The global distribution of mama/papa kinship terms has been traditionally explained as the result of linguistic convergence, not of common origin. It is usually alleged that these terms are in no way resistant to linguistic change and that they are subject to constant modification, loss and replacement by other nursery-shaped kinship terms. A serious etymological survey shows that kinship nursery terms are, to the contrary, extraordinarily resistant to phonetic and semantic change, as the most ancient written data clearly prove. The cumulative evidence discards the traditional linguistic explanation for the global distribution of mama/papa words and advocates for their antiquity within the language families where they are found and, further, for their common descent from a language ancestral to all existing languages.

The first [the descriptive system] … describes collateral consanguinei, for the most part, by an augmentation or combination of the primary terms of relationship. These terms, which are those for husband and wife, father and mother, brother and sister, and son and daughter, to which must be added, in such languages as possess them, grandfather and grandmother and grandson and granddaughter, are thus restricted to the primary senses in which they are here employed. All other terms are secondary. Each relationship is thus made independent and distinct from every other. But the second [the classificatory system] …, rejecting descriptive phrases in every instance, and reducing consanguinei to great classes by a series of apparently arbitrary generalizations, applies the same terms to all the members of the same class. It 136 thus confounds relationships, which, under the descriptive system, are distinct, and enlarges the signification both of the primary and secondary terms beyond their seemingly appropriate sense.

Here, I report the pervasive distribution in numerous Aboriginal language groups all over Australia, of kinship terms with similar phonetic shapes and meanings, such as kaka MB, FZH, EF. It is argued that this distribution is consistent with the antiquity of this term in the language families in which it is found. Further, its pervasive presence in non-Pama-Nyungan (non-PNy) as well as in Pama-Nyungan (PNy) languages, is consistent with inheritance from a higher taxonomic level, possibly Proto-Australian, and beyond, and even possibly from the proto-language spoken by the first modern men who colonized Sahul. Likewise, the assumed existence of Kariera-like terminologies in the higher nodes in the Australian language phylum is consistent with the claim that the Proto-Australian kinship system was Kariera-like.

No abstract

In further defense of the Proto-Sapiens antiquity of global kinship etymologies, we illustrate the long-lasting survival of personal pronouns first in the Indo-European family, then in the Eurasiatic macrofamily of languages. We then put forward a conjecture about how the category of 1st and 2nd person pronouns might have originated.