Daniel sent us this one — he's been watching a lot of international shows on Netflix, Korean dramas, German thrillers, Spanish stuff, and at the same time his ten-month-old is in full babbling mode. The kid's saying mama, dada, up, bye-bye, but also a flood of not-quite-words that sound weirdly like actual words in other languages. Basic ones — mom, dad, yes, no. He's asking whether there's some connection between how languages developed and baby babble. Are these fundamental sounds that languages grew out of? Or is he just hearing patterns in noise?
This is one of those questions where the gut instinct turns out to be surprisingly close to the truth, but the mechanism is different than what most people assume. The short answer is no, your baby isn't accidentally speaking Korean. But yes, there is a deep connection between babbling and the structure of human language. And it's not a coincidence that mama and dada show up across wildly unrelated languages.
I'm not crazy for thinking my leaf medicine chants sound like ancient Sumerian.
I'm going to let that one sit there untouched.
But walk me through it — why do babies everywhere land on the same handful of sounds?
The starting point is that babbling isn't random noise. It's constrained by the hardware. A baby's vocal tract at six to ten months is still developing — the larynx is high, the tongue fills more of the mouth, and motor control over the articulators is crude. What you get is a kind of acoustic bottleneck. The easiest sounds to produce are ones where you just open and close your mouth while voicing — which gives you ma, ba, pa, da, ta.
The mouth doing what the mouth can do with minimal effort.
The linguist Roman Jakobson wrote about this back in the nineteen-forties — he pointed out that across every language studied, the words for mother and father tend to be built from these exact sounds. Mama, papa, dada, baba, nana. It's so consistent that he argued it's not cultural transmission at all. It's a structural inevitability.
Which would mean languages didn't borrow mama from each other — they each independently arrived at the same sound for the same reason.
And Jakobson's insight was that it works in both directions. Babies produce these sounds first because they're motorically simple. Parents, hearing these sounds, assign meaning to them — they treat ma-ma-ma as the baby calling for mother. The baby learns the association. The word sticks. Multiply that by ten thousand generations and you get a near-universal pattern.
It's not that languages evolved from baby talk. It's that baby talk and language both emerge from the same physical constraints. The mouth is the mouth.
That's the core of it. And there's a wonderful paper by the linguist Larry Trask where he lays out the actual mechanics. The ma sound happens when a baby is nursing or mouthing at the breast — lips together, voicing engaged. It's literally the sound of a baby who's about to feed. Da and pa come from what's called the "canonical babbling" stage — rhythmic jaw opening and closing, which produces these consonant-vowel alternations.
The nursing connection is almost too neat. The first word-like sound is the sound of wanting food.
It gets better. The anthropologist Dean Falk has this whole theory she calls the "putting the baby down" hypothesis. The idea is that in early hominins, mothers had to set infants down while foraging. The babies would fuss, and mothers would respond with vocalizations — kind of a proto-motherese. Over evolutionary time, this back-and-forth shaped the earliest forms of vocal communication. And the sounds that worked best were exactly these simple CV syllables.
CV being consonant-vowel.
Ma, ba, da. These are what linguists call "canonical syllables." And here's the thing Daniel's probably noticing — when a baby is in the variegated babbling stage, around nine to twelve months, they start stringing different syllables together. Ba-ma-da, goo-ba-pa. And because they're experimenting with a wider range of sounds, some of those combinations are going to accidentally land on real words in other languages.
This is the pareidolia of infant noise. We're pattern-matching machines.
You hear your kid say something that sounds like neh and you think, wait, neh is "yes" in Korean. And you're not wrong that it sounds similar. But the baby didn't learn Korean. The baby produced one of maybe fifteen sounds that are motorically accessible at that age, and by sheer probability, some of them will overlap with words in the world's seven thousand languages.
Seven thousand languages, most of which build their basic vocabulary from a pretty constrained set of phonemes. The overlap isn't coincidence — it's statistical inevitability dressed up as miracle.
The basic vocabulary part matters. The words Daniel's noticing — yes, no, mom, dad — these are among the most phonetically reduced words in any language. They're short, they use simple consonants, they're often reduplicated. They look like babbling because they evolved under similar pressures. A word you use hundreds of times a day gets worn down, phonetically, over centuries.
The linguistic equivalent of river stones.
High-frequency words erode. The Old English word for father was fæder — two syllables, a fricative in the middle. By Middle English it's fader. Now it's dad. That's not random drift — it's optimization for frequent use. And guess what sounds are easiest to say quickly and repeatedly?
