Tower of Babe-l

Not a great pun. Not much of a pun at all. But you'll forgive me I hope - as the recent birth of my niece has me thinking about baby-talk. and a recent correspondence with my good friend Daniel had me thinking about language development. In that exchange Daniel suggested that "the confounding of language at the Tower of Babel wasn't thorough enough" (I think he might have been referring to my tiresome and confusing answer to a very interesting question). But even just the name of the tower has caused plenty of confusion.

People like to credit 'babel' with the origins of the word babble. At first it sounds good - supportable by orthography, phonology, semantics (including connotation and denotation) mythology . . . and let's pause on that. The connection is likely a myth. The name can be traced so easily to the Akkadian bab (gate) + ilu (god) that we pretty easily have to abandon the echoic origin of the place name - which leaves us with the question of the origin of babble.

Is it still possible that babble came from Babel? well of course it is. But if we look carefully we find other more likely sources. Babel's synonymy with cacophony dates to the mid 1500s while babble's synonymy with blather goes back to the early 1400s - and other very similar forms can be attested as far back as the thirteenth century - and in several languages.

It's no secret to students who paid attention in school that barbarian comes from similar origins. Meaning strange or foreign and probably imitating language sounds. The alternation of /r/ and /l/ makes perfect sense as they're both coronal liquids. And the low back vowel /a/ as in father is an easy lax sound. Can we predict another word used to mimic "meaningless" or indiscriminate language? How about blab? blablablah? The already mentioned blather - blare (using both /l/ and /r/) - blatant (from spencer's faerie queen - the blatant beast had a thousand tongues and used them all carelessly - probably symbolic of the ignorant masses) - these are all tellingly similar.

So is a baby likely to make these types of sounds? Well let's look backwards at this question. Are we likely to hear these sounds in a baby's babble? Let's not forget the origins of baby - probably echoic of what we hear as baby talk - and what sound do we ourselves make when imitating a baby's burp or belch? Or better yet what sound do we make when reacting to the mess a baby leaves on our shoulder? There might be no official spelling for it but we've probably seen it in several cartoons or other written dialogues - bleah.

So here's a question i'd love for you the dear reader to answer: What words can remember pronouncing incorrectly when you were a child? Or a word that a younger sibling cousin niece or nephew mispronounced?

Instead of patient i said pedatient until I was about 4 years old.

Instead of until my sister (who just had the baby of her own) said ultin.

Your feedback will fascinate me.