Baby Talk

This article presents a descriptive study of baby talk (BT) in the Maghreb (including its phonology, morphology, and syntax). The majority of data comes from Morocco and Algeria; additional examples from Libya and Egypt are provided. Both Arabic and Berber languages are discussed. Baby talk – a special speech register used when addressing babies – is common in North Africa, both among Arabs and Berbers. As in many languages, the structure of Maghrebian BT terms is simple, usually made up of two syllables consisting of a consonant and a vowel. Reduplication is also common in BT cross-linguistically. Gemination of C2 is frequent in Afro-Asiatic languages, including Arabic and Berber, e.g. Moroccan Arabic pappa ‘bread’, ninni ‘sleep’, fuffu ‘fire’. As is often the case around the world, Maghrebian BT is usually accompanied by an accented prosody. There are many similarities between BT terms throughout the Maghreb. Maghrebian BT lexicon is conventionalized and rich – the number of terms can reach 200 per dialect. Most typical semantic groups are: food, animals, body parts, basic actions and qualities, etc. BT terms are mostly nouns and verbs, but can often be used in different grammatical categories. Morphological markers are usually absent. Maghrebian BT differs radically from the standard (adult) speech on all language levels (phonology, morphosyntax, word roots). Hence, BT cannot be regarded as a distortion of adult speech. It is interesting to investigate, then, why adults teach infants a language so divergent from their own.

When a new baby arrives among the Beng people of West Africa, they see it not as being born, but as being reincarnated after a rich life in a previous world. Far from being a tabula rasa, a Beng infant is thought to begin its life filled with spiritual knowledge. But how do these beliefs affect the ways the Beng raise their children?
In this unique and engaging ethnography of babies, Alma Gottlieb explores how Beng religious ideology affects every aspect of their childrearing practices, from bathing infants to protecting them from disease to teaching them how to crawl and walk. She shows too how widespread poverty among the Beng sets practical limits on these practices. A mother of two, Gottlieb includes moving discussions of how her experiences among the Beng changed the way she saw her own parenting. Throughout the book she also draws telling comparisons between Beng and Euro-American parenting, bringing home just how deeply culture matters to the ways we all raise our children.
Anyone interested in the culture of infancy, and vice versa, will enjoy The Afterlife Is Where We Come From.

In this paper, I will provide etymological explanations for the two Korean words for 'grain': ssal 'uncooked grain' and pap 'cooked grain. ' The word ssal 'uncooked grain' is a loanword from Middle Chinese bu-sat 'Bodhisattva, ' linking the Buddhist holy figure to the type of food that has a sacred status in Korean culture. The support for this claim comes from the fact that (i) grains were sometimes associated with the Buddha's body in Korea, and (ii) certain dialects of Japanese have also referred to rice-undoubtedly the most favored type of grain-as bosatsu 'Bodhisattva' or buppō-sama 'Lord Buddha Dharma. ' Moreover, pap 'cooked grain' is most likely derived from the baby-talk term for 'food, ' because cross-linguistically, baby-talk terms for 'food' or 'to eat' tend to be similar to /papa/ or /mama/, some of which shifted into the adult-talk term for food or a common type of food.

The article analyzes Abkhaz “children’s speech” (baby talk), the phonetic processes and morphological means involved in the derivation of children’s forms of “adult” words. The
article presents the corpus of children’s vocabulary of the Abkhaz language.

This paper is devoted to the baby talk (BT, a special speech register used when addressing babies) in Berber and Maghrebian Arabic. The discussion includes its phonology, morphology, and syntax. The study is based on a corpus of BT lexemes (1331 entries) collected through fieldwork and elicitation. A study of this scope has not yet been conducted. Maghrebian BT lexicon is conventionalized and rich, and differs radically from the standard (adult) speech on all language levels. Hence, BT cannot be regarded as a distortion of adult speech.

[Paper in Italian]
An attempt to reconstruct, through phonetic correspondences, the ancient shape of the meaningless words of a well-known Italian rhyme, often used for counting-out games. It seems possible to trace back the rhyme to Latin times, when these words might have been meaningful (*hanc para ab hac quidquid quodquod, "keep this one [an hand] safe from this one, anything something").

Подзывные слова сопоставляются с baby-talk (речью нянь) с точки зрения внутреннего структурного и прагматического сходства. В работе дана попытка рассмотреть подзывные слова в общем репертуаре жанров коммуникации, направленной на внеречевого собеседника.
Статья опубликованна в сб. Детский фольклор и культура детства: материалы научной конференции «XIII Виноградовские чтения». СПб., 2006. С.210-216.

The author analyzes the children's vocabulary (baby talk) in the non-written Bezhta language, which is a part of the Avar-Ando-Tsez group of the Daghestan languages. The phonetic processes and morphological means in the derivation of children's forms are considered. The article contains the corpus of children's vocabulary of the Bezhta language, as well as the names of animals and birds and their associated verbs, interjections used in the treatment of domestic animals and birds (calling, driving away), onomatopoeic and descriptive words, as well as a number of verbs with expressive semantics.

