Amy and the word “No”

[pne]

I heard somewhere that most children learn the word no before the word yes because they hear it a lot more often, but with Amy, it was the other way around.

She’s said amà (which meant yes) or oka (okay) for quite a while, but has only started saying no (in English) or nee (in German) in the past couple of weeks (or so it seems to me). Previously, when she didn’t want something, she might push it away with her hand, but she never had a word for that.

This may also be because she’s becoming more aware of her will and her own desires—that previously she’d say “okay” not because she particularly liked what was being suggested but because she wanted to please Mummy and Daddy, whereas now, she’s more apt to voice her disapproval.

Comments

[n-true.livejournal.com]

You should write an "Amish" dictionary. ;)

I'd be interested in her pronunciation of the words in IPA as well...

[sparkofcreation.livejournal.com]

My best friend's songs bilingual English/ Urdu, but he learned "no" in Urdu (ne) and "yes" in English long before the reverse.

[pne.livejournal.com]

You should write an "Amish" dictionary. ;)

I had to think about that for a moment before I realised the first phoneme was /EI/ and not /A:/! (Or something like that.)

I'd be interested in her pronunciation of the words in IPA as well...

That's a question I sometimes ask as well. Especially this one fricative she uses occasionally; the nearest phoneme in English is /S/, but I'm fairly sure it's not [S]. Quite what it is, though, I'm not sure (curled-c? s with retroflex hook? ...)

I have noticed that her distribution of voiced/voiceless and aspirated/unaspirated stops isn't the same as mine, though -- she tends to leave things unaspirated (which makes me jealous, since I have a hard time saying e.g. [k] as opposed to [k_h]), and recently I've noticated that she sometimes unvoices voiced stops.