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Why do Greek people call their grandmothers “Yaya”?
Because that’s the Modern Greek word for grandmother. 🙂
The Triantafyllidis dictionary gives a shrug for the etymology: Λεξικό της κοινής νεοελληνικής
λ. νηπιακή: γιάγια και μετακ. τόνου για προσαρμ. στα άλλα ανισοσύλλαβα ουσ.
Baby talk: yáya and accent shift to adapt to other imparisyllabic nouns
Babiniotis’ dictionary gives the same shrug.
The motivation is wrong: yaya didn’t have to be imparisyllabic to begin with (and váya, the Mediaeval word for nurse, wasn’t). The obvious analogy is instead with other child-talk terms: mamá “mum”, babás “dad”, papús “granddad”, dadá “nanny”.
Baby talk has given us mama, papa/baba (hence babás “dad” helped by Turkish), and dada (hence dadá “nanny” again from Turkish). I’m not aware of yaya as an established baby-talk vocable, but I don’t see what else it could be.
Another, now obsolete word for grandmother btw is nené: νενέ – Wiktionary. That’s also from Turkish, and it also fits the baby-talk pattern.
My wife is Filipino. Grandmother is “Lola” in Tagalog. Our grandson could not pronounce the “L”. So he started out saying Yaya. And my wife loves it. Her license plate says “YAYA”!