moominmolly | Entries tagged with language

For all that she is a wildly creative and clever kid, Natalie has never had a particular love for naming things. Some time last year, she did start to name her stuffed animals. The dolphin was "Dolphiny". The leopard was "Leopardy". The panther was "Panthery". We knew she was committed to this scheme when she wound up with a new elephant and named it "Elephanty". Doesn't exactly roll off the tongue, that one. You have to LOOOOVE consistency and precise articulation to embrace the name Elephanty.

At some point this winter, though, the winds changed: she now has "Beary Bear", and an old fluffy dog has become "Doggy Dog". (Animals named last year appear to retain their old names.) I was waiting to see how long this new scheme would last: was the problem just that "Beary" sounds like "berry", and "doggy" was already a word? Or, if I bought her a stuffed snail, would it become Snaily Snail? Did she even know that she had HAD a system to shift? Only time could tell.

...but not a lot of time. Apparently it was a conscious exploration, because yesterday she asked D if he had noticed that she had changed the way she names things, pointing out both the old scheme and the new. "I change the way I name things every year," she reported, quite seriously.

Personally, I can't wait to be called "mommy mom" and "daddy dad", but D says no. :)

In the spirit of "post the stories when they happen", I was reminded this morning of something that happened during bedtime-story-reading the other night: I wound up explaining the difference between an en dash and an em dash to N because she stopped me in mid-sentence to ask why they were different.

I admit I conflated the en dash and the hyphen so as to not bore her too much, but still, that's a lot of noticing.

This is N's last week at the French school. After two years of daily immersion, Natalie won't have any more cause to speak French after lunchtime tomorrow. Sure, I can take her to Montreal, or to France, and sure, she's a smart, outgoing, language-oriented kid that will certainly pick up a thousand other things in her lifetime, maybe even French! Who knows?

But right now, she mumbles French in her sleep and sometimes switches languages mid-sentence. It's adorable to hear her translate for

dilletante. She's really good. Having a good reading teacher who created an advanced reading group really turned her year around, enough that she was suddenly anxious and sad about not going to French summer camp. I know that switching schools next year will be good for her, but right now, I'm just having a little moment of sadness at such a big change.

*sniff*

El Perezoso
Continuarán viajando cosas
de metal entre las estrellas,
subirán hombres extenuados,
violentarán la suave luna
y allí fundarán sus farmacias.

En este tiempo de uva llena
el vino comienza su vida
entre el mar y las cordilleras.

En Chile bailan las cerezas,
cantan las muchachas oscuras
y en las guitarras brilla el agua.

El sol toca todas las puertas
y hace milagros con el trigo.

El primer vino es rosado,
es dulce como un niño tierno,
el segundo vino es robusto
como la voz de un marinero
y el tercer vino es un topacio,
una amapola y un incendio.

Mi casa tiene mar y tierra,
mi mujer tiene grandes ojos
color de avellana silvestre,
cuando viene la noche el mar
se viste de blanco y de verde
y luego la luna en la espuma
sueña como novia marina.

No quiero cambiar de planeta.

~ Pablo Neruda

( in English: Lazybones, my translation )

Other Neruda has touched me more, but I happened across this one this morning and it made me happy. Feel free to pick at the translation or provide your own!

As pointed out by Language Log, this facebook video of a ranting toddler is completely excellent. The kid furiously gesticulates and speaks a very intense gibberish for several minutes. So soulful! The subtitles are also entertaining. I remember that when N babbled like that, I also used to wonder what she was thinking...

I really want to watch this documentary. It's called "American Tongues", and it catalogues a bunch of different pockets of unusual English dialects around the country. Here are a couple of clips of it that exist on Youtube:

Tangier, VA
Cajun

It looks like I can get it in this (interesting-looking) collection on Amazon for $225, or for $100 less on eBay.

spike discovered that American Tongues on its own is rentable for $85.

...but now I'm out of ideas, and I'm not paying $85. Does anyone have a clever way of helping me see this thing? University libraries? The copy you already have sitting on your shelf?

