Tata

[David L. Frye]

The responses from Frances Karttunen et al. should already indicated that,
no matter what, this isn't entirely a coincidence. But the first
question is whether 'tata' really means 'father/daddy' in Spain. I
certainly never heard it used in the 2 years I lived there. The
Diccionario de Regionalismos de la Lengua Espanola, one of the cooler web
sites out there (http://www.hispanicus.com/drle/) has "tata. America,
Murcia. Padre, papa," indicating that it is only used in this sense in the
province of Murcia (as well as "America," which is of course inaccurate --
it isn't used in Cuba or Argentina, for example). For the rest of Spain,
it shows 'tata' as meaning 'Nin~era. Empleada del hogar.'

In short, I would stick with your original assumption. The places where
'tata' means father seem to line up with those where the indigenous term
(not only Nahuatl) for father is something like 'tata.' Murcia might be a
case of an 'indiano' usage being brought back home...

David Frye <dfrye at umich.edu>


On Fri, 5 Nov 1999, [iso-8859-1] Kerry Velazquez wrote:

> Can anyone tell me whether "tata", meaning "daddy", comes directly
> from the classical nahuatl "tahtli" (father), or from Spanish?  I have
> always assumed that "tata" is a diminutive of "tahtli", but I have
> recently been told that "tata" has the same meaning in Spain. Is this
> just a co-incidence or is there a reason?