Learning how to speak - Part II
Ya ya ya ya ya ya, ya ya ya ya ya. Sunday is a holiday, Sunday holiday! One of your favourite rhymes from school. Except the ya is supposed to be la. :)
As you’ve grown and as you continue to jabber on enthusiastically, some language challenges continue to stymie you. The consonant ‘l’ and ‘r’ are among those. So it had been ‘yava yaddu’ instead of rava laddu, ‘yav’ instead of love and ‘yaayun’ instead of lion for a while.
While we were in Europe this year, I showed you how to touch the tip of your tongue to the roof of your mouth and say ‘la’. And suddenly, you could say it! You still need some practice with it of course, its been such a habit to say ‘ya’ instead of ‘la’.
‘Ra’ however, continues to confound you. And you get impatient when we try to teach you how to touch the tip of your tongue to the roof of your mouth but let the air flow. Sigh. I guess it will take a little more time to get to rava of rava laddu!
Another one of your unique pronunciation is of the word ‘smell’. Rather, was. For the longest time you called it ‘fen’. So much so that all of us called it fen :D Again, something about Europe. One day you could just say smell!
You would say ‘dottiya’ instead of ‘gottilla’ which is Kannada for ‘I don’t know’. And in Europe when you were tired, instead of Budapest, for some reason, you would call it ‘Gudapest’. :D
The mixing of languages is a source of constant amusement, sometimes even to you! ‘Pur bittana’ which means, ‘I farted’ except, you wanted to say it in Hindi and it should have been ‘pur kiya na’ because ‘bittanalla’ is a Kannada word. Other examples include - ‘yahan kootha maine’ which means ‘I sat here’ and in Hindi should be ‘yahan baithi hoon/thi maine’.
You know, as you learn the language, I wonder sometimes. - did language come first or consciousness. I remember the day I taught you the word ‘smell’. You had pooped and it was smelly or maybe had farted....or maybe I had farted and it was smelly! I said, it was a bad smell. And showed you that when you breathed in, what you could smell was the sense of smell. Until that day, you had never communicated or expressed in any way that you could identify any smell - good or bad. You are an expressive child, always have been. Even when you could not talk, you could talk!
But from that moment on, you would continuously talk about smells - bad smell from an open drain, good smell from a perfume, body odour, smell from creams and cosmetics and soap and pee and fart and poop, the smell of the mouth after brushing teeth. You see what I am trying to say here? Did you know of the concept of smell before I told you there was a word for it? Or did you become conscious and aware of this after you knew there was a word for it?
I guess we’ll never know.
Hugs & kisses, my little linguist adventurer.
Mumma