OK, Lady Gaga is actually kind of adorable. Here she is on French TV last December: she sings Eh Eh, plays a little ragtime, and screws around with Poker Face on the piano, throwing in some random made-up French lyrics and playing while standing up on the bench for no obvious reason.

My hungry bee:

A conversation on the way to the Friendly Toast on Saturday, as we were both squeezing through a hole in a bench:

N: We're squeezing through a bench!
M: Yup!
N: And it's easier for me because I'm tiny and small, and you're big and... well, I mean, is it okay if I say "fat"?
M: Sure!
N: And you're big and fat!
M: That is exactly why it's easier for you.
N: Some people don't like it when you say "fat". But you don't mind.
M: Yeah, some people don't like it, especially if you try to use it as a mean word. I don't mind, though. I think it's just descriptive.
N: YOU'RE STEPPING IN LAVA! DON'T STEP IN THE LAVA!

(Most serious conversations with her end sort of like that.)

Complicated! Complicated. I really don't mind if she says I'm fat, because I am more on the round side than, say,

dilletante; all I can do is model being happy and active and healthy in my body how it is. Conveniently, this is pretty easy for me. But, seriously, all the big conversations happen when you're doing and expecting something else, don't they? And they're gone so quickly.

So, you know that thing where you talk with your hand, pretending it's a mouth? Like this:

Last night, Natalie emerged from the bathroom during the "pee and brush teeth" portion of the bedtime routine, walked up to David, put her wrist to her mouth, and talked with her hand just like that to say:

HELLO, SILLY PERSON. ...I require more toothpaste. ...For a certain reason.

Sometimes she can frustrate me so much, but then she turns around and does something like that and I can't believe how weirdly lucky I am.

Current Mood: weird and lucky

[Poll #1575379]

A note, because it matters! I mean the one that runs lengthwise, like a spine in the middle of your mouth where your palates fused together.

Natalie at 1: "Naayi more cookie?"

Natalie at 2: "MAH COOK! That means I want a cookie. MAH COOK!"

Natalie at 3: "Mommy, I want to go to True Grounds for a cookie."

Natalie at 4: "Mommy, can we go to True Grounds and get a cookie? I want to split it in half and keep one half for myself and then split the OTHER half into halves and give one to Meredith and one to Erin for after dinner. Then I'll split MY half in halves and eat one now and one after dinner with them, okay?" Three minutes later: "PUMPKIN BREAD!" *orders pumpkin bread*

...My head, it is always spinning.

[Poll #1560693]

Turns out the iPhone is almost perfect for traveling with. It has two problems: I cannot directly use it to edit my photos without using a computer as an intermediate step, and typing is so slow I haven't bothered to post much. So yeah, we are in Scotland! Some things that have been awesome:

* Diving in Belize. I must become certified. It was perfect.
* Spending a day and a half with Natalie before heading off to Scotland. She taught me an origami form from memory, did a lot of shopping math and prioritizing with her Very Own Gift Card, and gave me lots of snuggles. And grew a foot.
* Driving! Granted, starting out driving in London at rush hour after no sleep was a little thrilling, but D is an able navigator and now it's just fun.
* Place names. During our drive from London to Scotland, David read me the map, and neither of us could stop giggling. I want the handbook to British place name morphology: what's a Thorpe? A Burn? And seriously, who lets Spital-In-The-Street keep its name?
* Menhirs. I've seen a zillion standing stone sites, from the kind with underground rooms and a visitor's center to the kind that's one stone in the middle of some dude's field that you can only find if you notice the tiny handpainted sign, but apart from Stonehenge, they've all been in France. So getting to walk a mile or so to a stone circle on a hill in Duddo was really fun for me.
* Sheeps! All over! Dotting the hillsides! It turns out that the Scottish countryside looks just like a cartoon of the Scottish countryside, but real.

Okay, reaching typing annoyance. More when I return, with a photo of David eating menhirs.

Usually, picking up N from school is very gratifying: she runs up to me with a huge grin and LEAPS into my arms, yelling, MOMMY! Some days, though, I miss her more than usual. Last week, I was having one of those days, where I just wanted to quit early and go pick up my kid and do something ridiculous. She had given me strict instructions to not pick her up early that day, though, so I arrived at the appointed hour to the daily leap-hug. I was still bursting with love when packing her drowsy form into the car, so I made a silly "I'm eating you up" noise and ended with a kiss to the head.

