(12)
(2)
(4)
(73)
(12)
(4)
(88)
(53)
(4)
(31)
(2)
(126)
(22)
(96)
(11)
(1)
(60)
(41)
(132)
(31)
(11)
(26)
(25)
(21)
(15)
(38)
(100)
(153)
(1543)
(193)
(8)
(101)
(2)
(3)
(19)
(16)
(2)
(63)
(462)
(12)
(4)
(10)
(19)
(41)
(136)
(21)
(7)
(36)
(50)
(5)
(3)
(18)
(72)
(8)
Anna has her own vocabulary.
Most of the words are based on English or Danish ones – /βaβa/ for ‘flower’, /ka/ for ‘cat’, /mɛ/ for ‘sheep’ (Danish mæh ‘bah’), etc.
However, her word for ‘meat, sausage, burger’ doesn’t seem to be based on any word known to us: /(t)ɬa/ (that is, as if it had been a Welsh word spelled lla, or a Zulu one spelled hla, but sometimes the fricative becomes an affricate as in Nahuatl ‘tl’).
Funnily enough, although I find it easy to recognise what she’s saying thanks to my training in phonetics, the rest of the family make their own approximations: Marcel says /ʃla/, Charlotte opts for /kla/, and Phyllis is adamant that Anna says /xla/.
I believe similar things happen to Welsh place names in English.
Filed under lang • en • kids • linguistics
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