Talk:tată

Latin?

Romanian is a Romance language, but it began to be formed as late as in the 13th century, when there was no Latin-speaking population in the lowlands of modern Romania. Therefore I presume that this word is most likely a loanword from the Bulgarian equivalent of the Serbian (deprecated template usage) тата, because from the 7th to the 10th century the whole territory of Romania was incorporated in the Bulgarian Tsardom. Since there is inappropriate to speak of separate South Slavic languages at that time, I think that "From OCS" would be the most apt expression. I demand a source for the Latin claim and am going myself to find something about the possible OCS origin. Bogorm 13:31, 7 January 2009 (UTC)

These kind of nursery words (papa, baba, tata, mama, kaka, pipi, atta etc., usually charachterised by gemination/reduplication of the basic onomatopoetic syllable/sound) get "reinvented" in all languages from time to time, and are often not even considered valid etymons for inspection in historical linguistics. I very much doubt that there are written records that beyond reasonable doubt confirm either chronologically continuous Latin origin (Vulgar Latin progeny was attested rather lately), or unambiguously point to the layer of borrowing from Slavic, Dacian substrate or something else.. --Ivan Štambuk 13:42, 7 January 2009 (UTC)

Then I suggest removing the etymology. Bogorm 13:49, 7 January 2009 (UTC)