Father's Daze

As I noted last week, I am busy learning a new language — Aiden-speak.

There are some who might say that I’ve been learning a new language — English — all my life and I still haven’t gotten it down yet, but I don’t pay any attention to them. Maybe it’s because I don’t understand what they’re saying.

Aiden’s vocabulary and grammar skills, while still rudimentary, are growing every day, which makes communicating with our two-year-old grandson a daily adventure.

Because of the limited nature of his language skills, many of the words and phrases he does have down have to serve multiple purposes and can have multiple meanings.

That’s also a function of his pronunciation and enunciation skills as well.

For example, as I noted last week, he still hasn’t included the letter L in his speech yet — he hasn’t gotten to the episode of Sesame Street sponsored by the letter L yet, apparently.

As a result, the word police and the word please have a tendency to sound the same when Aiden pronounces either one.

Fortunately, we’ve been able to avoid any confusion through the simple use of context to determine meaning.

When he points to passing vehicle with lights and a siren, we can tell that he’s saying “police car” and not “please car” when it comes out “peas car.”

At least, we feel safe in assuming that he’s not asking for a car of his own , saying “please, car.” He’s more than a dozen years away from that yet.

Similarly, when he says “juice, peas,” we assume he’s being polite in asking for another drink and not calling for the juice police — if there is such a thing.

Then again, he could reverse it and say “peas juice,” in which case we’d have to go out and buy a juicer and squeeze him some fresh pea juice — although that doesn’t sound very appetizing to me.

Fortunately, peas are not one of his favorite foods and we haven’t gotten into discussions over another slice of pie. If there were such a thing as pea pie, we’d have a real tongue twister if Aiden wanted seconds on that — “peas more peas peas pie, peas.” It sounds worse than an old Abbott and Costello routine.

With its vocabulary and grammar limitations, Aiden-speak obviously has a lot of features with multiple meanings and usages.

He has learned to ask “What happening,” but that simple question has to cover a variety of situations and inquiries. Again, those on the receiving end of that interrogatory are forced to rely on context to fill in much of the missing meaning.

Similarly, the simple two-word question “Where (fill in the blank)” can have a multitude of meanings.

So far, we’ve been able to handle “Where Mee-mee” or “Where Poppie” with “at work,” “still asleep,” “in the kitchen” or any other appropriate answer without fail. Heaven help us, though, if that two-word question gets stretched beyond our ability to answer it.

Another word that Aiden has learned, sometimes too well, is that dreaded two-letter one: no.

It usually comes at the most expected times, when we tell him it’s time for bed, or time to turn off the television, or ask him if he wants to eat now.

That’s one language challenge that we can still handle using the skills we learned raising three children of our own, and we meet that word with the same response we used back when Aiden’s father was learning to speak — ignore it and go ahead with what needs to be done.

Some things the same in any language, it seems.