Playing With Language

Celeste and Quinn have a new game where they take apart a word and look at the different phonemes/components.

During lunch today, Quinn started with zinnia: "If it didn't have /ə/ it would be zinny; if that didn't have /i/ it would be zin; if it didn’t have /zɪn/ it would be nothing!"

Then Celeste moved on to sunshine: "If it didn't have /sʌn/, it would be shine; if it didn't have /ʃaɪn/, it would be sun."

Then Quinn tried grass: "If it didn't have /gr/ it would be ass. Daddy, why are you laughing?"

Of Nosh and Gnomes

After an extended series of midmorning snacks by the girls — apples and peanut butter, olive bread with butter, and I'm not really sure what else — Evelin made the comment that with all that noshing they'd probably wouldn't want lunch.

A little time passes, then Celeste pipes up: "Is nosh spelled with an n or a g?"

I told her it was with an "n", explaining that it came from Yiddish, which lead to a bit of investigation to figure out that it would be written נָאשׁ, if we were using the Hebrew alphabet.

I also made a mistake in telling her that the word came to English via German, which was completely wrong. It actually comes from New Latin gnomus via French. Probably it was coined from the Greek γηνωμη ("earth-dweller"), but γνωσις ("knowledge") is also suggested.

She's no Lelaina Pierce

Tonight, when Celeste started to wipe some Coritzone-10 on the Poäng in Quinn's room (Quinn had a patch of eczema on her knee and Celeste wanted to feel the cream), I said: "Thanks for wiping your hand on the chair."

Without missing a beat, Celeste said: "You're being ironic."

I Blame The Princess Bride

After dinner, as Quinn was running around outside, she ran over to the imaginary pet store to get a cocker spaniel. However, she was only calling it a "cocker" (which is the name of one of Celeste's toy dogs, a cocker spaniel).

I said something about a "cocker spaniel" and she corrected me, "No, daddy. Cockers are dogs. Spaniels are people."

It took me a few moments, but then I asked her if she thought I was talking about "Spaniards." Turns out that's what it was ... although while she agrees Spaniards are people, she doesn't quite buy that spaniels are dogs ...

An Editor's Child

This morning Celeste noted that "ex-cit-ed" had three syllables, which meant two hyphens ... and I quote, "Hyphens. I love those guys."

Channeling Beavis

Quinn and I were in the car. NPR is on the radio. The commentator or presenter says something about "member of Congress." Then I hear from the back seat: "Ha ha ha. He said 'member.'"

Animal Sounds

Celeste, as she will readily tell anyone and everyone within ear shot likes "puppies and that's all!" Quinn, however, is a much more equal opportunity animal aficionado. "I like puppies and bunnies and elephants and baa-baas [sheep] and turtles and ponies and kitties that don't scratch and ... and ... and ..."

Thus Quinn's animal noise extravaganza the other day shouldn't have been a surprise: "Meow-woof! Meow-woof! I'm a mixed up kitty!"

Misheard Poetry

So Celeste and I are reading A Room With a Zoo before she goes to bed. Tonight we got to a chapter break and I notice the next chapter is 19 pages long.

I suggest that it might be too long of a chapter to read right now (we'd already read about 10 pages ... and she likes to interrupt, ask questions, start reading at a different point on the page than where I'm reading, et cetera).

Celeste asks, "Is it as long as a hound's bark?", which I thought was a pretty neat simile. It turns out she'd actually said "hound's back," which is nice, but not as poetic of a phrase.

Know It All

Celeste's been doing very well with her speech therapy, when she's focused and motivated, she gets it and does what she needs to do. She's also increasing catching mispronunciations in her day-to-day speech and correcting herself.

Tonight, as we were going through her latest worksheet, she was stumbling over the white–write pair. Quinn was talking, Evelin was unloading the dishwasher, and I wasn't sure if I was just not hearing Celeste quite right or not, so we skipped that pair and finished the sheet.

In a quiet moment, we went back to white–write. She was saying the 'hw in white well, but I couldn't figure out how she was saying "write." I tried correcting her and she just gave a little smile and said: "That's how Ms. L--- says it, but she doesn't know it starts with a w."

