Tuesday, January 5, 2010

Tristan LD V.3

Tristan is picking things up quite rapidly:

New words:
duck (for all birds, but also just today):
bird
wet
cold
dirty "dody"
nose
booger "buga"
potty
peepee

And his first color word: yellow. He has noticed and named yellow things all around and outside the house (toilet paper package, lamplight. He wanted to combine banana and yellow..first he said nana for banana, and then "banawo" (yellow is "yewo").

He's also combining words, as I mentioned before. Brig was grooming his nose, and showed him the results, told him what it was, and he repeated "buga" and then said "dirty". He picks up He's very good with dirty now, and gets that it means it should be not touched or thrown away. He throws things away for us - we ask him "Tristan, will you put this in the garbage?" He marches over, lifts the lid, drops it in, and shuts it, and receives a cascade of accolades.

He touched a puddle from a boot and said "wet...cold".

I want to explain the hyphens in "I-see a-ball". Brig and I heard this as two words, not four, and what I know about stress patterns marking word boundaries in English bears this out. Both I-see and a-ball were two syllable constructs with the same stressed-unstressed pattern, as in a usual two syllable word (like "Ke-vin"). The I part is then like a first person verb prefix, like suffixes that mark conjugations in romance languages, and the a- is a demonstrative prefix, rather than a separate demonstrative word, like the indefinite article "a" that it comes from and will evolve into. This is all my personal conjecture based on what I learned about linguistics while earning my bachelor's...not sure what anyone official would have to say about it.

He already understands a few core grammatical features of English, like V-O (verb-object) sequence as in "read book", S-V (subject-verb, "I sit"), SVO and dem-noun ("I-see a-ball").

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