More Please!
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).