Reading Things

For a while now, Celeste has been good at recognizing letters. She's perfect with uppercase letters and decent, but not perfect, with lowercase; she also seems to get the concept of letters representing words which represent ideas and things.

When asked, she can spell dog and bus and a few other words — both vocally and using her blocks or foam letters. (For some reason, the almost always spells train T-R-N-A-I. This is interesting to me and makes me wonder about language acquisition and languages that don't write out vowels. I also wonder if the /eɪ/ diphthong is the issue. Or if it's just that Celeste is a two-year-old.) She can also read off letters from book covers, food labels, etc.

Yesterday, I took Celeste and Quinn to the thrift store to pick up some books; 40¢ for paperbacks that are likely to be chewed is a very good thing. Among the titles I grabbed was Dan Yaccarino's So Big!. I didn't say anything about the book to either of the girls; it just caught my eye and I added it to the pile. I did notice Celeste flipping through it in the cart however.

Later that afternoon, Celeste was having me read some of the books when she pointed at So Big! and said, "Daddy, read So Big!" Again, I had never told her the title of the book. I asked her if she knew the title because of the words on the book and she nodded and asked me to read it. I asked her to read me the letters on the cover and she did so perfectly, only stumbling over the exclamation point. "S-O-B-I-G ... I don't remember."

Totally Unrelated

During a final proof for one of our magazines today, there was a two-deck headline on a column that read: "Where's the Fugawi / We're Here Now". Everyone was a little flummoxed by "fugawi," although there were the requisite namechecks of Fugazi. The term didn't appear in the column, and none of us at the table recognized. I asked the features editor if she'd googled it, and she said she hadn't. As I walked back to my desk to see if anything popped up, I thought of fugedaboudit and started playing with that /fʌːg/ sound in my mind and realized that fugawi corresponded all to well to "fuck are we."

It turns out, it's also the name of a brand of GPS software, which worked well with the headline, explaining the presence of the verb 's. At the same time, the Urban Dictionary's definition for the word matches up with the other meaning pretty well. The headline ended up being rewritten.

Come On, Come On!

Sometimes Celeste pops out with something that makes me wonder about my own language use — not interesting things like popping out with bits of Japanese or French or Cherokee or anything or even really bad things like dropping the F-bomb. Instead it's things like this:

Today was a good day potty-wise: No accidents means Celeste gets to go through three vignettes of Elmo's Potty Time or three letters of Me Can Only Eat ... with Cookie Monster. Tonight, after her bath, Celeste and I came downstairs to play Cookie Monster and when the screensaver cleared I saw a couple of work e-mails that piqued my curiosity.

Instead of going immediately to PBSkids.org, I opened a few of the e-mails to try and figure out what the discussion meant for the issue that I am working on. Celeste got a little impatient after the third e-mail in the series: "No! Celeste want Cookie! Come on!"

"Come on!" was delivered with the perfect inflection of irritation. I burst out laughing (probably the wrong thing to do, but she smiled), and then asked her if she picked that phrase up from me or mumma or from one of the grand'rents. Evelin and I were both implicated as was one grandmother, but the other grandmother was cleared of any connection to that phrase.

Listen Closely [From the backblog]

Last Saturday, as we were getting ready for B---'s third birthday party, Evelin had the idea that we should burn a CD of kids' tunes for him. Naturally, since B--- is German, most of the kids' music he has in German stuff; Evelin thought it might be fun to give him some English-language songs for him. Celeste was helping me pick songs, and she was insisting we put "the pig song" on the disc.

I had no idea what song she was talking about^*, so I searched for "pig" on the hard disk that has all the music I've offloaded from CDs and/or acquired digitally.

