Showing posts with label baby talk. Show all posts
Showing posts with label baby talk. Show all posts

Sunday, May 01, 2016

Yuck: a borrowing from Arabic into Berber?

One of my son's first words is [x:::], "yuck!" - his attempt to pronounce the Algerian Arabic baby-talk item kəxx(i) كخّ "yuck". I was surprised to learn recently that this word goes back well over a millennium: a hadith in Sahih Muslim records its use in addressing Ali's son Hasan, then a child:
أخذ الحسن بن علي تمرة من تمر الصدقة فجعلها في فيه فقال رسول الله صلى الله عليه وسلم : كخ كخ ارم بها أما علمت أنا لا نأكل الصدقة (link)
Al-Hasan son of Ali took a charity date and put it in his mouth. So the Messenger of God, peace be upon him, said: "Kax, kax, throw it away; don't you know that we do not eat alms?"

Variants of this word (kxx, kexx, kexxa, kəxx) are very widespread in North Africa, not just in Arabic but in Berber too, as you can see from the Barefoot Linguist's Baby Talk database: it's used in Siwi, in Kabyle, in Tarifiyt, and in Senhaja. In Europe, on the other hand, it's far from universal; in fact, I don't know that it's even attested. That suggests that independent parallel innovation is unlikely. /x/ is a perfectly normal phoneme within Arabic, but in Berber it's rare in inherited roots and unlikely to be reconstructible for proto-Berber; all of the Berber languages listed there as having this word are intensely influenced by Arabic. That makes it unlikely that it's a common retention from proto-Afro-Asiatic. The most obvious conclusion is that kəxx has been borrowed from Arabic into Berber. Other cases of the borrowing of baby-talk is certainly attested, but this example seems particularly striking for the word's sheer frequency.

Tuesday, June 10, 2008

Baby talk across the centuries

Most languages probably have a few words used especially for addressing babies. However, Siwi seems to have a lot more than I know from English or Arabic (I've recorded something like 40). One of these (already noted in Laoust 1931) is mbuwwa "water" (the normal Siwi word is aman). mbuwwa, meaning "water" or "drink", turns out to be rather widespread: they use it in baby talk in Syria, Lebanon, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, Malta, Sicily, and probably a few other places for which I haven't found sources. The remarkable part is that Ferguson managed to track down a historical source for this word. Varro, a Roman grammarian of the first century BC, gives bua as the nursery word for "drink" (presumably to be related to bibere, the adult verb for "drink".) (Unfortunately, I haven't managed to find the relevant work online.) If the connection is correct, then this word (possibly along with some others, like pappa for "bread" or "food") has persisted in Mediterranean baby talk for at least 2000 years, apparently without ever passing into adult speech.

So what special words do you use in your language when talking to babies?