how to speak robinese
The baby is teaching me how to speak Robinese. This is a greater intellectual challenge, she reasons, than merely learning English would be (which she’s also doing). Old dogs, new tricks, and all that.
From what I’ve been able to gather, Robinese is more of an analytic language than English. She changes the meanings of words not by gluing on prefixes or suffixes, but by adding more words. For example, I would stick together two concepts and a suffix in one word to refer to my absentmindedness. She would express the same sentiment using separate words: “silly Daddy.” We intensify a word by adding “-er” or “-est.” She does so by repeating the word: “shoo shoo bad bad,” she says to the cats or anyone else who crosses her.
Her most creative use of this technique so far has to be “water monkey balls,” her term for “museum” (don’t all museums have a giant monkey and an aquatic play room?).
Other linguistic highlights:
Normally we don’t modify pronouns: we can say “red car,” but not “red it.” Robinese has no such restriction: “my this” is a frequent utterance when she has no idea what to call something, but knows she wants it.
“All right” is not just a response to cajoling (as in, “all right, I’ll do it, quit bugging me”); it is also an expression of cajoling. Can you imagine waking up to a baby standing next to your bed, pulling on your arm and saying, “All right, all right, all right?”
Word meanings are extremely dependent on context. The single-word sentence, “Hold,” can mean, “I want to play with the cups that are on that table,” or “If you value your eardrums, you’ll pick me up right now.”
Next lesson starts today. Can’t wait.