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Comment by princeb | Hacker News Reader

japanese falls completely outside this generalization. edit: on further investigation mama and baba are used very informally but it appears these are loanwords.

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Japan is a linguistic minefield and defies generalization. In Ainu 'nanna' is mother and in Okinawan it's 'anma'. In Old Japanese there's 'haha' (and variants - 'papa' appears to have been prevelent in Old Japanese, see link in cousin post) and 'amo'.

Also note: while 'mama' is a loanword it's overwhelmingly what babies call their mothers in Japan i.e. it has outcompeted other words likely for the same reasons as said in the article.

Traditionally, they were "o-toh" for dad and "o-kah" for mom. You might add "-chan" or "-san" or remove the "o-" prefix, depending on your taste.

Personally, a phrase like "every language" immediately flags a BS sign to me.

Kids use okasan/otosan only when they are talking about third party mom/dad. They use haha (which make even more sense, according to article) or chichi when speaking about their own mom and dad.

haha and chichi are more formal.

It really depends what you mean by 'traditionally'. My reading of [1] is that the 'ka' reading is one of many although it's become more prevelant in modern usage. [2] says that 'papa' was most common in Old Japanese.

[1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E6%AF%8D#Japanese

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mama_and_papa

Japanese has 'chichi' (dad) and 'haha' (mom)

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