The ones babies produce first.
So you've got this convergence. Baby babbling produces simple syllables because that's all the motor system can do. High-frequency words in adult languages get reduced to simple syllables because that's what the motor system prefers when it's optimizing for speed. Two different processes, same endpoint.
Which means Daniel's hypothesis — that languages somehow developed from baby sounds — has the causality slightly backwards. It's more that both are shaped by the same underlying constraints.
Although I should say, there is a version of his idea that some linguists have taken seriously. Not that languages grew out of baby babbling per se, but that the interaction between infants and caregivers — this babbling-and-response loop — may have been a crucial driver in the evolution of language itself.
There's a debate in evolutionary linguistics about what came first. One camp says language evolved for adults to coordinate — hunting, toolmaking, social negotiation. Another camp, and this has been gaining ground, says the primary selection pressure was infant-caregiver communication. The argument is that human infants are uniquely helpless. They're born with underdeveloped brains because our big heads have to fit through the birth canal. That means they need extended care, and they need ways to signal their needs and internal states to caregivers.
The caregivers need ways to soothe and regulate the infant from a distance.
The psychologist Anne Fernald at Stanford did foundational work on this — she showed that mothers across cultures use similar melodic patterns when talking to infants, and that these patterns carry specific communicative functions. Rising pitch for attention, falling pitch for soothing, short staccato for prohibition. These aren't learned from culture. They appear to be part of our biological inheritance.
Motherese isn't just cute. It's a functional communication system that predates language.
That's the argument. And babbling fits into this as the infant's side of the loop. The baby produces sounds, the parent responds, the baby learns that sound production changes the parent's behavior. That's the seed of intentional communication. Once that feedback loop is in place, you've got the scaffolding for something more complex.
I'm picturing a prehistoric mother setting down her infant, the infant going ba-ba-ba, the mother responding with some melodic call, and over a few hundred thousand years that turns into syntax and eventually into people arguing about tax policy.
The tax policy part may have been a mistake, but yes. And there's actually neuroimaging work that supports this. When mothers hear infant cries or babbling, it activates not just emotional regions but also motor planning regions — the brain is preparing to respond, to vocalize. There's a study from two thousand twenty-three that used fMRI to show that the superior temporal sulcus, which is involved in processing communicative intent, lights up differently for babbling than for random noise. Adults treat babbling as if it's trying to communicate, even when they know it's not.
Which is the point. We're primed to hear meaning in those sounds. And Daniel, listening to his kid babble while watching Korean dramas, is experiencing the intersection of two pattern-matching systems — the parental instinct to hear words in baby sounds, and the language-learning brain trying to parse unfamiliar phonemes.
That's a really good way to frame it. The brain is doing double duty. And Korean is actually an interesting case here because it has a sound called the "lenis stop" that, to an English speaker's ear, can sound ambiguous between a b and a p, or between a d and a t. So when a baby produces something that's acoustically smeared between ba and pa, a Korean listener might map it onto a real Korean word, while an English listener maps it onto a different real word or onto nothing.
The ambiguity is in the ear, not in the mouth.
And this gets us to a broader point about how we perceive infant vocalizations. There's a phenomenon called the "perceptual magnet effect" — once you've learned the sound categories of your native language, you pull ambiguous sounds toward those categories. A sound that's acoustically halfway between ba and pa will be heard as one or the other. But the boundaries between categories differ across languages. So the same baby sound could genuinely be heard as two different words by speakers of two different languages.
Which means Daniel isn't just imagining things. The sounds his kid is making really could be heard as Korean words by a Korean speaker. But that's about the listener's perceptual system, not about the baby's linguistic knowledge.
The baby is producing undifferentiated vocal play. The adult ear is doing the categorization. And because Daniel has been marinating his brain in Korean and German and Spanish, his perceptual categories are probably a bit more flexible than the average monolingual English speaker's.
His ears are primed for more patterns.
There's decent evidence that even passive exposure to a language's sound system — like watching subtitled shows — can sharpen your ability to discriminate its phonemes. You're not learning vocabulary, but you're tuning your ear to the acoustic landscape.
We've got three things converging. One, the baby is producing sounds from a universal, motorically constrained set. Two, languages independently converged on those same sounds for high-frequency basic words. Three, Daniel's brain, steeped in multiple languages, is pattern-matching like crazy. The result is a ten-month-old who sounds like a tiny polyglot.
