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.

The long and short of it

I forgot to mention previously that V has a lot of adjectives--at least in English, possibly in her other languages: big, little, hot, cold, soft, hard, etc. She also seems to have a couple of adverbials: over there, up there, down there, etc.

Today she surprised me by counting out loud in Finnish. No kidding. She was looking at a page from a book, and all of the sudden she said, "Seitsemän (seven)." Then she said, "Seven." OK, I really don't think she knows that seitsemän and seven mean the same thing in different languages; it's probably just a coincidence that she said both things back-to-back. (Really, I may be a proud mamma, but I'm not delusional.) She then started from the beginning: "Yksi, kaksi, kolme ..." Then her pappa came in, and she said, "Sex!" Now, in case you might think that this is a really weird thing for her to say to her father, keep in mind that sex means 'six' in Swedish. It also means the same thing that sex means in English, so rest assured there are plenty of puns in Swedish about the number 6.