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Dyr look like animals
A few days ago, I removed a few bricks that had been placed on top of the lawn for a while, and beneath there were plenty of centipedes, worms, spiders, ants and woodlice.
Léon was watching with great interest, and afterwards he went in to tell Phyllis:
– Mum, there were dyr under the stenene, and they looked like animals!
It so typical of a bilingual kid to know the same word in two languages (here “dyr” and “animals”), but not to equate them. Fully bilingual kids are normally crap at translating literally.
Filed under lang • da • lang • en • kids • linguistics
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Surely this is just code-switching rather than translating as such. I’d have thought it was commonplace. Certainly in my mother’s family, brought up in a bilingual English/Welsh environment, often did/do it.
Unless Leon was just using a very archaic sense of the English “deer”. ;-]
It looks as if the centipedes are trying to spell out some kind of message in, what is it, Hebrew? Armenian?
They kind of spell out “ae” in Georgian…
Anyway, yes, most of it is normal code-switching, the translation bit was just when he said the animals in Danish look like animals in English.
OK, I think I see what you mean about translating/equating. Has he internalised dyr with a more specific meaning than animals (something like “creepy-crawlies”)? Sorry if I’m being slow but what else would they look like but animals?
It’s a good question. I guess he’s encountered “animal” much more often than “dyr” (simply because he speak English more often), so perhaps “dyr” has a more specialised meaning to him?