I'd add a fourth thing. At ten months, babies are in what researchers call the "perceptual narrowing" window. They're born able to discriminate pretty much all the speech sounds used in all the world's languages. By about ten to twelve months, they start losing the ability to hear distinctions that aren't used in the language around them.
They prune the unused branches.
So a ten-month-old is actually producing sounds that are more "universal" than what an adult can produce. They haven't yet specialized. Their babbling does contain phonetic elements from across the world's languages. It's not that they know those languages — it's that they haven't yet forgotten them.
That's kind of beautiful. The babbling stage as this brief window where the infant is phonetically universal. A citizen of every language for a few months, before the walls go up.
The walls go up fast. By twelve months, most babies have already narrowed their perceptual space to the sounds of their native language. The window closes. Which means Daniel's kid is right at the peak of phonetic universality. If there's ever a time when a baby would sound like they're speaking every language at once, it's now.
The answer to his question — is there a connection between the development of languages and baby speak — is yes, but not in the way he probably imagined. It's not that languages grew out of baby talk. It's that both are shaped by the same physical and cognitive constraints. The baby mouth and the evolved language both converge on ma, ba, da because those are the path of least resistance.
I'd push it one step further. There's an argument, and I find it pretty compelling, that the baby-caregiver babbling loop was the crucible in which language first emerged. Not that adult language is baby talk grown up, but that the selective pressure to communicate with infants drove the evolution of vocal control, turn-taking, and the mapping of sound to meaning.
The infant as the original language teacher.
In a sense. The linguist Peter MacNeilage wrote a whole book arguing that the syllable structures of language — the consonant-vowel alternation — derive directly from the mandibular oscillation cycle. The same rhythmic jaw movement that produces babbling is what gave us the syllable. He called it the "frame-content" theory. The jaw cycle provides the frame, and the tongue and lips add the content.
Every word I've ever said is, at some deep mechanical level, chewing with style.
Chewing with socially negotiated meaning attached.
I'm going to think about that next time I'm eating leaves.
I'm sure you will. But the MacNeilage work is worth dwelling on because it connects babbling, chewing, and speech into a single evolutionary story. The neural circuitry for controlling rhythmic jaw movement — what he called the "mandibular central pattern generator" — got co-opted for vocalization. First for simple syllable-like calls, then for babbling, then for speech. The infant babbling stage is basically the brain testing and calibrating this system.
Babbling isn't just the baby trying to talk. It's the motor system doing integration testing.
That's a very Corn way to put it, but yes. And the integration testing produces outputs shaped by the same biomechanical constraints that shaped the world's languages. That's why it all sounds familiar.
Let me pull on a thread you mentioned earlier. The perceptual narrowing thing — babies lose the ability to hear distinctions they're not exposed to. What happens to the babbling itself? Does it also narrow?
Yes, and this is one of the coolest findings in the field. Deaf babies who are exposed to sign language from birth will babble with their hands. They produce rhythmic, repeated hand shapes and movements that are structurally analogous to vocal babbling. Same trajectory, same timing, same developmental function. The babbling isn't about sound per se. It's about the brain discovering the motor patterns of whatever communication system it's immersed in.
That's a striking piece of evidence. It means babbling isn't driven by the vocal tract. It's driven by something deeper — the brain's drive to find the rhythmic building blocks of language, whatever the modality.
And for hearing babies in a spoken-language environment, that means vocal babbling. The interesting thing for Daniel's question is that at the babbling stage, before perceptual narrowing, the vocal babbling of a baby in an English-speaking home is not that different from the babbling of a baby in a Korean-speaking home. The differences emerge later, as the baby tunes into the specific sound patterns they're hearing.
Which means if you took a recording of a ten-month-old babbling in Jerusalem and a ten-month-old babbling in Seoul, and stripped out any identifying context, you couldn't reliably tell them apart.
There's actually been research on exactly this. In one study from the early two thousands, they had adults listen to babbling samples from infants being raised in different language environments. The adults couldn't identify which language environment the baby came from until about ten to twelve months of age. Before that, babbling is universal.
Daniel's kid really is, in a measurable sense, speaking a universal human language for a few more months.
And after that, English will start colonizing the sound space, and the Korean-sounding and German-sounding bits will fade.
Unless he keeps the kid on a steady media diet of international Netflix.
Passive exposure through screens doesn't really do it, unfortunately. There's a whole literature on this. Babies learn phonetic categories from live, interactive speech. A video of someone speaking Korean won't prevent perceptual narrowing. It has to be a real person, responding contingently.
