Suffixes

At first, Anya could only speak Japanese. Or rather, the language she did have shared that difficulty that Japanese has around multiple consonants. Every syllable was either a vowel, or a consonant followed by a vowel--ena-ga-li-sha, rather than english.

She grew out of that a while ago, but recently this stuff has got a whole lot more sophisticated. She's obsessed with suffixes! So three of her favourite words--mama, daddy, and nummy (food/tasty) are increasingly now mummets, nummets, mamia, nummia and daddia.

This is quite an interesting process, in terms of language. Essentially, she's learning the rudiments of inflection, at least through play. Lots of languages have a rule of one-concept-one-word: in Mandarin Chinese, you can't really change the meaning of a word or its context in a sentence without adding extra words. Others have a lot of inflection: in Latin, "amo" (I love) means something very different to "amat" (he/she loves), although the root of both words is the same. English I think is somewhere in between: most of our inflections regarding tense, case, and person have been dropped, though we still add -s for the plural of nouns and the third person of verbs, and -ed for the past tense.

At the moment of course, she's just playing around. I don't think she remotely understands inflection and I don't think she's using it with any intent beyond the pleasure she's taking in saying funny things. But I think it's interesting that she's picked up this linguistic habit so easily. And I wonder, if she'd spent her first 14 months around people talking an inflection-less language, whether she'd be playing this game at all.