Mother and Father

[Michael McCafferty]

Kier,

Mayan belongs to the Mayan language family and Nahuatl to Uto-Aztecan.

Nahuatl 'mother' is /-nan/; 'father' is /-tah/.

monan; amonan your mother; y'all's mother
nonan; tonan  my mother; our mother

The diminutive (endearment) suffix -tzin often accompanies these terms.



Michael McCafferty

Quoting Kier Salmon <k_salmon at ipinc.net>:

> 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
> _______________________________________________
> Nahuatl mailing list
> Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org
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>




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