Some notes on Aitch’s recent linguistic development:

As Aitch adds more words to his vocabulary, it’s becoming clearer and clearer to us that the adoption agency pulled a fast one. We think that Aitch came not from Korea but from Canada. His “au” phonemes are sounding suspiciously Canuck, so that he’s hanging aboot the hoose and such. Even worse, we think he’s French-Canadian; his “no’s” are imperiously Gallic: “Non! Non!” He’s also fascinated by the sound of anyone speaking French. Would it ruin the cachet of our international adoption if it became known about town that our son comes from the Great White North?

Aitch has also picked up an odd habit of adding an “ee” sound to the end of many of his words: to wit, “Uppy,” “Downy,” “Juey” (juice, normally pronounced “ju”–or, come to think of it, is it “jus”? hmmm). This really annoys both Husband and me, maybe because we are quick to pick up on it on our own speech: “No, you can’t get downy, you have to finish your juey.” I’ve tried to listen carefully to the words Aitch chooses to inflect to see if my little Noam Chomsky is using it is any kind of linguistic marker. So far, he attaches it indiscriminately to nouns, adjectives, and interjections, although not so far to verbs. Then, I thought maybe this sound was not grammatically indicative but perhaps a grammatical element in itself. In Arabic, for example, you can add “sh” to the front of a noun to turn it into a question, and a variety of suffixes to a word to indicate a direct object, so that the simple noun “ism” can become the question, “Shismik?” or “What’s your name?” But Aitch’s “ee” does not appear to have any intrinsic lexical value. After close study, I can only conclude that it indicates urgency. In other words, he tends to use it when he’s whining, with a rising tone that sets my teeth on edge. Like tonight, when I tried to take him to bed: “Noeeeeeeeeeeee!”

Three months ago, when we had Aitch evaluated by Early Intervention, the nice ladies told us that he would be busting into two-word combinations any day now. Well, he’s almost two and he’s still speaking in resolute one-word sentences. He does name everything he recognizes, including each individual car on the road, and sometimes the one-word sentences relate to one another. The other night, to keep him distracted while changing him, I began talking about the soup he was going to have for dinner, and he said, “Soup. Bowl. Hot?” Definitely a train of thought there, but not quite a phrase. Hot soup bowl, Aitch! Hot soup bowl! You’re so close!

He is showing remarkable strides, though, in spatial reasoning. He knows his way around town, which he calls “downtown,” which is just so cute and urban of him. If we decide to try an alternate route when he has his heart set on the library or the coffee shop, he lets us know about it: “Cookie? Cookie?” He does it in the car, too; when we cross the bridge into the next town he starts calling for “Wobby,”the lobster at the fish market on that road. I find this kind of intelligence rather remarkable, although as Husband pointed out, even Dog is able to recognize his usual route.

Last week, though, I was driving Aitch on a few errands. I had been out of town for a few days so I wasn’t up on all the latest additions to his vocab. I pulled into the strip mall that contains the liquor store, when I heard from the back seat, “Wine? Wine?”

I wonder how he learned that while I was away?