Unnumbered source etymology
Original entry ↗A kind of sponge cake soaked in rum-flavoured syrup. · A grandmother. · An old woman, especially a traditional old woman from an Eastern European culture. · A father.
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; as opposed to the Arabic words أَبُو (ʔabū) and أَب (ʔab); see also Papak), and is linguistically related to the common European word papa and the word pope, having the same Indo-European origin. The Chinese word "baba", meaning father, comes from 爸爸.
Relationships mentioned by the source
These are extracted mentions, not a timeline or a verified sequence of immediate parents.
This page abbreviates 3 auxiliary source items. The etymology narrative is not shortened. Omission counts are available in the audit fields below; consult the original for complete auxiliary material.
Inspect preserved source fields
Raw extraction fields are retained for auditing. Their order does not establish ancestry.
{
"templates": [
{
"name": "doublet",
"args": {
"1": "en",
"2": "bubbe",
"nocap": "1"
},
"expansion": "doublet of bubbe"
},
{
"name": "der",
"args": {
"1": "en",
"2": "fr",
"3": "-"
},
"expansion": "French"
},
{
"name": "der",
"args": {
"1": "en",
"2": "pl",
"3": "baba",
"4": "",
"5": "old woman"
},
"expansion": "Polish baba (“old woman”)"
},
{
"name": "der",
"args": {
"1": "en",
"2": "fa",
"3": "بابا",
"4": "",
"5": "father",
"tr": "bābā"
},
"expansion": "Persian بابا (bābā, “father”)"
},
{
"name": "der",
"args": {
"1": "en",
"2": "peo",
"3": "",
"4": "pāpa"
},
"expansion": "Old Persian pāpa"
}
],
"links": [
[
"mama",
"mama#English"
],
[
"papa",
"papa#English"
],
[
"dada",
"dada#English"
],
[
"father",
"father"
],
[
"grandmother",
"grandmother"
],
[
"bubbe",
"bubbe#English"
],
[
"grandfather",
"grandfather"
],
[
"baby",
"baby"
],
[
"baba",
"baba#Polish"
],
[
"Ali Baba",
"Ali Baba#English"
],
[
"بابا",
"بابا#Persian"
],
[
"أَبُو",
"أبو#Arabic"
],
[
"أَب",
"أب#Arabic"
],
[
"papa",
"papa"
],
[
"pope",
"pope#English"
],
[
"爸爸",
"爸爸#Chinese"
]
],
"references": [],
"descendants": [],
"lexical": [
{
"pos": "noun",
"glosses": [
"A kind of sponge cake soaked in rum-flavoured syrup.",
"A grandmother.",
"An old woman, especially a traditional old woman from an Eastern European culture.",
"A father."
],
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"usually",
"countable",
"broadly"
],
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"sourceRecordOrdinal": 146317
}
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}