Re: Conlang baby-talk

On 27 Jan, Christophe Grandsire wrote:

> En réponse à Sally Caves <scaves@...>:
>
> > it
> > seemed utterly ridiculous to me: "come here, my little choo choo train."
> >  I
> > knew it wasn't logical (the cat in no way behaved like a steam engine or
> > a
> > train).  Later I wondered if it was an extension of French "chou,"
> > "mon
> > chou," which often gets extended to "chou chou"-- which in an
> > Anglophonic
> > environment could get extended to "choo choo train."  Christophe could
> > probably expand on this!
>
> Well, the French onomatopoeia for "train" is indeed "Tchou tchou"
/tSutSu/, but
> I would never have connected it to "chouchou" /SuSu/ ;)) . Count on
English-
> speaking people to do strange things like that ;))) .
    It gets even stranger, Christophe, as evidenced by the following
[very bad]  joke:

Parent to child: What does T-O-O spell?
Child:  /tu/.
Parent: And what is one plus one?
Child: /tu/.
Parent: And who wrote Tom Sawyer?
Child: /twejn/.
Parent: Now say it all together!
Child: [obvious result! ;-) ]
Parent: Very good! Tomorrow I'll teach
            you how to say "airplane"!

[Now all together --- groan!  :-)  ]


> The cliche of children without teeth having difficulties to
> pronounce sibilants
    Just thought I'd be pedantic and point out that it's no cliche.
Just yesterday I was struggling with trying to get sibilants
from a little girl who had a number of teeth missing! She kept
sticking her tongue through the gaps and /s/ and /z/ kept
coming out as distorted versions of /T/ and /D/!
    OTOH, it _is_ possible to produce them without teeth.
I've even seen a (speech therapy documentary) movie
where a man _without a tongue_ managed to make acceptable-
sounding "sibilants" (to this day, I still can't understand how he did it!)

    The rest of the post was very fascinating!

ObConlang:
    rtemmu doesn't really have "baby talk". The closest thing
to it would be the "endearment" suffix   -xual. (To be used
with care around diabetics! ;-)   )When placed at the end
of a word, it adds a flavor of
"aw, isn't that/aren't you  cute/sweet/etc."

Dan Sulani
--------------------------------------------------------------
likehsna rtem zuv tikuhnuh auag inuvuz vaka'a

A word is an awesome thing.

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