Let the trilingual status begin!

The title for this post is admittedly exuberant. Here's why: yesterday I brought V home from her day with the babysitter, set her down in her chair for a snack, and she promptly looked up at me, pointed at her nose and said, "Nenä." Nenä! This is the Finnish word for nose, of course, and, as far as I can tell, this marks the first official trio of words all connoting the same concept. She has already nailed English nose and Swedish näsa. OK, multilingualism is still a long way off, but what an exciting start.

Funny, actually, that the first example has to do with nose.We have somewhat of a history with noses, thanks to my mother. During a visit to my mother, when I was pregnant with V, my mother, out of the blue, told me, "You were the one kid of mine that, when you were born, I looked at you and thought, 'If this kid ever wants a nose job, I'll pay for it.'" Yeah, she's funny like that. Then when V was born, my sister asked our mother if she had seen any pictures of V yet, and my mom answered, "Yes, she has a big nose like her mom's."

So that's our history with noses, although it has little to do with language. (Are our noses really that big?)

Continuing on from my digression, then. Here are some new English words as of the past week or so: kiwi, mouse, ears, truck, again, boots, and mackey, which means 'macaroni.'

She has also learned some new names of people. She says Pia, Sirpa-täti, Amber, and Emily (actually, she says that name constantly, because she wants to play with her friend).

And a new animal sound: the sheep says "baaa," of course!

There is one morpheme that V has uses for such a long time that I actually overlooked it. This is the diminutive -y that we use in English. It's interesting that her use of this is absolutely grammatical; we attach this morpheme only to nouns, and this is what she does, and very productively--"Sockies, ducky, doggy, kitty," etc. The diminutive form is in addition to the base form of each of those words, of course, so it's not just a matter of her mistakenly thinking that the word dog, for example, is actually doggy.

In terms of semantics, V continue to use a couple of general words when she doesn't know a better word. Examples are her use of apple and dog. In V's world, an "apple" is any round or circular food, either real food or what she sees in pictures. So oranges, cucumber slices, meatballs--those all get called "apple." Any picture she sees of an animal with four legs, provided that she doesn't have another name for it, gets called "dog." A little argument that we have over and over again when we look at her picture book goes like this:

Me: Horsey. What does the horsey say?
V: Heeeeeeeee. (pointing) Dog. Woof woof.
Me: That's not a dog, that's a horsey. What does the horsey say?
V: Heeeeee. (pointing) Dog. Woof woof.
And so on, for as long as I allow it to continue. At this point, there is simply no convincing her that the horse is not a dog. Oh well, you have to pick your battles.