Language

Curse you, eco-friendly 100% recycled paper Whole Foods tissues. It's like blowing your nose on a newspaper. The entire family has red noses wiped raw at this point. Next time I'm springing for the eco-unfriendly Kleenex with lotion built in.

Meanwhile...

The kids' language development never ceases to fascinate me. I find it to be a great example of generalization, which is something that I study (in relationship to math) for my job.

The first super cool thing I remember is how Nora figured out how to communicate that she didn't like something. This was last summer when she was about 19 months old or so. Nora knew the phrase "I like it" and would use that a lot, but didn't know the word "don't". One time I was trying to get her to eat something (of course), I think it was a piece of fruit or something, and she kept shaking her head and saying no. Finally she paused and then said "No I like it!" I thought that was brilliant and got the point across perfectly.

Now the kids are at an age where they are generalizing the rules of grammar, and of course because our grammar system isn't consistent, they say things that aren't grammatically correct. (But they're logically correct). My favorite one is when they say "It's mys!" instead of "It's mine!". They do this because they know that this book is your book, so "it's yours"...therefore if this other book is my book, then "it's mys". Makes perfect sense.

And of course the kids do the more typical toddler type errors too, for instance, today Milo said "I falled off the sofa!" Again, makes perfect sense because he has generalized that you put an "ed" on the end of a verb to indicate past tense.

I have often thought that it's got to be such a challenge to make sense of the English language what with all of our exceptions and special rules and so forth. I thought that Japanese was a very easy language to learn in contrast to, say, French because it is so consistent. There is no such thing as an irregular verb. It's fascinating to me to watch the kids demonstrating their ability to generalize rules in order to make up new words and new parts of speech. Sometimes it ends up being correct (I kicked the ball) and sometimes it ends up being incorrect (I felled off the sofa), but it's always logical.