Learning the lingo

Liza has recently become very vocal, talking at anything and everything. Of course, it's in some foreign language only understood by her and some Inuit woman 1000 miles from here, but it's still exciting to hear it. What really amuses me is that it's not made up of the expected "easy" sounds - ma da ba and such. She's making up her own dipthongs and leaving out most of the vowels; it sounds like she's a cross between a Kalahari bushwoman and a Dutch person eating a cracker.

Occasionally Liza finds words she especially likes, and then she applies them to every situation.

For a while last week she was stuck on making a sort of whistling "sss-T" sound, which was pretty amusing. I was almost sure I was going to have the only kid in town to learn how to whistle before learning how to talk, but she's moved on. This week she's been saying "gm-tkum," with a swallowed "g" at the beginning and a hard "t" in the middle. I have no idea what she thinks it means, but the other night we had a five minute conversation that consisted of both of us saying "gm-tkum" back and forth to each other, with various intonations. She seemed satisfied that she was getting her point across.