isoglossia

The plan was for Magda and me to sit down tonight and write a post based loosely around this picture she took yesterday afternoon. We’d talked about the need for some updated logging of Adam’s hilarious utterances. Though we usually make a point of touching on these in the monthly reports, there’s never enough time or space, and at times we lose sight of the fact that while this site may serve many purposes, its primary importance is as a scrapbook for us, and we’re frequently foregoing the noting down of the things we most want to note down. So we constantly have a list of things we want never to forget, most of which deal with poop or language acquisition.

Several months ago I noted Adam’s difficulty with the [S + consonant] phoneme family. It continues, and continues to baffle and amuse us. It’s especially difficult given that you never know for sure which language he’s mispronouncing (stand by for extensive post on code-switching/mixing). He spends a fair amount of time talking about the ‘fatwa’, but it turns out that he’s not still pissed at Salman Rushdie but just wants you to turn on the light (Polish: swiatło).

“Papa, let’s go. LET’S GET IN THE CAR AND GO, PAPA. To the new shomps. We can get in the car and go, and we can drive and buy things. FARTIES!“

This chocolate brand will always have a certain meaning for us.

I know you see them too.

A few of these are marginal, but since Adam learned that it’s the cool thing to look for robot faces, it’s been hard to avoid having to photograph every rubbish bin and electrical outlet just to shut him up.

*And seriously, have I run this little bit of table code into the ground or what?

Predjamski grad, “Castle in front of cave”, is one of Slovenia’s great cultural treasures and a truly dramatic example of military architecture. It is also heavily touristed and on a recent gorgeous July day we had plenty of company as we crawled through the castle and the caves behind and beneath it.

So we were pleasantly surprised that, despite ample audience and previous displays in the past few weeks, Adam did not whip down his pants.

His opportunity for a brazen-public-urination-hat-trick foregone!

Despite this unexpected lack of flying wee, the maintenance of the two boys did prevent us from taking many pictures. A pity, as the castle/cave integration is so fascinating. If the pictures above pique your interest, you can get the castle’s story along with some great high dynamic range pictures, here on Flickr.

Thanks to Michael Manske for pointing me to the Flickr pictures, and to JumpinJack for producing them.

See also: Adam shoots himself

One of our favorite sports is watching Adam learn to talk. Right now, for example, there is a little phonetic puzzle ^[1] that entertains us no end. When confronted with an English word beginning in S + consonant, he converts it to F ^[2]. You need to know this when you hear him comparing the sizes of objects and he says, “dis one big, dat fall” (the copula ^[3] has long been on his ‘optional features in English’ list, too), or that he wants to eat his cereal with a ‘foon’. This personal phonetic rule is especially fortuitous when you take him for sladoled and he asks for a flavor called ‘Smarties’, but bizarrely it doesn’t obtain in Slovene or Polish ^[4]. In spite of such handicaps, he is making amazing progress in all three languages, but still it all accrues so slowly at times that when a great leap does occur, it really makes you sit up and take notice.

Watching the syntactical puzzle pieces fall into place is intriguing. Adam disdains yes/no questions and is a big fan of the one word sentence. For example, in reply to a question such as “Adam, do you want some juice?” he is likely to answer, “WANT”. If he overhears us talking about how we are out of coffee, he will look up from his Thomas and advise, “BUY” like a stockbroker caricature. Inflection ^[5] is spotty, with no distinction between “Adam do dis” and “Papa do dat”. Interestingly, the things he gets, or doesn’t get, in one language don’t always correspond to the other two he’s picking up. It all makes my brain hurt.

So it was that an electrical current zapped through the room last night when his mother directed a question in English to the Big-Person Grownup Chair at the end of the table where Adam now eats, freed at last from the shackles and tyranny of the Chair That Is High ^[6]:

“Adam, are you eating your sausages?”

Without even glancing up from his Tweety-Bird plate, my son carelessly deployed a flawless example of present continuous aspect ^[7], ‘be’ included. The boy is beginning to get on it.

So at least he knows what we mean when we tell him, ‘Adam, you are so fart’.

NOTES FOR REAL LINGUISTS:
^[1] I don’t know why this link is here.
^[2] The rule is actually a good deal more complex than this, but see the part about my brain hurting.
^[3] Yes, yes, I know, but if you think I am going to get into stuff about predicates and complements and non-copular functions just when my traffic is increasing, you underestimate how shallow I can be.
^[4] This really does cry out for some analysis. I will get on it right after ‘My Name Is Earl’.
^[5] See note 3.
^[6] Just one of many non-funny semi-linguistic ‘jokes’ going on in our house. Want to come over and see our Oil that is Baby?
^[7] Let’s just not even get into this, okay?