Paul and the Family

Sarah’s always been a good talker. Practically as soon as she started talking, she was using complete sentences, and soon afterward she began amazing us with her mastery of idioms and expressions. Now, based on two things she said yesterday, it seems that she’s started to take language a step further:

• Kelli asked Sarah if she wanted to watch a movie. Sarah said, “Yes, I want ‘Charlie hash browns’.” We had to ask her to repeat it before we figured out that she wanted the Charlie Brown Christmas movie.
• After supper, Sarah came running up to us saying “I found Mickey Mouse!” I followed her into her bedroom, where she started reaching under her dresser to try to pull out some toys that had gotten pushed underneath. After a bit of adventure (in which my hand got stuck under the dresser and Kelli had to come rescue me) we got all the toys out from under the dresser, including a toy ring, a toy cell phone, and more. Sarah seemed to be looking around for something else, and we told her that we’d gotten everything out from under the dresser. “There wasn’t any Mickey Mouse,” I said. Pointing to the “bathtub” part from the game “Mouse Trap,” I said “That was the thing that I saw when I first looked under the dresser—that was the thing you were pointing at.” “Oh yeah! That’s it!” she said, grabbing the tub and walking out. Kelli and I just looked at each other, puzzled for a moment, before Kelli finally figured it out. “Mickey Mouse—Mouse Trap.” I just shook my head at that one.

This morning I overheard a humorous interchange between Brian and Adam. Adam and Brian had already moved their Christmas presents into their bedroom and they were playing in there. I was in the living room, separating recycling from trash as part of cleaning up the remains of Christmas morning. I overheard the following:

• Brian (from his room): “Adam, I’m going to tell on you!”
• (At that point I anticipated that Brian would be coming to me, and I started anticipating the complaint that was surely coming. However, since nobody was screaming, I knew it probably wasn’t too serious.)
• Brian (comes into the living room): “Da-ad, Adam ate a Hershey’s Kiss.”
• Paul: “Was it yours?” (I already knew it wasn’t, or Brian would have been upset rather than calm.)
• Brian: “No.”
• Paul: “Okay, well, it’s probably fine. Just don’t eat a lot — maybe just have one.”
• Brian: “Okay.” (returns to his room)
• Brian (from his room): “Adam, you can come out — it’s okay to eat one…”

Here are two conversations with Sarah from today that I thought were worth sharing:

Conversation 1

• Kelli (to Sarah): Aunt Terra is flying to California tomorrow!
• (brief pause while Sarah thinks about what she just heard)
• Sarah (with a confused look on her face): She doesn’t have wings!

Conversation 2

• Sarah: I just ate something yummy
• Paul: Really? What did you eat?
• Sarah (after thinking for a couple of seconds): The thing that I ate!

Tonight we had some jello (well, a jello salad with fruit in it) along with our supper. Sarah did hersomewhat common routine of leaving the table, playing for a couple of minutes, then coming back and asking for more food. In this case, the food she asked for was the jello salad. After giving her two or three helpings, I told her that the helping I was giving her would be her last, and not to ask for more. Sure enough, when she finished that helping she immediately asked for more:

• Sarah: Can I have some more jello?
• Paul: Remember I told you that you couldn’t have any more after the last bowl?
• Sarah: (pointing to the 9x13 dish, still half full of jello) There’s still more jello!
• Paul: We’re going to save that for later. We’ll have some more tomorrow.
• Sarah: I’ll have jello for breakfast tomorrow.

As a side note, Sarah really loves to say “jello”. For that matter, she really likes to say any word that starts with the “dj” sound (the sound made by the “j” in words like “jello” as well as most other words that start with “j” and some words that start with “g” as well. The linguist in me can’t help but chuckle because she likes to pronounce that sound as a fricative rather than a stop, so she ends up pronouncing it like “zhello” rather than “djello”. I actually suspect that’s part of the reason why she likes those words so much — I’m guessing that she enjoys that sound.

Interestingly, when I was in Argentina and I was teaching English pronunciation to some native Spanish speakers, they did exactly the same thing. For them, of course, it was because the “dj” sound isn’t used in Spanish so they never really learned to hear and pronounce that sound distinctly from the “zh” sound, which is used as the pronunciation for the character that’s written as “ll” (double-“l”). (At least, that’s how it’s pronounced in parts of Argentina, most notably among “porteños” — people from the area around Buenos Aires).