Lingtyp] Colexification between 'mother', 'breast', and
> 'eat/drink'
>
>
> *  [EXTERNAL]*
>
> Dear Ian,
>
> It might not be exactly what you are looking for, but in Central Tibetan,
> the word for 'milk' and 'breast' are the same: *'o.ma <http://o.ma>*, and
> the honoric verb for 'eat' and 'drink' are the same: *mchod*.
>
> Best,
>
> Eric
>
>
>
>
> Le 2021-10-26 13:41, Ege Baran Dalmaz a écrit :
>
> Dear Ian,
> I just realized that in Turkish, there are some uncommon variations of the
> said words that could link a colexification of some kind. It is just an
> (un)educated guess that I have, though.
> There is an uncommon way to refer to your mother in Turkish, as ['ma.ma],
> it is mostly used by "western-oriented" people that do not use [an.'ne],
> the most common way to say mother in Turkish.
> In child-directed speech, food and/or breast milk can be referred to as
> [ma.'ma], meaning food in general.
> Also, breast in Turkish is [me.'me].
> If these three could be thought to be colexified, I guess it would be
> helpful for you. The mother one ['ma.ma] is not really common, but the
> other two for food and breast are quite common in standard Turkish.
> Best,
> EBD
> Ege Baran Dalmaz
> Boğaziçi University
> Graduate School of Social Sciences
> Department of Linguistics
> ebarandalmaz at gmail.com
>
> Jess Tauber <tetrahedralpt at gmail.com>, 26 Eki 2021 Sal, 13:16 tarihinde
> şunu yazdı:
>
> In Yahgan (a critically endangered Native American language from Tierra
> del Fuego, which I've studied for nearly a quarter century), the standard
> word for 'mother' is da:bi (colon marks tenseness of the vowel preceding it
> in the keyboard-friendly orthography I developed), while the set of words
> for 'breast' includes chvmmvsh (v represents schwa), chvmmvsha, chvmmvshka,
> tvmmvsha, while da:pvsh is both 'breast' and 'milk'. So traces of dialect
> mixing or augmentative/diminutive shifting of what were originally
> variations on the same theme back in the day.
>
> And 'eat' is normally atama, where ama represents 'food' in general (but
> fatty sea mammals used for food in particular). vndvpa is generic for
> 'meat'. In the inclement climate of Tierra del Fuego (cold and wet),
> inhabitants went around nearly naked, keeping fires going at all times to
> warm themselves against. When they cooked they only rarely did so
> completely- usually only enough heat to melt the fat within morsels being
> prepared. They often woke at all hours of the night to have a nosh, and
> when they put on weight by overeating, it would just as quickly melt off
> their bodies.
>
> Another form likely related to the original set I mentioned above (and
> which I'm now only realizing) is muru:, meaning 'suck'. Because of the
> morphophonetic changes in word building, this shows up in combination as
> mush-.
> The word for 'drink' is vla, and there appears to be a very old
> alternation (likely sound-symbolic) between /l/ and /sh/ in the language,
> based on internal reconstruction I did years ago.
>
> There is also a form ushkuru: meaning 'swallow, gulp down, eat' which
> appears to be part of this same system
>
>
> Jess Tauber
>
> On Tue, Oct 26, 2021 at 4:29 AM ENRIQUE BERNARDEZ SANCHIS <
> ebernard at filol.ucm.es> wrote:
>
> Hi, Ian. In Cha'palaa, a language spoken in NW Ecuador, the root  ču-
> appears in derivatives meaning "mother / breast / milk / drink". It is just
> a matter of adding nominal or verbal inflection.
> Enrique
>
> El mar, 26 oct 2021 a las 10:00, Daniel Ross (<djross3 at gmail.com>)
> escribió:
>
> Dear Ian,
>
> 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.)
>
> 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.
>
> On the other hand, there may be further uses or derivations of this form
> in some languages, such as Latin *mamma* 'breast' and other derivations
> like *mammalia* (class of animals producing milk, i.e. with breasts).
>
> 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":
> https://www.jstor.org/stable/24939295 and Ruhlen then expanded this to
> claim a possible Proto-World etymology in his 1994 book *On the Origin of
> Languages*. 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 *mama*.
> (These etymologies seem tied together, with the Indo-European variants of
> maliq'a meaning "milk", for example.)
>
> Daniel Ross
> ALT Webmaster
> Lecturer, UC Riverside
>
>
> On Tue, Oct 26, 2021 at 12:35 AM JOO, Ian [Student] <
> ian.joo at connect.polyu.hk> wrote:
>
> Dear typologists,
>
> Are you aware of any language that colexifies (uses the same lexeme for)
> the following four concepts: 'mother', 'breast', and 'eat/drink'?
> 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.
> I would much appreciate your help.
>
>
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> --
> Enrique Bernárdez
> Profesor Honorífico de Lingüística General
> Departamento de Lingüística, Estudios Árabes, Hebreos y de Asia Oriental
> Facultad de Filología
> Universidad Complutense de Madrid
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