I have a question. Or a thought, really. An observation?

[conuly]

Ana tends to add an -a to certain verbs:

I pick-a up book!
No take-a nap! (When if it hadn't been one of those verbs, it would've not had an "a" in there)
You read-a da book.

It's not all verbs she does this with - she says she wants to turn off the light, not turna off, for example.

Does anybody have any idea why she might possibly be doing this? It's very confusing.

Comments

[conuly]

Why does everybody think I'm worried? I'm not. I'm honestly just curious as to what is going on. It's not just a "language quirk" with no explanation. There is an explanation as to what is going on in her head when she does this, and I want to know what it is! God!

[leora.livejournal.com]

A lot of people do worry. The problem is that finding out what is going on in her head would be massively difficult. If you had recordings of large amounts of what she's been exposed to, it might be decipherable, but kids aren't usually able to explain it themselves and tracking down a source tends not to be feasible since kids get exposed to so much. So, people just learn to shrug and go - well, it'll sort itself out, since that is what happens.

Maybe she's been confusing some of the articles other people use as parts of verbs. I noticed that she doesn't seem to be properly using articles yet. So, maybe she just needs to sort out the word breaks and get the concept of articles.

[conuly]

*grins*

Yeah, I know, figuring out *exactly* what she's thinking would be hard - but any speculation would be useful, because then I could listen more closely to see if it fits this pattern or that.

For example, for a while there I thought the -a took the place of a preposition, which seemed to fit, since it was either verb, one syllable preposition, rest of sentence - but then I heard "pick-a up". So that idea, already not that great (it irked me on a deep-down level) is shot.