Language Acquisition
Before Olive was born, I used to spend quite a lot of time playing video games. I still have the interest, but for these last almost-two years, my available time has been sharply curtailed. Typically these days I might get a few hours a week of gaming, if I'm lucky.
Still, every so often, a game grabs me to the point where I make the time, usually at the expense of sleep. Recently, that game is Heaven's Vault: a game in which you're an archaeologist/linguist deciphering ancient scripts. The writing in the game is fantastic1, and the script-deciphering bits are great at making you feel clever.
In what is definitely a coincidence, Olive has been doing much the same thing with her time recently, only not in a game: she's had an explosion of vocabulary in the last few weeks. She's way beyond basic yes and no questions now: she knows a bunch of body parts, a bunch of vehicles, a bunch of household items, a bunch of prepositions, and a few verbs. She has occasionally put together two-word sentences. I never bothered to formally count her vocabulary in the past, but at this point, I think it would be actually impossible to do so in a rigorous way, because she keeps using new words we'd never heard her use before.
It is just amazing for her to be able to tell us what she wants. Yes, she's been using body language and gestures for ages, but there's still a world of difference between her just pointing next to her, and her doing so while saying "Daddy sit2"
As clever as she is, she's still not what you might call equipoised; she's got the typical toddler tendency to tantrum. I think we've seen this before, though: just before she could crawl, she got pretty irritable, because she knew exactly what she wanted to do, but just didn't have the skills. This feels like the same kind of frustration: she has some clear concept in her head, but we just don't understand her. That frustration is really hard for her, and she doesn't yet have the skills to regulate her emotions well. They'll come, of course; she just needs to grow a bit, so her emotions don't overwhelm her as much.
It feels like she's right on the brink of another big transition, now. The first big transition is from infant to toddler, and most of that is just growing big, strong, and coordinated enough to move under your own power. This one is from toddler to child, and it mainly has to do with becoming fluent in your first languages. Olive has two first languages, and she's still hitting her verbal milestones a bit earlier than the peak of the bell graph. It makes me proud of her.
I am looking forward so much to having proper conversations with her!
The story-telling, the conversations between the characters, etc, are fantastic. Literalist me is convinced that someone will misinterpret the original statement as my enthusing about the design of the glyphs you decipher. They're fun, and well-put-together from a gameplay perspective, but a good puzzle is more common in games than a good story.
Technically, what she actually said was "Daddy shi-shi", but "shi-shi" is her word for "sit". We have no idea where it came from3, but she uses it consistently, clearly, and for no other purpose, so I guess I have to count it as a word. In the past I've said that you can't start counting words until they're clear, consistent, have a single use, and are also an actual word. I stand by that for tracking a kid's first words, but I have to admit that sometimes a kid will just invent a word and teach it to the parents instead of adopting the conventional one.
Christina read that sentence, looked at me, and asked "are you lying for effect, or what? She's clearly saying "hi-setz", trying to say hinsetzen!" That, of course, is German for "sit down".