The World According to Abraham Frank

Here's that linguist post I've been longing to write. I've mentioned before how fascinating it is for us language lovers to watch our children acquire language. So humor me for a moment. This really IS fun!

First, there's Abe's phonetics (sounds). If you spend any time with our son you'll find out very quickly that his favorite word(s) is bee- duccck (big truck). It's one lexical item in his vocabulary (not a noun and adjective), with the final "ck" a uvular fricative, like the German "nach". He seems to love the feel of the friction of air through his velar passage... somehow the "ch" making the truck seem that much more big. (Velar sounds are pronounced in the same point of articulation as the English "k"... feel the place where your tongue back closes?)

There is a common process in the sound systems of languages (and changes across dialects) where consonants can swap positions in a word (metathesis). Abe seems to do this with some of his words. He calls a 'cup' a "buck" (swapping the b and c) and a 'boat' a "doap" (placing the d word final).

He also has his own semantic categories (categories of meaning). While his language is sounding much more like standard English these days (than baby yiddish or something like Russian, as he uses the generic term for "nda" anything he wants to say), he's still holding out for his own choices on some words. The following words are all called "dent": a spoon, the moon, and a button. It seems he's chosen this word for anything that looks round. Makes sense.

He's adding new words every day, this week's favorites being train tracks "tain tacks," "beedop" (big step, for the big steps we took a family trip to the mountains), and "bwop" (plop for the sound rocks make when he drops them in the river).

(Pictured: Sam and Abe, approximately the same age, experiencing the aroma of a rose in the mountains, Abe plopping rocks in the river)