baba

Origin

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 These terms often continue to be used by English speakers whose families came from one of these cultures. In some cases, they may become more widely used in localities that have been heavily influenced by an immigrant community. Some senses were extensions of one of these family terms in the original languages ("old woman" from "grandmother", "holy man" from "father"). The "cake" sense comes through French, from Polish baba (“old woman”). The Middle Eastern word baba (as in Ali Baba) is rather a term of endearment, and is ultimately derived from Persian بابا (bābā, “father”) (from Old Persian pāpa...