The Six-Year-Old Linguist (Part 1 of 1)

This story was published in 1988 by a magazine for elementary school teachers

My sister Karen was about two years old when she started to talk pretty well. I had always marveled how adults could not understand small children simply because they didn’t understand baby talk. It never occurred to me it might be the other way around, that little kids didn’t understand English. It was 1967 and I, a six-year-old, decided to do something about the communication gap.
I got a pencil and paper although I could barely spell. Then I went into Karen’s room, where she was playing with her blocks on the floor. “Karen,” I said, “do you want to do something neat?”
“Okay!” Karen said in her always excited two-year-old voice.
“Do you still remember baby talk?”
“Yeah,” was her reply.
“Well, I’m going to make a dictionary of baby talk so big people can understand babies.”
Karen didn’t know what a dictionary was but she nodded her head. “I will say a word, and you tell me how to say it in baby talk, okay?”
Karen smiled. Whatever we were going to do she at least thought it would be fun.
I got down on the floor so I could be right next to her. I spread out the paper and got my pencil ready. The greatest linguistic work of all time was about to begin.
“Okay, Karen, how do you say ‘high-chair’ in baby talk?”
“Za za” was Karen’s immediate response. I wrote that down quickly.
“How do you say ‘Mommy’?”
“Ma-ma.” Karen said. I could tell she was enjoying the attention more than anything else.
“How do you say ‘Daddy’?”
“Da-da.”
“How do you say ‘book’?”
“Ugalug.” We were doing so well.
“How do you say ‘bed’?”
“Ni-ni.” I kept writing, doing my best to spell the baby talk words just like Karen pronounced them.
“How do you say ‘house’?”
“Ga-ga-dee.” After a few more minutes I could tell Karen was getting tired of the dictionary idea. I decided that was enough for one session. I thanked her and left the room. I was so proud of myself. When showed the dictionary to my mom and dad, they said, “That’s neat, Billy.” Even though they tried to sound excited, I was disappointed at their response. I thought they would say something like, “Oh you’ll go far in life.”
There was a lot of work ahead of me, but I knew if I did a little bit every day, I would soon have a whole dictionary of baby talk to English and English to baby talk. The going might be tough, but I was committed to do it at all costs, no matter what obstacles I faced.
I didn’t have time to get with Karen the next day, nor the next. In fact a whole week went by before I was able to get back to Karen’s room. When I did, she was still on the floor playing with her blocks. “Hi Karen,” I said. “Do you want to do some more baby talk for me?”
Karen said, “I forgot it.”
So ended the greatest linguistic experiment of all time.