- Charles A. Ferguson, “Baby Talk as a Simplified Register” (Paper prepared for the Social Science Research Council Conference on Language Input and Acquisition held in Boston on Sept. 6–8, 1974), to appear in Talking to Children, ed. Catherine E. Snow and Charles A. Ferguson (London: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1976).
- Otto Jespersen, Language: Its Nature, Development, and Origin (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1922).
- Edward Sapir, “Male and Female Forms of Speech in Yana,” in Selected Writings of Edward Sapir in Language, Culture, and Personality, ed. David G. Mandelbaum (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1949), pp. 202–212.
- Allen Walker Read, “The Social Setting of Hypocoristic English (So-called Baby Talk)” (Paper read at the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association, 1946).
- Roman Jakobson, “Why ‘Mama’ and ‘Papa'?” in Selected Writings, I (The Hague: Mouton, 1962), 21–22.
- Ashok R. Kelkar, “Marathi Baby Talk,” Word, XX (1964), 40.
- Charles A. Ferguson, “Baby Talk in Six Languages,” American Anthropologist, LXVI, Part II (1964), 103–105.
- Ferguson, “Baby Talk as a Simplified Register.”
- For a review of this literature see Catherine E. Snow, “Mother's Speech Research: An Overview” (Paper presented at the Conference on Language Input and Acquisition held in Boston on Sept. 6–8, 1974), to appear in Talking to Children (see n. 1 above).
- There does not seem to be any special term in Bengali designating baby talk as such though there is a term for nursery rhymes called /čhora/ which is loosely used to cover the domain.
- See Jakobson, p. 21.
- The baby talk referred to here is in the Standard Colloquial Bengali of Dacca. It is my impression that there is a considerable difference between baby talk in the Standard Colloquial and in various Bengali dialects. My stepmother used to have a chain of names that she strung together to talk to her son, and her song passed on to the other children in the family, starting with her first grandson:
- bajanu rajanu šultanu samratu kamalu jamalu
- hitlaru musulu sijaru kaijaru naduru ganduru
- father, king, emperor, emperor, Kemal, Jamal
- Hitler, Mussolini, Caesar, Qaisar, Nadir.
- The rhyming has the endearing suffix /-u/ in it in all the titles of the then-admired leaders. The child starts being a father, a king, an emperor, emperor of emperors, Kemal Ataturk (of Turkey), Jamal (to rhyme), Hitler, Mussolini, Caesar, Qaisar, Nadir Shah (of Afghanistan), and ganduru (to rhyme). Such improvisations are not usually found in rural dialects.
- For a detailed study of Bengali naming and nicknaming patterns, see Afia Dil, “Personal Names Among the Bengali Speaking Hindus and Muslims” (Paper presented at the Seventh Annual Bengal Studies Conference, Minneapolis, 1971).
- In Bengali, cousins of the same generation are addressed as brother or sister even by adults.
- Ferguson, “Baby Talk in Six Languages,” pp. 106 and 109.
- For a more detailed study of Bengali nursery rhymes, see Afia Dil, “Bangla Nursery Rhymes: A Psycho-sociolinguistic Approach to the Bengali Mind’ (forthcoming).
- This view of the child as something like a dancing god is reminiscent of the stories of the Hindu god Krishna. The loving attitude toward the dancing child reflected in the rhymes, however, is shared by all Bengalees, Hindu and Muslim.
- In Bengali culture red is the color most associated with young children. Boys and girls often wear red clothing, and red is the color of the bride's garments.
- In Bengali culture it is sleep itself which is personified, not some other being like the sandman of English nursery rhymes (who brings sleep).
- For a description of the special Hindu and Muslim terms used in Bengali, see Afia Dil, “The Hindu and Muslim Dialects of Bengali” (Ph.D. diss., Stanford Univ., 1972).
- Ferguson, “Baby Talk in Six Languages,” p. 108.
- The /juju/ is generally considered to be dark, covered with a heavy cloth from head to foot, old and sinister-looking, and /jujuburi/ is the female counterpart. The term /Juju/ is used in adult language too, when someone wants to point out that he is old enough not to be frightened by a /juju/.
- See, for example, Ferguson, “Baby Talk as a Simplified Register.”
- See Ferguson, “Baby Talk in Six Languages,” p. 113.
- Four semivowels are identified in Charles A. Ferguson and Munier Chowdhury, “The Phonemes in Bengali,” Language, XXXVI (1960), 40.
- See Ferguson, “Baby Talk as a Simplified Register.”
- Hindu children will also use /mam/ for ‘water’. This may be a carrying over of the word from the neighboring community.
- There are three forms of the second-person singular pronoun in Bengali: the honorific /apni/ generally applied to elders, /tumi/ to equals, and /tui/ to juniors and inferiors. The honorific form is used for the baby in a gesture to give him the “royal treatment.” For details, see Dil, “The Hindu and Muslim Dialects of Bengali,” pp. 148–149.
- In Bengali, when an adult or a near-adult indulges in baby talk, it is called /kɔlam kɔra/ ‘to be playful’, or it is looked on as /nækami/ ‘to be childish’. Both of these terms are employed in a derogatory sense.
- See, for example, Dil (n. 16 above), and Yona Sabar, “Nursery Rhymes and Baby Words in the Jewish Neo-Aramaic Dialect of Zakoh (Iraq),” Journal of the American Oriental Society, XCIV (1974), 329.
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Volume 27, 1971 - Issue 1-3: Child Language--1975