The Boy and the Girl often end the evening together in the tub. “Bubbles!” cries the Boy as he runs to get L.
Sometimes, L gets an urge to play teacher.
language
Teaching the Boy
Use Your Words
“Yes or no?” I ask the Boy.
“Tak,” he replies.
Yes or No?
E is entering the wide world of language, three languages at a time. He grunts and coos sometimes, but he’s started using a few words, both Polish and English. For example, he has a “Yes” grunt and a “No” grunt, but he also says “Yes” and “No.” Sort of. When I have difficulty discerning whether his grunt is affirmative, I ask him, “Yes or no?”
“Tak” comes the reply.
Return to Russian
What happens when you throw a group of thirty-somethings from Poland together with a babcia who used to teach Russian? Everyone sings all the Russian songs they can remember from elementary school Russian classes.
Dac, Redux
When L began speaking Polish, we made a video of her saying her first word.
Now that the Boy is beginning to speak, we thought we’d do the same.
With the same word.
Clipped
“Jew!” the Boy cries, pointing feverishly. Yet we’re not playing I-Spy in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. The Boy is just thirsty, and he clips most of his words. Our cat, Bida (“Poor thing” in Polish), becomes “Bia.” Big sister’s name gets the middle vowel and consonant removed, so she becomes simply “La.”
Explaining in Poland
I’ve only now been getting around to the videos from Poland.
P-english
Mama, masz cos twardy żeby bear down on?
Chatting
Language Confusion and Independence
Like L, E is growing up bilingual. And so when Mama encourages him, “Powiedz ‘no'” (“Say ‘no'”) and he responds “Nie,” it’s difficult to figure out if he’s asserting his newly-emerging independence or simply not differentiating between languages.
Toddler Translation
I often wonder what E thinks he’s saying.
Sometimes, it’s obvious:
- Why in the world did you just close the fridge?! Didn’t you see me heading straight toward it?
- Holy cow, that’s frustrating! Can I get a little help here manipulating this [fill in the blank]?
- No?! But I want to do that!
Sometimes, who knows? Not even he, I suspect.
God in the Dative
We must not help our neighbor for Christ, but in Christ. […] In general, the expression “for God” is a bad one. God ought not to be put in the dative.
One of the more difficult, perhaps the most difficult, challenges to learning Polish was getting accustomed to its inflected nature. In English, we tell who did what to whom in a sentence by syntax, where it appears in relation to other words. In the sentence “The dog bites the man,” we know who is doing the biting and who is being bitten by the order: subject verb object; biter bites bitee. Polish and other inflected languages determine these things by adding endings (inflections) to the words. Instead of meaning coming from word order (subject verb object), it comes from word endings. The different meanings are called cases. The subject of a sentence is in nominative case. The direct object is usually in accusative case in most inflected language, but Polish is an odd ball because some direct objects are in genitive case, and all direct objects of negative verbs are in genitive case. Indirect objects, to whom or for whom (i.e., “We gave the dog some treats.”), are in the dative case. In Polish, that usually means adding “-owi”, “-ze”, “-u”, or “-i”to the end of the noun. In English, we just slip it between the verb and the direct object.
So what puzzles me about Weil’s contention that we shouldn’t put God in the dative is how it seems to fly in the face of so much we hear in contemporary Christianity in America. We have “10 Things Young People Can Do for God” and “How to Work for God Effectively” and “Working for God in the Public Square” to name a few articles one can find easily enough. Indeed, it seems to have a Biblical basis. So I wondered what Weil might mean. Perhaps it’s a case of not limiting oneself to the dative case but also the instrumental, accusative, genitive, locative, and vocative cases.
My Tongue Twister
Do icy icicles ice on icy icicles? Icy icicles ice on icicles.
I like this because it’s winterish, and now it’s winter.
This isn’t the perfect winter, though. My perfect winter is snowy. Poland snow! That means it’s higher than a horse.
I saw snow that deep on Curious George. They were at their country house. And it started snowing and they didn’t know. But then, the snow was higher than their house and came into their house. So then the Man with the Yellow Hat had to clean it up. I wish I had that much snow I could play in the snow and make a snow angel and eat snow. I once did eat snow. It was freezing cold and white. I spit half of it out.
This is the first of probably many posts by the Girl. She tells me what to write; I write. — gls
Translations
A small pot sat on the stove, boiling a bit of chicken for the Boy’s “soup.” We add it to the pureed potatoes, squash, zucchini, and carrot that makes up the bulk of his lunch, and we boil the chicken separately then add it to the blender with the puree. Tonight, K was upstairs, though, and realized the heat under the pot of boiling chicken needed to be turned down, so she told L, “Powiedz tatowi zeby wyciszyl kurczaka.” L, in turn, translated it rather literally and came to me saying, “Daddy, Mama said for you to quiet the chicken.”
It takes a bilingual child to see some of the oddities of language.
Polyglot Concert
Our daughter, thanks to a bi-lingual mother and multi-lingual daycare, knows songs in four languages.
Riots and Revolts
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Why I?
A student in class today asked why we capitalize the first person singular subjective-case personal pronoun, I, but none of the other personal pronouns. “Why don’t we capitalize ‘he’ or ‘she’?” the curious young lady asked.
Indeed.
“I’ll look into that,” I replied, scribbling in my little notebook.
The New York Times offers an answer:
England is where the capital “I” first reared its dotless head. In Old and Middle English, when “I” was still “ic,” “ich” or some variation thereof – before phonetic changes in the spoken language led to a stripped-down written form – the first-person pronoun was not majuscule in most cases. The generally accepted linguistic explanation for the capital “I” is that it could not stand alone, uncapitalized, as a single letter, which allows for the possibility that early manuscripts and typography played a major role in shaping the national character of English-speaking countries. (New York Times)
The whole article is quite interesting.
You Might Have To
I go home to learn about life from my daughter. I learn what goes on in her school, what her teacher says, how her teacher teaches.
L, like any good story teller, doesn’t simply tell us, though, she shows: she begins incorporating various phrases from school into her own speech.
“You might have to” becomes the key phrase. “You might have to do this.” “You might have to move that.” I can imagine L’s teacher helping her with this or that task, explaining, “You might have to try it a different way, like turning it the other direction.” “You might have to wait. I believe someone else is using those crayons.”
“That’s okay” is another. I spill a little milk and mutter “Shoot” under my breath. L consoles me: “That’s okay.”