Why are some words, like “mama and papa”, similar in many languages?
In: Other
“Mama” and “papa” are sort of a special case. There’s a big [wikipedia page](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mama_and_papa) about them — it’s marked as needing more sources but does seem to accord with what I’d heard elsewhere. Basically those are easy and natural sounds for babies to make, and it’s normal for babies to have some way to refer to their parents pretty early on.
A lot of other words that are similar in many languages are similar because the languages are related to each other. Similar words which mean the same things in different languages are called [cognates](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognate).
For example, many words in Spanish are similar to words with the same meaning in French because both Spanish and French developed (over the course of several hundred years) from Latin. The Spanish words for “mother” and “father” are “madre” and “padre”; the French cognates for these are “mère” and “père”. The Latin words they’re derived from are “mater” and “pater”. French and Spanish and other languages which developed from Latin (Italian, Romanian, etc) are in a group called the Romance languages. English did not develop from Latin, but the words are still sort of similar because they’re in another language group (the Germanic language family) from a nearby area in Europe.
Note that there are some other reasons that words can be similar across languages. I’ll give a couple examples from English and Japanese, which are totally not related to each other.
In some cases, words are directly borrowed from another language because the other language has a really good word for a thing. These are called loanwords. For example, Japanese “beisoboru” (borrowed from English “baseball”) or “tsunami” (borrowed into English from Japanese).
Another case is onomatopoiea, which is words that describe the sound of something. For example, a cat sound is “meow” in English and ~~”niao”~~ (edit: actually ニャー, “nyaa”) in Japanese. They’re similar words because they’re trying to describe the same sound. (Edit: a better example would be English “moo” vs Japanese ムー “muu”.)
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