Are any words the same in all languages?
These seem like very bad candidates. All are loan words, which is interesting, but we could go deeper if we're considering pineapple/ananas and coffee. And let's be real, words like robot and computer are mostly the same in this respect too, especially if we're considering taxi. But what about words that are more "native"?<p>How about "mama" and "papa"? There are variations, but these seem to be pretty small and mostly replacing the plosive in papa with a b or t. You can pretty much go down the google translate list and see. For mama sometimes the last a changes to an i. Here's some examples (not a linguist or many language speaker so please correct me if I'm wrong. Trying to add some sounding help)<p>Nearly identical in: Afrikaans, English, Spanish, French, German, Dutch, Hungarian, Japanese, Filipino<p>Albanian: mama, babi<p>Arabic, Chinese: mama (妈妈/媽媽), baba (爸爸)<p>Bulgarian: mama, tatko (татко)<p>Chez: mama, tatínek<p>Hebrew "i-ma" (אִמָא), "ah-bah"  ̶"̶b̶a̶h̶-̶b̶a̶h̶"̶ (אַבָּא) (edited: thanks zimzam and ars!)<p>Korean: "Oh-mah" (엄마) "Ah-pa" (아빠)<p>My understanding is that these are pretty early words and need to be pronounceable by infants. I wonder what the first human words were and if we still use any of them. We have some constellation myths that are probably older than written language (not recorded, so can never confirm). The 7 sisters is a good example, but remember these are all always contested. We'll never really know tbh.