The social brain needs a social partner.
Which brings us back to the babbling loop. It's not just about sound production. It's about the infant learning that sound production changes the behavior of another mind. That's the magic ingredient. That's what turns babbling into language.
That loop, that back-and-forth, is presumably what drove the evolution of the whole system.
The hypothesis is that as hominin infants became more altricial — more helpless at birth — the selective pressure for caregiver communication intensified. Mothers who were better at interpreting infant vocalizations and responding appropriately had infants who survived at higher rates. Infants who were better at producing interpretable signals got better care. Over evolutionary time, this feedback loop drove increasing vocal control, increasing social cognition, and eventually the emergence of something we'd recognize as language.
The first words weren't "pass the mammoth meat." They were "pick me up, I'm cold.
Probably something like that, yes. And the sounds that worked best for that function were the same sounds babies produce today. Ma, ba, da. Short, voiced, easy to produce, easy to hear, easy to locate the source of.
Locate the source — that's interesting. These sounds are acoustically designed to be findable?
In a way, yes. Voiced stops like ba and da have a sharp onset — a burst of acoustic energy that makes them easy to localize. Compare that to a fricative like fff or sss, which is diffuse and harder to pinpoint spatially. If you're an infant trying to get a caregiver's attention, you want a sound that cuts through ambient noise and says "I'm over here.
The acoustic equivalent of a flare gun.
The caregiver's response is similarly optimized. The high pitch, the exaggerated intonation contours, the slowed tempo — all of these make the signal more salient to an infant's auditory system, which is tuned to higher frequencies and slower rates of change than an adult's.
Both sides of the conversation are engineered for each other. The infant signal and the caregiver response co-evolved.
That's the argument. And you can see remnants of this in how adults talk to pets, or even to each other in intimate contexts. The motherese register doesn't disappear when the kids grow up. It gets repurposed.
I've definitely heard you use a motherese register when explaining archery technique to beginners.
I prefer to call it "enthusiastic instructional prosody.
So to pull this together for Daniel — his baby's babbling sounds like words in other languages because both the babbling and those basic words are shaped by the same biomechanical and perceptual constraints. It's not a coincidence, but it's also not evidence that his kid is secretly Korean. It's evidence that humans are one species with one vocal apparatus and one developmental trajectory, and that languages, for all their surface diversity, are built from the same small set of building blocks.
I'd add one more thing that might be comforting or maybe slightly melancholy, depending on how you look at it. This phase — where babbling is phonetically universal, where it could be any language or no language — is incredibly brief. By the time his kid is saying clear words with consistent meanings, the window will have closed. The sounds will have narrowed. The universal infant will have become a specific little English speaker.
There's something poignant about that. The moment you can finally understand what they're saying is the moment they've stopped being able to say everything.
actually quite lovely.
I have my moments. Usually right before a nap.
It's worth emphasizing that the narrowing isn't a loss in any practical sense. It's specialization. The brain is trading breadth for precision. A ten-month-old can potentially hear the difference between four different d-like sounds in Hindi, but they can't use any of them to ask for a cracker. By eighteen months, they've lost those distinctions but gained the ability to actually communicate.
The universal receiver becomes a tuned transmitter.
And the tuning is shaped by the specific language environment. Which is why a baby raised in a Korean-speaking home will end up with Korean sound categories, and a baby raised in an English-speaking home will end up with English ones, even though they started in the same place.
The answer to Daniel's question, the concise version, is: yes, there's a deep connection, no, it's not what you think, and enjoy the next couple of months because the window is closing.
If he really wants to preserve some of that phonetic flexibility, he should find some actual Korean speakers for the baby to interact with.
The inconvenient truth of language acquisition: it requires other humans.
Terribly inconvenient, I know.
There's another layer here I want to dig into. We've been talking about babbling as universal, but are there really no differences at all across cultures? I find that hard to believe.
There are subtle differences even early on. By about eight or nine months, babies start to pick up on the prosodic patterns of their native language — the rhythm, the intonation, the stress patterns. A baby in a French-speaking home will start producing babbling that has French-like intonation contours. A baby in a Japanese-speaking home will babble with Japanese-like pitch patterns. It's not the segments — the consonants and vowels — that differ at first. It's the music.
The melody before the words.