Nothing promising popped up, but I was intrigued by the Gina Rocco and the Rockettes [ MySpace | label ] cut "Pigtails" from her album Sea Tulip, so I played it. Celeste was still on my lap, and at first I didn't notice how closely she was listening to the lyrics:

As she cut off her pigtails / Put them in a supermarket bag
Said, I don't care what you do with them / I just want to forget
Forget my hair / Forget that it was ever there
Forget, forget my hair

Then she walked past her shadow / Without even recognizing it
Said, There isn't anything to lose / And there's no where to hide
I cut my hair / Is there anyone under there?
Forget, forget my hair

As she cut off her pigtails / Put them in a supermarket bag
Said, I don't care what you do with them / I just want to forget
Forget my hair / Forget everything I was last year
Forget, forget my hair

Suddenly Celeste sort of quietly asked: "Why did she cut her hair?" Evelin's been talking to Celeste about getting a haircut on and off, so maybe that's why it stuck in her mind, but clearly she was listening to the lyrics quite closely.

This afternoon, I was playing her a cut from Gruff Rhys, "Gyrru Gyrru Gyrru" from the album Candylion. I told her to listen closely to the song, and she did, but it was obvious she was confused.

I explained to her that the song was in a language called Welsh, and reminded her how B--- and his family spoke German and how Ms. ხ--- spoke Georgian, and she nodded. I then tried to get her to focus on/isolate the word gyrru in the song (easy to do, since it's repeated quite often), and she nodded. I then told her that gyrru is the Welsh word for "driving" and that the song is all about buses and trains and transport^†. Upon hearing this, Celeste broke into a big smile and started liking the tune ...

^*A week later, Evelin realized Celeste might have been thinking of "Pig Island" by Scott Bakula, from the Sandra Boyton CD Philadelphia Chickens.

^†Per an interview Gruff gave to BBC Wales: "There's a track called 'Gyrru Gyrru Gyrru,' which means 'Driving Driving Driving' — it's a road song. The lyrics are about transport, getting to A to B by rowing boat, or helicopter."

Why We Won't Go to the Skating Party

Each February, one of Evelin's uncles hosts a skating party, but we almost always cannot attend because of the Maryland–Massachusetts distance and February is a bad time of year work-wise for me. (I think the one and only one I've been to was when Evelin and I were dating and I was living in Northampton.) This year, however, Evelin had a new twist on our excuse for missing the party:

Wish we could come. However, it is much too far to drive, especially with children who won't wear hats, refuse to wear mittens, scoff at socks, just barely tolerate shoes, think that coats are for wussies, and cry because they are cold.

It's true: The girls hate coats.

Thinking of "hate" (the word, not the emotion), Celeste had been saying she hates things a lot lately and it really bugs me. It's usually in relation to food ("Celeste doesn't want [black beans/Veggie Burger/carrots/whatever]. Celeste hate it."), but sometimes she says it about people or toys or the park or whatever. When it first registered on me, I wondered where she picked up that word from — probably from a book, but Evelin and I both have caught ourselves saying we hate various things when, in truth, "hate" is a much stronger word than is warranted.

Initially, I tried to redirect her to a word like "loathe," in part because it's cute/funny to hear a toddler say she loathes something, but Evelin rightly noted that "loathe" is a pretty strong word when what Celeste really means is "dislike" (and often she doesn't even really mean that, she just doesn't want asparagus/jackfruit/apricots/whatever at the moment). So, we've been trying redirect her to "dislike."

It's been a week or two since the height of hating things, but I think we got the point to sink in. She still sometimes insists that she hates something, but more often she says she dislikes or doesn't want it. The really cute ones are when she catches herself about to say hate, pauses and then comes back with dislikes.

A Pox on Your House

They don't give you fancy quarantine signs these days, but we do have an official diagnosis: Quinn has chickenpox. We noticed a little something on her chin last night and this morning Evelin took off Quinn's pyjamas to find a bunch of red spots with little blisters inside of them. Evelin and I both had this pox as kids; Celeste has had the vaccine; Quinn's just the lucky one ...

We're not sure where she got it; the doctor said it could have been from some random person on the airplane or in the airport or from someone while we were in Louisiana. But she wasn't contagious herself until this weekend ... and we have another week or two before she's in the clear.

And the fun part for Quinn, since she's still under 12 months, she'll still have to get the vaccine. This early of an exposure isn't considered effective in ensuring immunity into later life.

UPDATE: Evelin corrected me: We have preliminary diagnosis of chickenpox (Varicella simplex). If the pox spots continue to increase/spread for the next day or two — and as of this morning it looks like they are — then we get an official diagnosis.