Me: Aaaaaaaahhhhm-MWAH!
N: ....why did you say "à moi"?

---

She's still counting things. She just doesn't do it out loud anymore, like she did when she was two. But every so often, I hear little numbers racking up under her breath, or she will proudly announce, "It's NINETEEN STEPS from the sidewalk to the car!"

---
Natalie is into writing everything, all the time. ( I love this adorable apostrophe-s semi-mastery )

A scene from our car trip to Virginia a couple of weeks ago -- I'm driving, N is writing a shopping list, D is assisting, because she really wants to spell "bread" correctly and she sussed out that "brad" wasn't it from our pleased but vague reactions:

N: How do you spell "bread"? B...?
D: B, that's right. Then R, E, A, D.
N: *writes intently* Then what?
D: E... A....
N: Then D?
D: Yeah! You've spelled "bread"! And I see that you wrote it upside-down so that I could read it!
Me: *spits out coffee*

That's my girl. If I ever had any doubt about her brain being like mine, I don't, anymore.

---

This one is

dilletante's, from a recent drive to school:

N: We're supposed to speak French now. Talk in French, Daddy!
D (helpful): Je ne parle pas Francais.
N: Yes you do!

*pause*

N: Anyway, je ne parle pas Francais *is* French!

Apparently, this was a good enough joke to her that she relayed the story to her teachers.

---

Best car-based mama-and-kid pastime of the moment: putting on the radio and discussing every song that comes on. What instruments are playing, what kind of voice the singer has/is using, how the music makes us feel, whether we like it or not, what else it reminds us of.

---

Now, I'm pretty good at languages, but sometimes that little-kid brain amazes me. Natalie and I got into a conversation about Haitian Creole in the car, the other day, and about the teacher at her old school who spoke it and provided Creole translation for the preschool graduation ceremony. Natalie said, "she speaks some French!", to which I responded, well, not quite -- she speaks a whole lot of a language that is similar to French, but different.

It occurred to me that there are a bunch of Haitian Creole AM radio stations I could put on, so that she could hear what Creole sounds like. After all, the last time she talked with this woman, Natalie didn't speak much French at all. So, I switched the radio to AM and began flipping through the dials.

A bit about my brain: when I start to hear something that I half-understand, my understanding and level of knowledge comes first, and I have to spend some time actively processing and thinking about what the sounds are like and which things I do and don't recognize before I can construct what the language must be. So, when I hit a Portuguese talk radio station, I stopped to listen a while and figure out what was going on. Natalie was not fooled: "Nooo, THAT doesn't sound like Sonja!" OK, all right, you're right, let's keep flipping. In my experience, there are a lot of actual Haitan radio call-in shows, so I was scanning to find one of those and flipping past the music. Natalie, of course, said, "no, go back! THAT sounds like Sonja!"

I went back one station, and sure enough -- Haitian Creole music. This means that she remembers what a teacher in another classroom at her old preschool sounded like well enough to pick it out of half a second of music. How does that even work? I love that kid.

Northampton, Southampton, Easthampton. West Hampton. Easy enough.

Norfolk, Suffolk.

Norwich, Sandwich, Greenwich.

Essex, Wessex, Sussex. Middlesex! ~~Narthex~~

Last night, I was fretting to

fennel about how fast N is learning French, and how OMG hey wait! I don't know any of the kid words! I've never spent a lot of time around the under-12 set, and so I have no idea how the kids and teachers at her school are going to refer to kid things, like pee and scrapes and toilets and thumb-sucking and security blankets. I can argue with you over beers about gender politics, but I can't ask you if you've used the potty. I feel like this may be a problem. Even if I don't need to use those words myself, I need to hear them in context and understand them! Aaa! Etc. He said, "it's okay, she'll let you know." I thought, man, I sure hope so.

Sure enough, this morning, she climbed into bed and snuggled up to me and said, "mommy, popotin means bum. Or bum-bum. Or butt." Well! Now I know. Thank you.

