Salt of the earth

When V falls asleep at night, she likes to talk about the people she knows and loves. We have little conversations about these people. When we talk about Emily, we talk about how Emily likes to say, "Yeah!" Tonight, V came up with the Emily sentence (if you can call it that) on her own. She said, "Emily," and then she laughed--chuckled, I guess, would be a more accurate description. Then she said, "Emily, yeah." She repeated this a few times, laughing and smiling each time. V knows what the word say means, but she has never used it in a sentence. I guess this is as close it she comes for now. I suppose I am struck not just by the quasi-sentence she made, but also by the idea that she is able to talk about something that is so abstract; Emily moved back to the States about four months ago. I guess V misses her. Actually, so do I!

V has already learned an important lesson: good friends are the salt of the earth.

Mean mamma

V has started saying her first bilingual pun. Min mamma means 'my mamma' in Swedish. Min is pronounced just like the English word mean.So little V says, "Min mamma is nice!" And then she laughs and laughs.

Prepositions and andra stuff

A lot of people ask me if V ever mixes her languages. For the most part the answer is no. I can think of a couple of words, though, that she says in Swedish even when she is speaking in English. One of them is the word andra, which means 'other.' No matter how many times I repeat the word other to her in English, she just doesn't seem to get the idea. Another is the word korv, which means 'sausage.' (Well, I'd call the Finnish version of sausage a glorified hotdog, but that's a different story.)

Whole sentences are spilling out now, right and left. Mostly it seems to have to do with what she observes around her, things like, "There's a tree over there. And there's an andra tree!" Sometimes, there's even a color involved, and, increasingly, it's even the right color. Today, for example, V pointed and exclaimed, "There's a red car. And there's a red car, too!" It's an exciting world she lives in.

I would say that she pretty much has all of the grammatical elements in English at this point, save for a couple. The main exceptions are prepositions and conjunctions. For example, she'll say, "Mamma Pappa come to bed Vera." This means, "Mamma and Pappa come to bed with Vera." She knows a few prepositions, but not many. And I don't think she knows any conjunctions yet.

Just because she has almost all of the grammatical elements, of course, doesn't mean that she has a robust vocabulary. Well, her vocabulary is pretty good for a 22-month-old child, but that's still pretty basic. For example, she doesn't yet know how to use the verb to want, so if she wants something, she points and says, "V's. V's." It gets the idea across, even though there is often some guessing involved in trying to satisfy her.

I continue to be amazed at how she uses whatever words she has to convey what she wants to say. Of course she often surprises me, too, when a word comes out that I had no idea she knew. Today there were a few examples, but my tired brain can't conjure up what they were.

"Spindel!"

I never knew that V knew this word, but a few minutes ago, she pointed with great excitement and started repeating, "Spindel, spindel!" to her pappa. Sure enough, there was a spider crawling across the floor. This was a first; we don't usually get much wildlife up in our fourth floor city apartment.

Her new favorite question, as of a week or so, is "What's that?" She probably says this to me a hundred times a day. And I know that this phase will continue for at least a few years, so I'd best prepare myself for that. She also knows the counterpart in Swedish and Finnish: "Mikä tämä on?" to her Finnish speaking people, and "Vad är det där?" in Swedish.

Make a mamma

I just wanted to note a couple of funny things that V has come up with lately in English. One of them she says when she wants to climb up on a little stool so she can "help" me do whatever I am doing in the kitchen. When she wants to climb up, she says something that sounds like "Make a mamma." I have no idea what it means or where it came from (make with Mamma, maybe?).

The other thing is her name for a new favorite treat, Rice Krispies cereal. She calls it "Aunt Christine." I can only assume that it's the "Chris" sound that sounds the same in both terms. So it's pretty funny when she points up at the cupboard at the box of cereal and says, "Aunt Christine, Aunt Christine!"

blanket statement

It seems more and more that there are two languages operating in that head of hers. She says something to me, then turns to her pappa and says the same thing in Swedish--about all kinds of things: her legs, her toes, going bicycling, going to bed, her toy bear--you name it. This is probably not so incredible to people who actually grew up bilingual, but to me, a monolingual, linguist mom, it is nothing short of fascinating. I simply can't relate; in her world, it's perfectly normal to have two terms for everything. And, increasingly, three terms, if we count her emerging skills in Finnish.

I have a couple more examples of how V uses a word she knows to apply to something that she doesn't have a word for. Oddly, both of these examples refer to napkins. She has one term for paper napkins; she calls them "diapers." Her word for cloth napkins is "blanket." Genius. I do correct her, of course, but as of yet, the word napkin hasn't yet filtered through and come back out in her speech.