rivka | (no subject)

On a parenting board I used to read, there was a woman who was so convinced that her children were gifted that she claimed her three-month-old daughter had made a verbal joke.

One of my goals is not to be that woman.

So I've felt a little funny about mentioning Alex's verbal development, which, while it's not in the "my child is the greatest genius the world has ever known" category, is not really what you'd expect of a twelve-month-old. Most kids say their first or second word about now. Alex has about a dozen: Mama, Daddy, hi, bye, no, dog, bird, cup, kitty, ball, balloon, pretty. They're not clearly articulated - "dog" is more like "gah" - but they're consistently applied. She says "gah" for dogs on the street, dogs on TV, pictures of dogs in books. A peacock at the zoo was met with "Bir'! Bir'! Pri'y!"

On Wednesday, we took the bus up to see our friends Emily and Zoe. We had never made the trip before, which involved a long winding walk across the Johns Hopkins campus. I was looking off into some trees when I heard Alex exclaim, "Ki'y! Ball!"

Kitty? Ball? Honestly, I'd been dubious about whether "kitty" was a word she said at all, given that we don't have a cat and she only encounters them in books. But she'd called a squirrel "ki'y" when we were out for a walk, and she said it about book pictures of cats, so it was tentatively on my word list. Still: a kitty and a ball on the JHU campus?

Then I looked up, and saw this:

stone lion with ball

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Very cool!

It sounds eminently plausible to me that she'd call a squirrel "kitty", especially if most of the dogs she's met have floppy ears -- she could easily be generalizing from the ear shape, or just using "kitty" to mean "any four-legged critter that isn't a dog".

I think "kitty" may be any non-dog, non-bird animal. Although you might be right about ear shape, because she called a lop-eared goat we saw at the zoo "gah" (dog).

When N was that age she had "poes" (kitty) for quadrupeds smaller than herself and "paa[r]d" (horse) for larger ones. Some dogs were cats, others were horses. When we saw a raccoon (in a cage) coiled up with its nose under its tail, she commented "Poes, mooie saat (staart)": "kitty, pretty tail". She may have been slightly older then, probably about 14 months.

Birds came in three sorts: in the air (voge[l] = bird), on the ground (atje, "eendje" = duck) and in the water (sraam "zwaan" = swan).

My cats have a squirrel noise and they use it at those little dogs with fluffy tails.