In India where there are dozens of languages, this plays out interestingly...
Granted, in few indian languages 'M' sound is not there.. but it uses even more basic sound 'aa'(as in used by babies earlier than 'm' sound) e.g. Aai in Marathi etc - or a similar Baa in Gujrati..
I think its not just a matter of naming the closest person with the easiest sound, and the second closest person with the second easiest one. You know how parents say they can tell by the cries of their baby what the baby needs? After the birth of our kid I found there is actually some truth to it. When he was hungry, he smacked his lips (like when sucking) and it made a mamamama sound, or myammyammyam or maybe even nomnomnom (overlaying the crying). When he had pain, it sounded more like auääää (excuse the umlaut) or auayyyy, due to the way he suddenly opened his mouth. I can imagine this is the source of expletives like Ouch or Aua in many languages. Now that he is a bit older (~10 months) he has more control over the sounds he makes, and is experimenting with speech, but the mamama and auäää seems to stick. Funnily, he seems to say "daddy" to me, although thats not the word in this region of the world (that would be papa) and I don't know where he got it from. Also, its too early to tell if he is consciously using it for me or just experimenting with interesting sounds. I guess parents tend to overinterpret the first utterances of their kids a lot :-)
The author, John McWhorter, is a great guy to listen to. His TED talk[1] is interesting, his TED-Ed lessons[2] are even more interesting, and his "Story of Human Language"[3] course is so enormously interesting and fun, I listen to it as entertainment when bored.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.ted.com/talks/john_mcwhorter_txtng_is_killing_language_jk" rel="nofollow">https://www.ted.com/talks/john_mcwhorter_txtng_is_killing_la...</a><p>[2] <a href="https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=ted+ed+john+mcwhorter" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=ted+ed+john+mcw...</a><p>[3] <a href="http://www.thegreatcourses.com/courses/story-of-human-language.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.thegreatcourses.com/courses/story-of-human-langua...</a>
I guess I'll be the geek who brings Tolkien into this, but for the curious: even the Elvish word for mom is basically a phonetic equivalent to "mommy." (I'll leave it to someone more enterprising to give us the Klingon word.)
japanese falls completely outside this generalization.
edit: on further investigation mama and baba are used very informally but it appears these are loanwords.
It's a nice article, but isn't this something every parent realizes after their first kid? 'Aaaah' sounds come first, then maybe an 'oh' and then the lips come in to make 'mamama' or 'bababab' and then it takes a longer time for complex words involving the tongue or non-aspirated sounds to come in (like 'teh' or 'keh').
Everyone with a brain the size a walnut already knows this:
<a href="http://www.qwantz.com/index.php?comic=1581" rel="nofollow">http://www.qwantz.com/index.php?comic=1581</a>