Eli5 why the words for mom and dad are so similar in a wide variety of languages
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Two reasons –
1. Both Mom and Dad are examples of sounds that really easy for babies to say, they come from a core set of sounds that the human mouth is able to process first. Along with the babbling / repetition of Momma and Dada. That’s just a core human habit irrespective of culture.
2. The majority of languages from Europe to India are theorized as having developed from a single, prehistoric mother language we now call “Proto-Indo-European”, or PIE for short. The idea is about 5,000 years ago the language spread out among the nomadic tribes of early human civilization. People settled down and the languages started to evolve from there into Celtic, or Greek, or Latin, or Germanic and even Sanskrit languages. For this reason we can trace lots of common words back through seeming unrelated languages to a core sound or core structure. Mom and Dad are classic examples that are still pretty universal among all the PIE descended languages.
For concrete examples of PIE and modern english, see [this chart](https://external-preview.redd.it/BhNby4GS9v4mL1lbOp2v_Uy1IkDBunT-H4lDWZThVkM.png?auto=webp&s=f2ce534fdc4ca4841a000de8603e9bfa87bf9689)
The same PIE root-sound “hreg” meaning “to straighten” or “right” moves throughout all the Indo-European languages back to modern english giving us words like Regal, Right, King, Rank, Reich, Rail, and Regime.
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