The Little Linguist

My son is a genius!! Yes, I just said it out loud, and nobody can do nothin' about it.

We had stir-fried Udon noodles for dinner tonight. Kai took the noodles out to spell his name on the table. "K! A! I! Kai!" This kid has been spelling his name since he was 2.5, so I was not super impressed or thrilled. "Mm-hmm," I answered with a mouthful of noodles.

"Mommy, what does..... K-I-A spell?"

"Kia."

"Hee Hee. That sounds funny. What does... I-K-A spell?"

"Ika."

Then he tried EVERY possible combination of the three letters and asked me what they spelt. Kia, Ika, aik, iak... and all the way back to Kai. I may be remembering things wrong, but it seemed to me that he was doing it systematically.

It totally blew my mind!! How does he understand that different sequences yields different results? Moreover, he was totally fascinated by the different sounds of those "words".

At the end of this game, he shared the results of his observation: "Mommy, I is 'i', A is 'a', and AI is 'I'."

I wanted to contact the Head of the Linguistics Department at UBC and tell him/her about this.

"But," the little linguist pondered, "Mommy, your name is K-A-T-E......" he looked away for a moment. Then he looked back at me with a big grin, "You're not Kate. You're Ka-tee because A is 'a' and E is 'ee'. Silly mommy. Hahahahahahahaha!"

note to self: it's time to teach him the "rules" of English spelling and about long and short vowels.

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