Milk?

Anyone have an idea of why Helena Iara laughs her head off when I say the word "Milk?"

Language(s)

There are loads of differences between when I grew up and now, and I certainly don't mean to belabor them with tales of walking 10 miles through the snow on the way to school, uphill both ways.  But one thing that does really strike me is how easy it has become to be a cosmopolitan baby (which I mean in the Kantian, not the fashion magazine, sense): to live across borders.  Helena does that literally whenever we fly from Brazil to the US or back, but she also does it every night.

Rita is getting Helena ready for bed as I write, singing this lullaby we ran across on youtube, purely by chance:

Neither Rita nor I have learned the lyrics in Turkish very well, but we can at least do the "Dandini, Dandini" bit enough for Helena to calm down as night approaches.  Helena's other favorite videos are mostly Italian, like Il Katalikammello and Il Gato Puzzilone.

I compare this to a story my mother tells about a trip she took into Cincinnati with her grandmother; both lived in small town Kentucky, and the "big city" was out of the usual.  My great-grandmother saw two Mexican kids on the street speaking Spanish and said, "Wow, those kids are so smart!"

"Why do you say that?" my mother asked.

"Only two or three years old, and already speaking a foreign language."


I don't think that Helena will even grow up with the idea of "mine" as opposed to "foreign."  Her world is different.  How, I'm not entirely sure, but very different.

Photos of spring

Playing

When Helena was six or seven months old, my parents bought a Johnny Jump-Up for her; in fact, the thing is called a Sassy Seat, but the basic idea is the same: a baby sits in a harness hanging from a door frame, and jumps and swings.  To me, it always looked like great fun.

Back then, Helena liked the toy.  Liked it, but wasn't fascinated by it.  She would sit and hang in it from time to time, enjoying swinging back and forth, but there wasn't much jumping.  I put the seat away in the box that said "Made so that babies can strengthen their legs for walking and running, and improve balance and coordination."

Last week, Helena saw the Johnny Jump-Up, now stored away in her room here in Brazil, and then pointed to it.  "You want to play in that?" I asked, to which she nodded enthusiastically.  I set it up, she got in, and jump, jump, jump, with huge smiles on her face.  Now that the toy was part its date, past the time when she needed to "strengthen her legs for waling and running," now the toy made for joyful fun.

Perhaps I'm generalizing from scant evidence (though, after all, what is this blog, if not that?), but I wonder if the story of the Johnny Jump-Up doesn't tell us something really important about play and learning.  Today, in the United States at least, toys have to be for something.  They teach some skill, strengthen muscles, make babies more intelligent... the whole propaganda campaigns of toy companies are now built around the pedagogical capacity of things kids once just did for fun.  And it isn't just the US: I don't know how many school reform books I've read in Latin America about how kids have to "play to learn."

Here's the problem, though: the basic point of play is that it is pointless.  Not that we don't have reasons or goals within the game, nor that it is senseless, but it is play exactly because it is sufficient until itself.  I play because I like it, because it makes me smile; sometimes, I just play because I play.  When there is a goal outside the game, it actually detracts from play: if I play soccer just so I can get a scholarship to college, it's almost like I'm breaking the rules.  The pointless nature of play is one of the major points of genius of Calvin and Hobbes, especially the sport of Calvinball.

None of this is to say that play and games don't have consequences: they do.  They strengthen legs and teach coordination and keep us from dying of heart disease.  Soccer probably helped me get into college at Williams, made me friends at Harvard and in favelas all over Latin America... but these are all by-products.  In philosophical jargon, they ensue, but they cannot be pursued.  The moment these things become the point of play, the goal of the game, then the game is no longer self-sufficient, no longer complete... no longer fun.

When Helena started to play in the Johnny Jump-Up, she loved it because now she was competent in balance and strength, because she knows how to run and jump.  She loved to play in it because she no longer needed it.

There's something in this experience to teach me about my work, too.  When any of us in the non-profit world write a proposal for funding, we have to say what we're going to do and what the results will be.  Not a bad exercise; it makes us think and plan.  But this year, I did a major evaluation of Shine a Light's work over the last decade, and it's fascinating to see that we did most of what we proposed... but of the real impact on kids' lives, on public policy, on the organizations we worked with, we didn't play for any of it.  It ensued as a by-product, a by-product that turned out to me more important than anything we had planned for.

I like to think that education should always be like that.  There are plans, but in the end, the lessons will surprise everyone, even the educator.

"Where's her mommy?"

A couple of days ago, Helena Iara and I were playing in the living room, when she found a tiny rag doll.  It's a very simple thing, just arms and legs and head and eyes, and Rita bought it when we were in Chiapas, Mexico, five or six years ago.  But what matters to the story here is that the baby is part of a pair: there is also a mommy doll, and they are always together (they were first sewn together, but as happens with curious babies, Helena seems to have picked them apart).

So what did Helena do, upon finding the doll?  A worried expression came over her face, and she began to say "Mommy?  Mommy?" but not with the sort of voice she uses to call Rita.  She walked around the room, looking in the toy box, on the sofa, other places where the mommy doll might be.  She only came to smile again when she found the other doll.

