Mudane to the max. I was just talking to my mom about my childhood, and found out something I never knew. She’s out visiting my aunt and I guess they were talking about my as a kid. The aunt was asking if I still spoke in my language, and my mom asked me if I did. I had no idea what they were talking about so she had to explain it.
Apparently I started speaking really early as a baby, But I just made up my own language. My parents only spoke English, but it seems I made up my own language that was completely unrelated. Mom said it’s a good thing that my sister was only a year older, and had a child’s ability to pick up languages, cause nobody else could understand, and she had to translate for me. Apparently I only spoke in my own language until I was about 4, and never bothered to listen to anything anybody else said at all. They finally bribed me to speak English because I loved the pictures in Dr.Suess books, and I had to learn English to understand the stories.
I had no idea of this until my mom was mentioning it today and now it does seems somewhat familiar but weird and hard to remember. My mom said they figured out nay-nay was liquid because they found out a-nay-nay was water hay-nay-nay was milk, and gon-nay-nay was juice. She couldn’t remeber any of the other words, but it was a whole language.
I never had any problems hearing either, I just lived in my own world I guess. The more I find out about me, the stranger I get.
I don’t think that’s all that uncommon – at least, I hope not.
When I started talking, it was also in a “private language.” I also had an older sister as my sole interlocutor/translator. Eerily, (well, maybe not so eerily, given the finite world of the <2 set,) the ‘words’ that are most easily and frequently remembered are also fluids, with a root and a set of modifiers.
“Lahdoo” - Water
“Lahdoe” - Milk
“Lahday” - Kool-aid
“Cat” was “Ayn-oh”, and “Gerbil” was “Ayn-ee”
My sister schooled me in english and had me reading at three, so I owe her a lot.
Like you, my memory of this early language is also strictly hearsay, although I remember it being a topic of conversation when I was six or seven.
To this day, when I’m thirsty, I’m apt to mutter “Lahdoo…” under my breath… just because it somehow sounds “more parched” to me. And I think it’s funny.
I am currently going through a battle with my two year old getting her to try “correct” pronunciation of words. For instance water instead of wa-wa; and further water fall instead of wa-wa fall. She talked at a pretty early age and we were so thrilled that she talked at all and found her “baby-speak” so cute that we hadn’t really tried to correct her until now.
She actually whimpered a bit the first couple of times I tried to playfully correct her – like she knew I was taking her to the next level and she wasn’t ready to go. She is adjusting fairly well now that we got the ball rolling.
I just don’t see how a parent could let their child go to age 4 without some sort of “encouragement” to speak properly.
The child will learn. I don’t think there’s ever been a case of a mentally normal child in a linguistically rich environment failing to learn their native tongue, whatever babbling and poor syntax goes before.