Of course, even without an official diagnosis, I did get one humorous misunderstanding of what Quinn has. I e-mailed by French translator/proofreader about the issue we have in production and mentioned that I was out of the office that afternoon because one of my girls has chickenpox, putting the word la varicelle. This morning I got an e-mail from her: "I am glad you had a good diagnosis for your little daughter and I guess an adequate treatment for smallpox." La variole is close to la varicelle, but I imagine the doctor would have been more concerned ...

And thinking of the doctor, he told Evelin that because of the chickenpox vaccine most of the people currently in med school (and more than a few now in practice) would not recognize a case of chickenpox because they'd never seen an infection before. This Evelin and me to start wondering if we should contact some of the local medical schools to see if they'd like to help fund Quinn's college fund in return for letting her model the disease to students ...

Still Blogging ... An Update

On Friday, The Editors Weblog had an item about the blogging reaching a plateau. One would be forgiven for thinking that I've joined the estimated 200 million who've stopped blogging, but it's just been a bad past couple of weeks at work and home.

We're not sure who was/is patient zero, but Celeste, Quinn, and I have been in various stages of illness for the past fortnight or so, and Evelin seems to be finally succumbing as of yesterday. Each of us has manifested differently, but it's basically been a coughing, sneezing, snotfest for quite a while with plenty of disrupted sleep for all. Adding to the fun, Quinn's first two teeth came in at the same time back on the 8th and Celeste's last two molars seem to be shifting into place if not yet breaking through the gums.

But enough with the whinging.

Quinn is building her language skillz. Last week (after a particularly bad night of screaming), she must have made a mental leap; she's started practicing dee, dah, gaa, and other new sounds with a vengeance. It's really cute and sounds much more like "her voice" than the squeaks and squawks that make up most of her vocalizations heretofore.

Celeste is building an interest in astronomy. Her prebedtime routine now includes a post-bath stop outside to look for the moon. During the early stages of the current moon's phases, that worked out really well as the moon was high in the sky around her bedtime; now it's rising around 2:00 a.m., so we go out to spy planes, stars, and Christmas lights. Of course, given her fondness for all things Stick and Rudder, every plane is a Gooney Bird. Also every car is a race car. Most of the buses actually are Metro buses, but I don't think she quite has it right when she points and says "Metro bus is eating insects!"

Potty training is going quite well with Celeste. The first few diapless days were a bit messy (particularly with the chaos that was Evelin's annual gingerbread house party: eight children and five adults was a bit overwhelming for Celeste), but she made it through the day more often than not last week. (She still gets diapers for naps and overnight, although the naptime diaps have been dryer than not lately.).

This morning, after being up with Quinn a lot last night, I think I nodded off for a moment while Celeste and I were reading on the couch, so I guess it's no surprise that I was a little groggy when she said "Potty! Potty! Potty!" and I raced her upstairs and dumped her into the toilet. It didn't register to me that her seat was up and she slipped bottom-first through the regular toilet seat. Despite some shocked tears, Celeste was a trooper and managed to do what she needed to do once we got her wet pyjamas off and her seat in place.

Of course, when the time comes, I will have to careful not to let something like that happen to Quinn. One, it's already evident that she has a temper. Second, I think she might be a baby ninja. She hasn't gone through everything covered in Question 3: Ninja Training, but she does try to rip my throat out on a regular basis.

Sharks

Sunday night, while reading Breaking the Maya Code (Revised), by Michael D. Coe, aloud to the baby^*, I ran across a statement about the etymology of the English word shark tossed off in a rather casual manner.

... the pair of fish fins ... is a rebus sign: the fish is a shark, xoc in Maya (Tom Jones has recently proved that xoc is the origin of the English word "shark"). And xoc also means "to count" in Maya. (p. 141)

The idea that the word shark was as recent as post-Columbus was a bit shocking to me, and it was irksome that Coe didn't footnote the source for Jones's proof.