Who knows how many ethical systems philosophers have thought up over the thousands of years since Aristotle talked about finding virtue in the middle between two extremes.  Kant and the duty to the moral law, Mill's utility, Levinas and the face...  But I'd put a good bet on the first step of any ethical system being empathy, feeling for a baby who has lost his mommy.  Maybe both the baby and the mommy are just cloth, but it means something.

Boots

"Bota bota," Helena Iara said this morning as she woke up, and then pointed to the door, as she does when she want to leave the room and go out into the world.  A simple event in the life of a little girl, but as I walked through the jungle this morning, climbing the little mountain behind our house, it occurred to me that this little exchange says something very important about language and meaning.

There's an important back-story here: about three months ago, Rita bought Helena a pair of boots.  Helena loved to wear them, but she also loved (and still loves) to say the word "bota," boot.  Soon, she began to use that word to refer to lots of other things: shoes and sandals, soon even feet, the paws of a stuffed lion, or the hairy pods of a cockroach in one of her children's books.  This is a process that linguists call semantic overreach: kids learn a word and begin to apply it to everything that sort of fits the category, until they learn to shave off the extraneous meanings and get to something closer to the way other people use words.  The most common example is that a "doggie" or "bow-wow" can refer to anything with hair, anything with four feet, anything that barks or growls... until Mom and Dad explain that "dog" is a much more limited concept.

Lots of Helena's words work like this.  "Up" (which she says in English) means "lift me up" as well as the direction up, and it also the way she refers to the teeter-totter in the park.  "Mana", a mis-speaking of banana, also means any other fruit she likes, from guavas to mangos (apples, strangely enough, get their own word).  And the most interesting case is "bola" (ball), which started out meaning ball and then moved on to round fruit.  As she learned that oranges and mandarins are not, in fact, balls, she began to push the meaning of "bola" in new directions: round ceramic flower-pots made sense, but then "bola" moved on to mean other things that are fun to do: dolls and cars and even her swing win cries of "bola." Then, "bola" moved on to mean "cake" and "waffle", because the word for those things in Portuguese is "bolo" (o instead of a, but maybe she can't hear the difference), and though she knows that a cake is different from a ball, she likes both of them.  By now, "bola" has become a fascinating semantic tangle, meaning almost anything that Helena likes a lot.

Which brings us back to "bota", and then pointing to the door.  "Bota," we've come to learn, doesn't just mean footwear.  It also means "walking".  Then from walking, she extended "bota" to mean going outside and seeing the world (her favorite activity), and perhaps even the abstract concept of freedom (she'll sometimes say "bota" as she pulls her hand out of mine or Rita as we try to help/control her).  So as she woke this morning and said "bota", she didn't just mean, "put my shoes on," but also "and then let's go out in the garden and look at flowers and run around and don't think that I'll hold your hand the whole time, either!"  Which is, by the way, what she and Rita are doing as I write this blog.

When linguists and philosophers of language distinguish between denotation (the dictionary definition of a word ) and connotation (the associations that spring to mind because of the word), valuing the first, and saying that connotations are derivative and mushy and not at all serious.  But a baby's use of language (if Helena is an example) seems to say exactly the opposite: connotation comes first.  "Boot" means freedom before the word is cut down and shaved into meaning just "footwear that covers the ankles."

So bota bota.  I'm off for a walk.

Why words?

Today, as Helena and I walked to the beach, she bow-wowed at every dog we saw, meowed at every cat, and even tried a neigh at the horse tied up in the wetlands by the dunes.  She makes the same sounds when she sees animals in her picture books: a couple of posts ago, I suggested that she is naming the animals in a kind of onomotopeia, but today as she and I talked, I reconsidered.

One of Helena's favorite videos right now is a Italian song about the sounds animals make: Il croccodrillo como fa?, and she loves another video that just shows animals and the sounds they make... What's interesting, though, is to watch how she gets scared at the sound of certain animals: yes, the crocodile, but also the cicada and the certain birds.  And as she and I talked as we walked to the beach today, I realized that (at least in the videos), she never gets scared by the animals whose sounds she knows how to make.

In the history of the West, at least since the Greeks, the role of language is to represent: words refer to things, and we judge their truth based on whether or not they reflect what's there in the world truly.  And though it might seem that Helena uses "bow-wow" to refer to a dog, honestly I don't think that's what she is doing.  I think there is something much more complicated and interesting going on here.

According to Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, while European epistemology (the science of how we know what we know) is based on ideas of reference and signification, Amazonian Indians see truth not as representation, but as a shift in perspective.  The shaman doesn't know the jaguar by studying it from outside, but by learning to look through the eyes of the jaguar.  One of the techniques that Amazonian shamans use to see through the eyes of the other is sound: one tribe will "steal" the songs of another and then sing them to try to understand the perspective of their enemy (in Araweté, strikingly, the word for "enemy" literally translates as "future music".).

Let's add another element here: understanding is one way to overcome our fear.  Just giving a thing a name can help, but the better we understand the motivations, the experience, the perspective of what frightens us, the less we fear it.

 I wonder, then, if Helena Iara making the sound of animals that scare her, isn't living out the Guaraní heritage of her middle name.  Helena used to be fascinated and terrified by dogs, but since she has learned to say "bow-wow," both naming them and putting their voice in her mouth, the terror has subsided.  She makes a sound, incarnates their perspective (even if in a very superficial way), and comes to fear them less.

If she's really doing this, she's pretty darn clever.