Is this just something we decided would symbolise baby speech or are children that grow up around English more likely to say this?

  • bstix@feddit.dk
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    1 day ago

    Babies will mimick whatever sounds you say.

    Modern parenting practice is not to teach them gibberish first, when you might as well speak normally to them. They’re small humans and should be treated as humans. Would you say goo goo ga ga to your friends or co-workers?

    Grown ups who speak baby language to children are frowned upon. Why are they doing that boomer shit? They look like idiots and it isn’t helping anyone.

    If you want to change your communication to facilitate a faster learning curve for a child to learn spoken language, you’re better off combining regular speech with sign language. They pick that up faster.

    • Krauerking@lemy.lol
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      11 hours ago

      Why are they doing that boomer shit?

      Its not boomer shit. Its so much older than boomer, I speak in the Goo’s and Gaa’s to keep my ancestors alive.

      Goo, ha goo ga ga, 3 ga googa
      (May our hunt only kill about 3 of us)

  • we are all@crazypeople.online
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    when I was a kid I had a baby cousin who crawled up to me, looked me dead in the eye and said GOO.

    I was unsure of what to do, just sorta instinctively said goo back.

    he continued holding eye contact but cracked a smile.

    he started crawling away when I heard GAA.

    i said it back to him when he was a good distance. He liked me.

    anyway, whereever you are in Santa fe, good job getting your doctorate, Erin.

    • Gorgritch_Umie_Killa@aussie.zone
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      1 day ago

      On no, don’t say you US people use Erin as a guys name as well! Dammit! I can barely understand the difference between how you say Aaron and Erin, and now I can’t even consider whether you lot are refering to a guy or gal to understand which name you mean! Ugh!! I just can’t with you lot! This is worse than losing to you in the soccer! /j

  • deegeese@sopuli.xyz
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    Every baby says goo or gaa at some point.

    Those are just representative sounds. Like ‘bang’ and ‘pow’ in comic books.

  • Schwim Dandy@piefed.zip
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    Since it’s unlikely that the babies have combined forces with supernatural powers to share knowledge upon entrance into the world, I think it’s safe to assume that it’s intended to be a representation of the nonsense gibberish they utter while learning how their mouth and vocal cords work.

    • teft@piefed.social
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      1 day ago

      Baba is the word for father in a bunch of languages.

      As one of the first utterances many babies are able to say, baba (like mama, papa, and dada) has come to be used in many languages as a term for various family members:

      father: Albanian, Arabic, Western Armenian, Chinese, Hindi, Urdu, Punjabi, Bengali, Greek, Marathi, Marshallese, Mingrelian, Nepali, Persian, Swahili, Turkish, Yoruba, Shona, Zulu  
      grandmother: many Slavic languages (such as Bulgarian, Czech, Russian, Serbo-Croatian and Polish; a doublet of bubbe), Romanian, Yiddish, Japanese  
      grandfather: Azerbaijani, Zulu (father, grandfather)  
      baby: Afrikaans, Sinhala, Hungarian  
      
      
      You can hear the zulu one in the opening lines of The Lion King song Circle of Life. 
      
      "Nants ingonyama bagithi baba." literally means "hear comes the lion, father"  
      
      
      • Whats_your_reasoning@lemmy.world
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        1 day ago

        You can hear the zulu one in the opening lines of The Lion King song Circle of Life.

        “Nants ingonyama bagithi baba.” literally means “hear comes the lion, father”

        Okay, this part blew my mind. I knew such terms were used around the world for parents, but that connection to The Lion King is still really cool to learn.

      • AllNewTypeFace@leminal.space
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        “ba” and “ma” are probably the easiest syllables to utter when your brain is still figuring out your mouth and vocal chords, which is probably why they tend to be words for the parents.

  • teft@piefed.social
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    Babies first sounds are usually a consonant followed by a vowel. So ma, pa, ga, gu, ba. A few months later they start duplicating the sounds while testing out their speaking abilities so you get mama, papa, gaga, googoo, baba. Which are common first words for lots of baby things. Like baba for my sister was her bottle. Every baby might not say every variation while they’re learning and they will obviously have favorite words but generally that’s why we consider baby speech like that. Maybe english just happens to choose the “g” for the leading consonant because we have a lot of hard g words in english and that’s what babies pick up on first.