And this makes sense developmentally. Prosody is processed partly in the right hemisphere and in subcortical structures that mature earlier. Segmental phonology — the fine control of individual speech sounds — depends more on left-hemisphere cortical areas that develop later. So the trajectory is: first, universal babbling. Then, language-specific prosody. Then, language-specific segments.
Daniel might notice that his kid's babbling doesn't just sound like words in other languages, but also has a certain English-y musical quality creeping in.
Almost certainly, yes. The stress patterns of English — that distinctive alternation of strong and weak syllables — will start coloring the babbling. A string like BA-ba-BA-ba-ba, with the first and third syllables stressed, is very English. A French baby would be more even, more staccato.
Which means the babbling is simultaneously universal and particular. The raw materials are shared, but the shaping has already begun.
This is what makes the question so rich. Daniel's intuition that there's something fundamental and shared in baby sounds is correct. But his observation that the sounds map onto specific words in specific languages is also correct, because his adult brain is doing the mapping. Both things are true at once. The babbling is universal, and the perception of it as language-specific is real.
The sound is the same. The meaning is in the ear of the beholder.
Which, now that I think about it, is basically a description of all language. Sound is just sound until a mind interprets it.
We've circled back to semiotics. The baby as a pure signifier, floating free of any particular signified, until the parents and the culture pin it down.
I'm not sure I'd go full Saussurean on a ten-month-old, but I take your point. The babbling infant is producing raw phonetic material that's rich with potential meaning, and the adults in their life are actively constructing meaning from it. That process — the joint construction of meaning from sound — is arguably what language is.
Daniel and his wife, hearing their kid say something that sounds like a Korean word, are participating in the same fundamental act that created language in the first place. Taking noise and finding signal in it.
Doing it collaboratively with the infant. The baby produces sound. The parent responds as if it's meaningful. The baby learns that sound production gets a response. The feedback loop tightens. Eventually, the sound really is meaningful, because both parties agree it is.
Language as a consensual hallucination, bootstrapped one ba-ba-ba at a time.
I might phrase it as "shared intentionality scaffolded by joint attention," but yes, your version is more vivid.
I'm a vivid thinker. It's the leaves.
Let me ask you about the other side of this. We've talked about why mama and dada are universal. But what about the words that aren't universal? What about the sounds that no baby ever babbles?
There are sounds that are rare in babbling and also rare in the world's languages. The classic example is the interdental fricative — the th sound in English "think" or "this." It's acoustically subtle, it requires precise tongue placement between the teeth, and it's motorically complex. Babies almost never produce it in babbling. And it's vanishingly rare across the world's languages. Only about four percent of languages have it.
English is one of them, which is why English-speaking parents spend years correcting "fink" and "dis.
The th sound is a late acquisition even for typically developing English-speaking children. Many kids don't master it until age six or seven. It's a hard sound to produce, and languages tend not to keep hard-to-produce sounds unless they're doing important contrastive work.
The inventory of baby sounds and the inventory of common language sounds map onto each other pretty well. The easy sounds are everywhere. The hard sounds are rare.
Yes, with some interesting exceptions. The r sound — the alveolar trill or tap — is very common cross-linguistically. Something like seventy percent of languages have a tapped or trilled r. But it's relatively late in babbling. Babies don't tend to produce clear r-like sounds until later in the first year. So it's common in languages but not especially early in development.
Why the mismatch?
The r sound requires precise tongue tip control against the alveolar ridge. The gross motor patterns for ma and ba are simpler — you just open and close your jaw. The fine motor control for r takes longer to develop. But once it's there, it's a useful sound because it's acoustically distinct and easy to combine with other sounds. So languages keep it, even though babies take a while to get there.
The babbling-to-language mapping isn't a perfect one-to-one. It's more that babbling represents the easiest sounds, and languages have a mix of easy and useful sounds, with the easy ones disproportionately represented in basic vocabulary.
That's a good summary. And the "useful" part matters. Some sounds are hard to produce but acoustically very distinctive, so they stick around because they help keep words apart. The th sound in English is a good example — it's hard, but it distinguishes "think" from "sink" and "this" from "dis," so it does real work.
Sounds with high functional load are maintained even if they're difficult. Sounds with low functional load tend to get simplified or lost over time. And that simplification usually moves in the direction of — you guessed it — the sounds babies produce first.
Language change, over centuries, is basically the language reverting to babble.
I wouldn't say reverting. I'd say optimizing. But the direction of optimization is toward sounds that are easier to produce and perceive. Which are, coincidentally or not, the sounds that babies discover first.
