Baby talk!

Karan's vocabulary has increased quite a lot these days and I wanted to list down here for posterity some of K's commonly used "words".

For favourite foods
cheej - for cheese

paata- for pasta and also for pata (malayalam for cockroach)

ich - for fish (which quite morbidly also happens to be his favourite animal to watch. he once was looking at virtual fish which my brother downloaded for him and wanted to feed the fish he was eating to the virtual fish)

atta - f0r motta (egg in mallu, which he always accompanies with the action of banging his head - he always has an almost "motta thala" - bald head and i think that was the inspiration for the said action to depict what he is asking for. motta is his favourite food and he insists on greeting my maid everyone morning with this.)

For animals
G - for giraffe (why do you people have such long names for animals)

ippo - for hippopotamus (see ibid)

aana - for elephant (this is actually the mallu word for elephant and he says it beautifully)

abwa - for dog (derived from the sound the dog makes - as in bow bow.)

poocha - mallu for cat. (this is also the only word k knows both malayalam and english for...although he says caat in a very mally drawl giving away his mallu lineage to any passerby.

For favourite places
ammacha or aju - why ofcourse for ammacha and "aju's" (anju's) house!

eech or cheech - for the beach

ub - for tub (all water bodies are favourite hang out places for k)

taaji- for magic hat, his creche, although i dont know if i can term it as one of his favourite places, he is quite enthu these days to go there.

for modes of transport
caa - for car ofcourse

uch -for bus (if you haven't got baby talk yet, we are having a little trouble with the letter "s" and permutations of that darned letter)

oto - for auto rickshaws

byche - guess what for?

scooter - very nicely i might add ( he is slowly beginning to identify the difference between a byche and a scooter)

chi - for plane (dont ask me, i have no idea where that came from)

for favourite songs
atatata - for happy birthday to you. (he keeps mentioning different people's names and we are supposed to sing happy birthday to whomever he has picked, which is sometimes hard cos he picks about 3 people in 3 breaths!

uch - for wheels of the bus and hush little baby, and he shakes his head violently if you start off on the wrong one.

ba ba - for ba ba black sheep, although if said to my mother, he means "robert barns, fellow mine!"

ka ka - for kake kake ( a mallu song about a "ka ka" - crow)

for exclamations
yeah! (always said with both hands raised and usually used when a visit to the beach has been mentioned.)

ooh gad (this is my personal favourite. it took me some time to figure out what this was - but when the phone suddenly rang the other day and he got a bit startled he used the term and i figured out that he was saying oh god! with a very yank accident! obviously he has picked this phrase up from his mother who keeps calling the lords name in vain, specially when her first born has made a major mess on the floor or has climbed up somewhere dangerously high! i laughed so hard when i figured out that he kept repeating it to make me laugh some more. i guess parents are the only ones who say and do things to make their kids laugh - it works vice versa too)