Monday, April 4, 2022

Topics in Koa as a Second Language

My seven-year-old daughter Eleanor seems to be a born linguist -- a phonetician in particular -- and it's been fascinating and heartwarming in a way I definitely never expected to experience as she's gotten increasingly interested in Koa and started making an effort to speak it with me over the past six months.

For some reason bedtime tends to be when Koa drifts into our conversations, and it's impossible to describe the emotions when this little daughter of mine says unprompted -- as she often does now -- Ivo koa, mama. Ni loha se! "Goodnight, mama. I love you!" Recently she started counting our goodnight kisses and hugs: ena, lua, tatu, nei...

Today Eleanor took in the fact that Koa adjectives come after their nouns instead of before, and after a moment of amused delight, seemingly accepted and integrated it as she started to use that syntax effortlessly (anu kuma "hot water"). Last night she struggled for a moment with Koa's distinction between singular and plural "you," but again mastered it seemingly without effort. I've never been in a language class with kids this young before, and though with a lifetime of linguistics background I know about ease of learning at a younger age in theory, I've never seen this myself and it's just astonishing.

What's most salient to me, though, is what I'm learning about my own language's phonology through my daughter's ear. Eleanor has always been unusually perceptive about phonetics both in hearing and production (I remember her at 3 explaining the difference between Spanish and English no in a way that would have fit right in in an undergraduate linguistics class) and in her Koa I've discovered the following so far:

* Koa stops are unaspirated
* /o/ is closer than I might have expected, as she's occasionally confusing it with /u/
* My /l/ apparently sometimes approaches some kind of alveolar flap! This isn't necessarily surprising in theory given that /l/ is Koa's only liquid, but I certainly never did this intentionally.

I'm really hoping Eleanor might be able to help me figure out what's going on with /h/, actually, which I've been noticing some instability with lately. Depending on the day, it seems like one of three scenarios is happening: (1) that the onset of voicing in a /hV/ sequence is delayed potentially throughout the duration of the vowel, to the point that hake "search" can come out sounding like [ḁke] or even [ḁʰke]; or (2) that the onset of voicing occurs early, voicing the onset as in [ɦake]; or (3) sort of a combination of the two, where the /h/ is colored into breathy voice which then spreads through the vowel à la Gujarati: [a̤ke]. I'm very curious to discover what's apparently already occurred in the "natural" development of this language!

Possibly even more thrilling, Eleanor -- who already loves to "invent" fairy and animal languages, speaking them in fluent and phonologically coherent gibberish -- helped me create her first word today! She wanted to say "safety" but I didn't have a "safe" root yet, so she suggested lapa and I entered it into the books then and there. She continues to seem genuinely excited about the opportunity to contribute to the creation of this language, and I'm equally excited to suddenly have such an enthusiastic partner in what has until now been an entirely solo pursuit. I just could never have imagined that my daughter and I might find ourselves here.

Incidentally, "Koa as a Second Language" would seem to translate as le Koa mo Cimi Lúasi (KCL), should there ever be a need to refer to this important subject more efficiently.

No comments: