Babbling Words

I know all mothers think this about their children but it's still worth mentioning: I think Siiri is really smart. For a while she's had quite a babbling-vocabulary. She said mommy, daddy, Erkki, Siiri, yes, no and cool. Lately she also says outdoors and sometimes almost seems to say eat and drink. All in Estonian of course. I've heard that children speak their first words at around 6 months.

4 to 6 months
At this stage, your child will start to babble, combining consonants and vowels (such as "baba" or "yaya"). The first "mama" or "dada" may slip out now and then. Though it's sure to melt your heart, your baby doesn't equate those words with you quite yet. That comes later, when he's almost a year old.
(from Babycenter)

Well, Siiri said her first words when she was only a few weeks old. Yes, it did melt our hearts, and yes, we knew that our baby didn't equate those words with us. It was just really cute. Now that she's 6 months old she says mommy when she is looking for me and she says daddy when she's looking for Erkki. One time I was holding her and she got really enthusiastic when I walked past Erkki. So I handed her over to Erkki and suddenly she said, "daddy, daddy, daddy". She DOES equate those words to us. I can assure you she's still almost a lifetime away from being almost a year old.

Some of it is getting lost in translation here. She doesn't really say "daddy", she says, "dada" or something like that. The Estonian word "issi" is pronounced Ihhi. To make matters even more complicated she barely makes a difference between "issi" and "Siiri". Yesterday evening, a little before Erkki got home, Siiri was relentlessly saying her name, "iii iii iiiikhii iiiii ii iiiiuiii" I repeated after her, "Siiri... Siiiriii". After a while she got a little agitated even, still repeating her name over and over, making small changes in her pronunciation. I realized she might be trying to say "issi" in stead. I showed her a picture of Erkki and she was momentarily overjoyed.

She loved touching the framed photos on the wall so I started to play a recognizing game with her - she touched the photo and I said who she pointed at. She pointed at me, "Mommy", she pointed at herself, "Siiri", she pointed at Erkki, "Daddy". After a while it became quite clear what (or who) she was thinking about. Game went continued like this, "Mommy, Daddy, Mommy, Daddy, Daddy, Daddy, Mommy, Daddy, Daddy, Daddy, Daddy"

Perhaps some of you remember that me and Erkki have decided against teaching Siiri stupid non-words. It always seems so childish when grown-ups use nonexistent words when talking with children. Actually it's not childish, it's unfair towards the child - Why hinder their development just because you think they can't cope with a real language. Why make up simplified non-words for the sake of the child if grown-ups would never use that word in a conversation and it will not help the child understand your language. Teaching a child to talk is basically teaching a language to an eager student. It's just plain cruel to substitute real words for ones that don't exist. If you don't understand what the fuss is about, imagine it this way: imagine you're teaching a foreign friend to speak your language. He points at a dog, "what do you call that?" so you say, "doggie". So in the future, whenever anyone says the real word "dog" in any context, he's just really confused. Don't you agree it's just cruel?

As a quick side note, the spell-checker in Blogger is awful. It does admit that "doggie" is not a real word but then it offers "doggies" (plural) as a correct word.

When it comes to the words mommy and daddy, I know they are not in the dictionary, but I still happily teach them to my child. There is a good reason for this. The proper words mother and father are wrong in other ways. When I imagine a child saying "mother" to a parent it just feels really distant and cold. As if they never really got along to begin with. Oddly, in this imagined scene, the child always has a posh British accent. And when I imagine anyone using the word father, I always end up thinking about a lightsaber duel and a guy losing his hand.

Other news, I got a THIRD babysitter in the hope of actually finishing the article before next year. I also have a couple of exams this month. I mean real university exams that I'm actually going to have to study for. Fortunately they're not too horrible and, to be honest, I'm not really reaching for an A. I can't even be sure I'll get any sleep right before the exam so I don't feel it's worth investing myself emotionally into these exams.