( she spontaneously spoke French to me )

I kind of figured it would take longer. omgcute.

Did you know that "June" does not come from the Latin iūnius but rather from Old Norse jånig meaning "grey"? This is also where the word "young" comes from; grey and young like a baby cygnet. See, look:

Sleepy cygnets:

Today's weather:

See? Obviously true. And, as if to prove it, what did I see just 20 seconds after taking the river photo? GEESE.

Of course, I also dreamed that the hottest new clothing designer around was named Ass Pantsley, so perhaps I am not to be trusted.

Background: N likes to make up French words. She's been doing this for a while, and she sounds very authoritative when talking to S: "That's bread. In French we say 'bee-SHAY'." The fake French words always sound kinda Frenchy, which is awesome. I've been reading her some French kids' books on and off since we went to Montreal in February, and now that she's obsessed with DORA THE EXPLORA, she's aware that all foreign languages aren't French. Now, two scenes from yesterday:

(1) We're at the park, swinging in the swings, and once I'm pushing Natalie high enough that she's about to fall out (the little thrill-seeker), she stops asking for more pushes and starts eavesdropping on the mom-and-kid next to us speaking Portuguese. I watch her listening more and more, trying to catch on, maybe getting some sounds here and there, and eventually she starts just ignoring what I'm saying and craning her head to listen. As the mom picked her kid up out of the swing, N looked at me and asked, "MOMMY, what IS that woman?!"

(2) Ever since our first French class on Monday, she's been asking me to sing the songs we sang in class and play the class CD, and she's been pulling the French books off the shelves and asking for them. So, last night, she was snuggled up in my arm in bed and we were reading a French kids' picture-vocab book before moving on to Pompon and his bike. Tonight, Natalie's decided that we're going to read it in the following way: she points at a picture and asks, "What's that?" to which I answer "le chien" (or whatever). Then:

N: "What's that?"
Me: "Le hot-dog".
N: *giggle*
Me: "No, seriously. It's le hot-dog in French."
N: *giggle* "No it's NOOOT! What's that?"
Me: *laugh* "Yes, really, it is! We say "hotdog" and in French they say le hot-dog!"
N: *giggle* "NO THEY DON'T!"

At that point I resorted to pointing out the words below the pictures, one in each language. We traced back over ice cream and la glace, apple and la pomme, and so on, until we got to hotdog and le hot-dog. She touched her fingers to the words and nodded, very small and gently.

I don't blame her for thinking I made that up. :)

1:30 PM: Hmm, I wonder if there are any French classes for little kids around here.
2:00 PM: Hey, look! Oh, wait, those are all for 4-year-olds.
2:15 PM: Hey, look! One for 3-year-olds at the Alliance Française, which I've been meaning to go to for years! On Monday afternoons!
2:30 PM: *gets OK from boss to take Natalie to a French class every Monday*
2:35 PM: Oh CRAP, it starts TODAY at *3*.
2:45 PM: *leaves office, calling ahead to tell the teacher we'll be late*
3:00 PM: *gets carseat*
3:05 PM: *whisks Natalie into car*
3:19 PM: *parks illegally, walks into class*
...
4:00 PM: *pries Natalie out of huge French library with a couple of kids' books and a Babar video*

....and then we went to the kid gym in Arlington, which we can never drop in at because their "open play" time ends at 5 PM, and listened to the CD of French songs that they gave us on repeat for the next couple of hours, and had the best lazy afternoon together that we've had in a really long time. And I have a song about dancing marionettes in my head, and the memory of Natalie giving a very deliberate thumbs-up to the librarian as we walked away. Me too, kid.

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Entries tagged with language

baby's first name scheme expansion

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Toddler rant

documentary help! (also: how is your google-fu?)

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conversations with Natalie

out of the many mouths of babes

Remember that time I felt inside your mouth at a dinner party? I'm still weirded out.

timeline

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tidbits (little of this, little of that, all about N)

ounce, dice, trice

remuer le popotin

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i dreamed it, it must be true

adventures in language-learning

last-minute plans love me

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