The works of Charles Dickens (1812-1870) are remarkable for his meticulous attention to the polyphony of surrounding society. Thanks to his personal experience, his novels also reveal an intense concern about the vulnerability of children. Away from the description of exploited or abused children of his well-known major novels, the novella A Holiday Romance (1868) provides some enlightening reflections on the cultural representation of childhood during the last decades of the Victorian age. In my paper I analyze Dickens’s choice of introducing the child narrator in his novella, and emphasize why is this innovation so relevant within the context of Victorian children’s literature.

Why do we call our parents mother and father? Why do we call ourselves these general words as parents? These personal questions have not sufficiently drawn the attention of linguists and psychologists, yet any account of language and human cognition must be able to provide a good answer. Indeed, our minds have evolved and develop in a social setting that is primarily governed by norms of kinship. This article demonstrates how those norms encapsulate the relationship between language and reality, individual and society. It suggests that the use of kin terms is characterised by a linguistic conflation of address and reference that corresponds to a cognitive conflation of social and natural concepts. This analysis rests on a biological view of language, morality and human sociality. From this grounded perspective, I integrate findings across the behavioural sciences. I argue that myth has a basis in child-directed speech, and that child-directed speech is a means of socialisation, not so much a means to help children learn to speak or relate to others. I also discuss the theoretical issues that result from this lack of metalinguistic awareness, issues that go back to the beginnings of philosophy. Because nature is prior to nurture, and the concepts of parents and kin appear first in life, understanding the nature of these concepts elucidates central problems, from the origin of societies to the current questioning of gender and parenting roles.

Mediterranean Periplus – voyages in time and space, around and beyond the sea of civilizations: we follow the movements of peoples, goods, ideas and cultural patterns in our historical space, underlying that exchange was the determining factor in the development of civilizations; therefore, the latter constitute a common heritage of the Mediterranean peoples.

The paper analyzes the children's vocabulary (baby talk) in the Abaza language, which is a member of small Abkhazo-Adyghean (West Caucasian) linguistic family. The phonetic processes and morphological means of the derivation of children's forms out of adult words are discussed. The paper provides a corpus of children's vocabulary in the Abaza language.

"Anthropologists and linguists following Murdock (1959) and Jakobson (1960) have explained the high frequency of words like mama and papa respectively for ‘mother’ and ‘father’ around the world, as spontaneously recurring inventions, in the case of ‘mama’ related to sounds made by an infant while breast-feeding. This type of explanation has tended to make linguists generally suspicious of finding deep etymologies for such words or reconstructing them to proto-languages.  At the other extreme there are linguists of the ‘long-range comparison’ school who believe that they can reconstruct a number of ‘proto-world’ or ‘proto-Sapiens’ kinship terms, and include *mama and *papa among this set.

As a corrective to both these approaches we closely examine the kinship roots mama and papa, which are widespread in Australian Indigenous languages. In investigating the distribution and varying meanings of these roots we use the on-line database of Australian kinship terms, AustKin, which has been being compiled as part of an ARC Discovery Grant based at the Australian National University.

Other Australian kinship roots (for grandparents) have been shown to have a split distribution with one root dominating in the east and one in the west for what is apparently a single proto-meaning. The distribution of mama and papa is not so clear-cut, but we outline how it can be accounted for without resorting either to recurrent invention or inheritance from some putative proto-world ancestral language.
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The works of Charles Dickens (1812-1870) are remarkable for his meticulous attention to the polyphony of surrounding society. This literary tendency is evident in his Condition-of-England novels, as well as in Dickens’s works aimed at a young readership; in the stories contained in A Holiday Romance (1868), the Victorian writer offers some enlightening reflections on the idea of childhood in Victorian culture. This paper offers an analysis of the innovative choices that characterize this Dickensian novella, especially dwelling upon its literary and sociolinguistic features.
In A Holiday Romance, Dickens depicts four children narrators, who express themselves using a language typically suited to their young age: baby talk. By using these young narrators, Dickens testifies to the increasing importance of children’s voices in the Victorian age; hence, to a socio-cultural legitimation of childhood.
Inasmuch as this literary and sociolinguistic innovation is limited by the adult author’s perspective on the issues discussed in the novella, the representation of children in A Holiday Romance is stained by the romantic idea of the ‘innocent child’. In addition to this, the adult voice implicitly invites young readers to follow the example of naïve and submissive childhood provided in the novella.
Despite the criticisms against it, A Holiday Romance is an innovative text, insomuch as it offers a plausible representation of children during the Victorian age, even according to its author; while writing to his American publisher, Dickens stated, “the writing seemed to me so like children’s, that dull folks […] might perhaps rate it accordingly” (Dickens, 1999: 402-403).