He said it again: Poonis!
Dressed for speed with a fresh diaper and bare feet, he ran from bedroom to bedroom chanting, Poonis! Poonis! Like two words in one, proof that imagination is more powerful than knowledge.
Openness to sound and the blurred understanding of sense: the same fertility that makes kids so much better than adults when it comes to learning multiple languages also makes it easier for them to say things that mean nothing at all. Sometimes they are trying to imitate and missing the mark. Sometimes all that matters is play.
My relatively fluent three year-old is having a renaissance of linguistic wonder as we work our way through my collection of CDs. If it has words, most of the music on my shelves comes in languages other than English. It’s not that Eliot’s exposure to this music is new: he heard the Gypsy Kings, Ali Farka Toure, and plenty of Gaelic in the womb. But now I believe he knows English well enough that he has begun to sort other sounds from the limited collection he hears from his mother and me.
For months he was focused exclusively on Latin music. He has his own names for many of the bands on that shelf. Elvis Crespo is known in our house as ‘That Guy.’ The Buena Vista Social Club is known as ‘The Other Guys.’ The men of the legendary Chilean band Inti Illimani are known as ‘The Guys That Sneak Up On Me.’ The bands on Putumayo’s collection of Colombian music are collectively known as ‘Cumbya Guys.’
But Eliot’s names for the bands are more a reflection of what his parents allow to stick than they are of his adventures in language. For that, we get into the singing.
We listen to this music over and over in the car. He imitates lines from most of the discs, some with enough clarity that I can understand. I heard him say this the other day: “A caballo vamos pa monte.” Let’s ride horses to the mountains.
He has no idea what he is saying, and I harbor no hope or delusion that this will develop into bilingualism. What Eliot hears has no context to connect those words to reality, no living give and take to illustrate cause and effect. It’s all about the sounds.
I remember one night in Ecuador walking back from the bars with a group of students from the Central university in Quito as one boy in a black leather jacket and with slicked back hair sang entire Frank Sinatra songs which he had memorized sound by sound. “Strangers in the night . . .” he would sing in dead-on mimic of the Chairman of the Board, “exchanging glances . . .” Then he would look at me and ask, “Que significa eso?”
So sometimes Eliot asks what The Other Guys are saying, and I tell him in Spanish, and he asks, but what does it mean? So I tell him of the flames in Tula’s room, where it’s getting hot because the girl went to sleep without blowing out the candle. He lets the double entendre go by and focuses on the last word.
“Candle, you say. I see.”
His favorite music du jour comes from the late Egyptian wedding singer Ali Hassan Kuban, a man who built fame blending Arabic lyrics with Nubian tunes, adding western instruments, and setting it all to pumped up rhythms. Not that Eliot knows or cares about any of that. But he cannot resist the drums and trumpets and relentless exuberance. We take the disc everywhere we go, and after what must be 100 hearings he imitates verses and asks, “what are they saying?”
I don’t know that language, I tell him, and then I wonder what must be his understanding of the term Language. A different dimension, surely, a code so dense even Daddy can’t break it. But Eliot does not care. “Nazsh deeling a na dink-a. . . . .” he sings without restraint, then asks, “Do you know this song, Dad?”
Maybe it is a fatherly shortcoming that, having exposed him to this range of music, I do not pounce on the curiosity and steer it toward a structure that will capitalize on it in an educational way, to make the American baby that can speak seven languages at the same time and make them all rhyme and head to the Middle East to straighten things out.
But that seems like a lot of pressure. Maybe the sound alone will broaden his mind.