This has me thinking about constructed languages. Did Tolkien, when he was building Elvish, unconsciously bias his phoneme inventory toward baby-friendly sounds?
Now you're asking whether Quenya sounds like babbling.
I am absolutely asking whether Quenya sounds like babbling.
I don't know enough about Tolkien's phonological choices to answer that definitively, but I can tell you that constructed languages in general tend to have cleaner, more symmetric sound inventories than natural languages. And that symmetry often means favoring sounds that are articulatorily straightforward. So there might be something to it.
The linguistic equivalent of the golden ratio. We find symmetric, simple sound systems aesthetically pleasing because they resonate with something deep in our motor cognition.
That's speculative but not crazy. There's work on sound symbolism — the idea that certain sounds carry inherent associations. High front vowels like ee tend to be associated with smallness and brightness across unrelated languages. Low back vowels like ah tend to be associated with largeness and darkness. The bouba-kiki effect, where people match rounded shapes to rounded sounds and spiky shapes to spiky sounds, is remarkably consistent across cultures.
Babies show this too?
There's some evidence that preverbal infants are sensitive to sound-symbolic mappings. One study showed that three-month-olds looked longer at a shape when it was paired with a congruent sound — a rounded shape with "bouba," a spiky shape with "kiki." They're making cross-modal associations before they have any words.
The scaffolding for meaning is there from the very beginning. The brain is ready to connect sound to sense before there's any sense to connect to.
And babbling is part of that readiness. The infant isn't just making noise. They're exploring a space of possible sounds, and the brain is building the connections that will eventually map those sounds to meanings. By the time real words emerge, the groundwork has been laid by months of babbling play.
Which brings us back to Daniel's kid. The not-real words that sound like real words — they're not random. They're the brain's way of sampling the acoustic space, testing the motor system, and setting up the categories that actual words will eventually fill.
The fact that some of those samples happen to land on real words in languages Daniel's been watching on Netflix — that's the delightful overlap of developmental universality and adult pattern recognition.
It's a good reminder that the boundary between signal and noise is porous. We're always finding meaning in noise, and sometimes the noise really does contain the seeds of meaning.
Especially when the noise is coming from your own kid. The parental brain is basically a meaning-making machine. It's designed to find intentionality in infant behavior. That's not a bug. It's the feature that makes language development possible.
Daniel should trust his intuition that there's something real going on, while also understanding that his kid isn't actually trilingual.
Yet being the operative word. If he wants to raise the kid multilingual, now is exactly the time to start. The perceptual window is still open. The brain is still sampling broadly. Get some real live speakers of those languages into the kid's life, and the babbling that sounds like Korean today could turn into actual Korean in a couple of years.
The babbling as a foundation, not a finished product.
And that's really the take-home. The sounds Daniel's kid is making are the raw material of all human language. They're universal not because languages evolved from them, but because they, and languages, and the human vocal tract, and the human brain, all emerged from the same evolutionary and developmental process. The convergence isn't coincidence. It's deep homology.
That's a satisfying answer. It honors the intuition — yes, there's something real here — while also being precise about what that something is.
It leaves room for the wonder, which I think matters. Knowing that your kid's babbling is universal doesn't make it less magical. If anything, it makes it more so. That little voice is speaking a language that predates all languages.
The ur-tongue. The mother of all mother tongues.
It's only around for a few months. By the time we record the next episode, it'll already be fading.
Now I'm feeling things. Thanks for that.
You're welcome. That's what I'm here for. Well, that and the archery facts.
And now: Hilbert's daily fun fact.
Hilbert: In nineteen oh nine, a Russian ethnographer documenting Yagli gures — Turkish oil wrestling — in the Kamchatka region recorded in his field notes that the wrestlers believed the olive oil used in matches had to be blessed by a blindfolded imam, otherwise the oil would "turn against the wrestler" and make him slip at the worst possible moment.
...right.
To wrap this up — the babbling phase is a brief, universal window where infants are phonetic citizens of the world. Daniel's hearing real patterns, but they're patterns in human sound production, not in any specific language. The connection between babbling and language is deep and real, but the causality runs through shared constraints, not direct descent. And if he wants to turn those accidental Korean-sounding syllables into actual Korean, now's the time. Thanks to our producer Hilbert Flumingtop. This has been My Weird Prompts. Find us at myweirdprompts dot com, and if you enjoyed this, leave us a review wherever you get your podcasts. We'll be back soon.
Take care, everyone.
