Noncompositional

Completely relaxed and refreshed, I return to the blogging world. I am not, however, not armed to the teeth with fun linguistic material to post about. Hey, that’s why it’s called a vacation — (oblink to LL [thanks Tensor]) — I don’t have to remember or write down all the cool stuff that my linguistics-trained brain automatically picks up. But as it happens, I do have some material. So here it is, in list-ish form (since, I must admit, despite getting around 10 hours of sleep, I’m still as tired as [expletive] [slightly-more-provocative expletive] shit).

On the vacation there were two young girls - aged 2 and 5, if I remember right. Let’s start with the youger one, call her K. She has [b] for [v]. Most noted example on vacation: [hɛbi] for heavy. Big surprise. Also, I think she has trouble with [l], though the details escape me. Again, not surprising, especially the coda ls, which were consistently not laterals, but back mid unrounded vowels (i.e., velarization without the coronal action, often written as <w>). Most noted example: my name. But hey, even kids my generation sometimes don’t have the “dark l” in coda position, but just the semi-vowel.

Moving into the levels of semantics/pragmatics, though with phonetics still playing a role: K confuses where are you with how are you. Either she doesn’t know when it’s appropriate to ask where are you (i.e., you don’t need to ask it when you’ve called someone, they’ve responded, and you’re now face-to-face), or she can’t produce how clearly enough for adults to perceive it as other than where. When she herself is asked where are you, she replies as though asked how are you (e.g., “good!”). And lots of other fun stuff that, while not “interesting,” just make me marvel at the process of language acquisition. Examples: use of subj-aux inversion in yes-no questions, rising intonation for one-word questions, ability to understand long words like life-jacket (though what it denotes for her can’t be said for sure).

Now the older one, call her R. One fellow vacationer was Japanese, and her name was (preserving some anonymity) [CV.tsɯ.e]. The five-year-old consistently pronounces this as [CVtsoɪ]. Certainly the word-final short (and lax) vowel is foreign to English, so the heavy syllabification is expected. However, it’s not [tseɪ], as might be expected. Now, I’m not sure the source of her knowledge of this name, but it could be that the high-back-unrounded vowel /u/ was interpreted as something closer to English /o/. Pull out your list of available diphthongs and you’ve got some options, but for preserving the height and backness of the original, [oɪ] might have been the best choice.

Finally, in the lexicon and morphology. This didn’t happen over the vacation, but a few weeks earlier. I noticed that R was using the comparative -er with irregular adjectives, like good, i.e., I did it gooder this time. However, only a few utterances following the use of gooder was this: you better not do that. Just thinking about it gives me goosebumps. Or maybe that’s the cool air of the apartment.