I checked the American Heritage, 3rd Edition, which lists the etymology as "origin unknown," and the Shorter OED, which is equally unsure of the origin. The Shorter OED does suggest, however, that it may come from the German word Schurke (worthless person). While that would fit the shark in loan shark, that sort of usage postdates the first for the fish shark by a few decades.

Take Our Word for It takes on the shark/xoc connection in this entry, saying that "shark's etymology simply is not known with certainty." That said, however, the word does seem to have come into English following Sir John Hawkins's expedition to the Caribbean in 1586, putting Hawkins (whose ships were attacked by the Spanish off the coast of Veracruz) in the right place and time to have picked up the word xoc/shark from some Mayan language or dialect.

So assuming xoc is the source word for shark, what were cartilaginous fish (with lots of sharp, pointy teeth) called?

From what I can gather online, there may have been specific names for specific sharks but no generic name, or maybe they were called sea dogs or sea wolves or something similar. (At least one term for shark in both Croatian and Serbian, morski pas, literally means "sea dog," as does the Maltese kelb il-baħar; the Corsican pesciucane is similar, meaning "fish dog.")

Casting about into other languages doesn't help much either. I can't find any definitive etymologies for any of these, but there do seem to be some connections within various languages.

In northern and central Europe, some descendant of the Old Norse hār seems to dominate: haai (Afrikaans), haj (Danish), haai (Dutch), hai (Estonia), háv (Faroese), hai (Finnish), hai (Frissian), Hai or Haifisch (German), hákarl (Icelandic), haizivs (Latvian), hai (Norwegian), haj (Swedish), and הײַפֿיש (Yiddish). [I probably have the Hebrew characters wrong for the Yiddish heifish.]

Romance tongues are more all over the place, but with some spread into other languages: tiburoi (Basque^†), tauró (Catalan), tiburón (Galician), tubarão (Portuguese), tiburón (Spanish), and tubaraun (Tetum^†); requin (French), rèkin (Haitian Creole), rekin (Polish), and rechin (Romanian); cagnaccia (Corsican); quenlla (Galician); squalo (Italian); squalus (Latin) and canísca (Sardinian).

A few languages, however, seem to base their word on "shark" (or maybe xoc): shark (English), ŝarkó (Esperanto), shaa'k (Gullah), siorc (Irish), sherk (Scots), sak (Tok Pisin), jak (Volapük), and siarc (Welsh).

And just to round out the list of other words and languages (with the caveat that some of these may refer to specific species/types of sharks): peshkaqën (Albanian), القرش (Arabic), marraxo (Basque), 鲨鱼 (Chinese), žralok (Czech), qiō (Fijian), ზვიგენი (Georgian), καρχαρίας (Greek), manō (Hawaiian), כדיש (Hebrew), cápa (Hungarian), ikan hiu or cucu (Bahasa Indonesian), 鮫 (Japanese), NORG (Klingon), 샤크 (Korean), ikan yu (Bahasa Melayu), mango (Māori), əwḫáym (Mehri), ᐃᖃᓗᔾᔪᐊᖅ (North Baffin Inuktitut), акула (Russian), sutsxlá (Sahaptin), k'wet'thenéchte (Salish), hacat (Seri), žralok (Slovak), léḥem (Soqotri), papa (Swahili), ma'o (Tahitian), köpek baliği (Turkish), oboodede (Twi), cá mập (Vietnamese), ekurá (Yoruba), and imfingo (Zulu).

UPDATE: Digging around, I recently found reconstructions for the word shark in a handful of proto languages: *(s)kʷálos (Proto-Indo-European); *cot-ac- (Proto-Dravidian), *maŋo (Proto-Polynesian), and *laḫm- (Proto-Semetic).

^* Since the baby seems to like to stop kicking as soon as I get anywhere near, one of Evelin's friends suggested I read a story aloud each night to get the baby used to my voice or something. Instead of picking a kid's book, I decided to go with what I was already reading. Evelin said the baby stayed pretty still for most of the time I was reading; I don't know if there was listening going on, or if the baby was just embarrassed by my bad pronunciation of the Russian, French, Spanish, and Mayan names/words.

^†Yes, Basque is not a Romance language, but tiburoi looks to a loan from the Spanish tiburón or similar. The same for Tetum tubaraun.