I updated you last week about Ollie’s great linguistic leap forward, adding ‘Hi’ and ‘Bye-bye’ to his existing vocabulary of ‘ə’. This past week saw another dramatic, though not, ultimately, particularly helpful, development in his speech.
Before his first breakthrough, Ollie had realised that ‘ə’ lacks a certain specificity, and he had almost always accompanied it with hand gestures or other body movement that clarified whether he meant: ‘Don’t you get the feeling that the old minute hand has edged its way round to teatime-ish?’ or ‘Do you fancy a quick game of marble helter-skelter, old chum?’. (Who knows, incidentally, whether ‘realises’ way back at the beginning of that last sentence is really an accurate word? Does a child of 19 months ‘realise’, in any sense that an adult can understand? I must access my second year teacher training notes on Piaget.)
After that breakthrough, Ollie had clearly understood that he, like others, could make sounds that had specific meanings. Unfortunately, he had only mastered two sounds: ‘Hi!’ and ‘Bye-bye!’ Now he quickly developed the considerable skill of working these into almost any conversation. If anyone so much as approached the door to the kitchen, or put on a pair of shoes, Ollie would be there like a shot with his cheerful ‘Bye-bye!’ and his rhythmic hand-wave.
He then added to these two the really useful: “Up’, which initially tended to mean he wanted to be carried but now means that he wants to go upstairs. The problem here is that he is incapable of explaining why he wants to go upstairs, and so, more often than not, one or other of us will go up with him to see what he wants. This morning, I discovered at the top of the stairs that what he wanted was for me to carry him downstairs. I suspect he was actually just trying the “Up’ on for size.
The downside of this newly acquired vocabulary was his fairly swift realisation that ‘ə’ no longer cut it; it belonged to an earlier stage of development, which, from the plateau of his verbal 20th month, he now spurned. And so he decided to replace all the ‘ə’s with something that more closely resembled adult conversation. He settled on exhaling in a single breath while sounding an ‘a’ sound as in ‘apple’, while simultaneously moving his tongue swiftly back and forwards and up and down in his mouth. If you try this at home (I recommend alone in a room with the door closed), you will soon discover that you produce a sound resembling ‘Ba-la-bla-la-ba-la-ba-bla’.
In fairness to Ollie, this seems to me at least as close an approximation to human speech as the ‘Rhubarb, rhubarb, rhubarb’ first used, apparently, by the actor Charles Kean’s company at the Princess Theatre, London 200 years ago, to simulate background conversation on stage that the audience is expected to register but not understand. I learn that the variation favoured by radio producers is: ‘Walla, walla’. ‘Peas and carrots’ is another option sometimes used, but that seems silly.
But I digress. Where Ollie went wrong is that he appears to have convinced himself that, just as his ‘Hi’ and ‘’Bye-bye’ are understood, so should his ‘Ba-la-bla-la-ba-la-ba-bla’ be. After all, we all seem to understand adult conversation, which, as we have established, sounds quite a bit like ‘Ba-la-bla-la-ba-la-ba-bla’. And so he no longer sees the need for hand signals and body language. Unfortunately, his ‘Ba-la-bla-la-ba-la-ba-bla’ is usually incomprehensible to anybody else, and so we’re in a mildly frustrating time. Fortunately, his oral comprehension means that a quick cross-examination can usually establish what he wants to say.
If I tell you that I have now shared the most exciting thing that happened this past week, you will understand that we are buried in deepest rural Portugal in deepest winter. So far a bit less rain than I anticipated, but the weather is, for those of us who usually live on the edge of Judean desert, very cold. The insulation of the house, and the efficiency of the heating, are currently being challenged by the conditions, but, fortunately, we have a fairly decent winter wardrobe out here permanently, and multiple layers and scarves work very well.
I’ve been nursing a cold for the last few days. (I choose the word ‘nursing’ carefully, to win favour with Bernice, who always contends that women soldier on through mild inconveniences such as colds, while men wallow in them. I keep telling her to talk to me again when she’s my age, and not the young girl she is now.) Fortunately, the local honey is excellent, the lemon tree in the garden cannot be seen for fruit, and I have a number of bottles of whisky to work though, so lemon toddies are the order of the day.
Despite the cold, I gamely went with Bernice and the boys to a park in a village 15 minutes’ drive away. In the middle of the day, it is actually considerably warmer outside in the winter sun that huddled inside on a sofa. This park has a slide that is long enough for Tao to welcome the challenge of climbing up the chute, and for Ollie to feel considerably braver climbing up the stairs than standing at the edge of the slide wondering how good an idea this is. However, guided down by Grandpa’s restraining palm on his chest he couldn’t wait to climb, and hesitate, and thrill again.
The park also boasts a few swings, at various heights for various ages, a fair-sized open space for running around and kicking a ball, and, major attraction, a water fountain operated by foot pedal. Bernice and I spent some time remembering how, the last time we were there, Tao was very timid about trying anything. The problem this time was, it is fair to say, the reverse.
As we were racking our brains over ways of disposing of lemons last week (fortunately, Tslil now teaches a few yoga lessons in person, and so can make her students an offer everyone is too polite to refuse), I suddenly remembered the citron pressé that I enjoyed every day of our summer holiday in the South of France 40 years ago.
Retrieving a recipe from Google was the work of minutes, and I had soon reduced a lemon sugar syrup. The next morning. I added a generous dollop to the juice of two freshly squeezed lemons, added cold water (no need for ice in a Penamacor winter) and found that I had managed a passable reproduction of what I had drunk all those years ago. Not quite a madeleine, but very refreshing.
And that’s about it. The days, and, indeed, the weeks, seem to be galloping by. We are already halfway through our trip. It’s just as well that we never come out here with any grandiose plans. Just keeping up with the boys takes all of our energy.