Young David (older brother of Daniel, who inspired this blog's first post), already has quite the linguistic background. His mother and grandparents, all natives of Milan, speak Italian to David and his younger brother. His father, from Berlin, speaks to them in German. David attends English language daycare and I am to speak to him in English as well. The child is not yet three years old and speaking in three different languages. Needless to say, I'm a bit envious. David usually does a pretty good job of knowing in what language to respond to whom, but he's also developed his own vocabulary for some every day items that are combinations of the languages. For David, "te" means milk - his parents figure this must come from the Italian word for milk, that is, latte (German for milk is milch). One of my favorite mash-ups is "pish-e", or fish - a combination of pesce in Italian and either the English or German word (in German: fische).
It's actually quite interesting from a philological standpoint; I'm currently reading Robert Sokolowski's Phenomenology of the Human Person and at the end of the fourth chapter he strikes off on an extended tangent about what happens in communication when two groups of people who have no common language are forced to live together and make a life. The first generation speaks pidgin, one form of protolanguage, which Sokolowski partially defines as when common words are created for concrete things, but there is no grammar and no syntax. In short, it is protolanguage because nothing past, future or abstract can ever be expressed, and nothing can ever be expressed in a complex fashion. The second generation of this hypothetical group produces creole - a combination of the two languages not only with its own vocabulary but also with its own very complex grammatical and syntactical structure. Italian, Spanish and French all began as creole - Latin combined with with whatever native dialect existed in the geographical region before the Romans came around. Sokolowski also identifies the language of toddlers as protolanguage; they can point to concrete ideas, but do not yet have the facilities to express the abstract.
All of this is just a really long way of saying that watching a three year old deal with three different languages is watching this play out in real time. Listening to David is really fascinating once I'm able to get past the fact that he's whining or yelling because he's not getting his way.
As I mentioned above the multilingual environment in which I currently reside is not only educational but also hilarious. Last night at dinner when Mrs. Levi suggested that she and her husband go see "Van Gogh" (as in the big exhibit that is in town) today, Mr. Levi gave her the weirdest look, which neither the Mrs. nor I could figure out until he explained that he thought she suggested they go to "Bangkok". My favorite situations, however, come from David when he is excited because not only does he combine languages, but he also forgets to pronounce the entire word. Several times a week this leads to confused stares from one adult to another as if to communicate "what in THE HELL did he just say??". Yesterday when I arrived he was extremely excited and said to me "OK! Now we'll go and play legos and read books in the living room, OK?!" This is of course not what David actually said, and I will leave you with that phrase and subsequent mental translation now:
"OK! Jetz we go joc leg and ree buch in sala. jetz! k?!"
(Jetz = jetzt = now in German; joc = jocare = play in Italian; leg = legos; ree = read; buch = bücher = books in German, sala = living room in Italian).
My answer: "OK!"
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