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Oh no, you're absolutely right! Parents are mama, dada etc all over the world, after all. Given the human larynx, there must be considerable overlap, usually pretty random: when I was a student someone told our Classics professor that an Inuit language and one of our South African indigenous languages have the same word for "house"; he took this as a sign that the languages were related, and she briskly said that if it proved anything, it was that they were not. Silence fell ...

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It's actually remarkable that there are so few instances of something meaning, say, "pretty fairy of the forest floor" in language A also meaning "hole in the ground for personal hygiene" in language B. Remarkable, and lucky.

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