Just because it's funny...

Solanne is well into language-acquisition: she's been making short sentences for about a month and a half now, she repeats almost everything we say, and she is interested in new sounds. But there are still glitches in the system: she hasn't got all the consonents and vowel sounds down, yet. So things come out a little strangely.

Yesterday, Derek was reading to the girls; it was a book about foxes. Well, Sol's "au" sound (which is required to say fox) is a little off and sounds more like "uh," and she doesn't always manage to say the final "s" in every word... With a little deduction, you can understand why I laughed every time she said it. Derek warned me that I would have to stop, otherwise she would keep saying it. And I guess it's only funny a couple of times, and then it gets old and perhaps misunderstood when you go out.

Which brings me to another story. When Maïa was about the same age, she, too, had some difficulty with some words. Frog often came out without an "r" and with the "o" sounding more like an "a." "L"s were difficult, so clock was also amusing. But within context, most people didn't think twice about what our child was saying... until, that is one day when we were happily shopping in the housewares section at the Bay. Maïa got very excited when she saw something novel, and she liked to let us know, at the loudest decibel she could. So the frog clock was... well, a little embarrassing.