Bbwi

I realize there is a fine line between enjoying and making fun of a child's first words, and I readily admit to more often than not falling on the jester's side, but hey, at least I can employ my linguistic training to do so with a level of sophisticated professionalism. I'm sure Grace will appreciate that.

As a linguist, of course, I have to get technical by first over-pondering questions such as "What is the definition of a word?" and "How many recognizable repetitions constitute its realization of having completed the process of standardization in the infant's conscience?" and, of course, "What level of phonological variation would be tolerated?" I'm sure all normal parents wrestle with these issues so I need not go further.

Well, I have officially identified Grace's first word, and as you will see, it is a beauty - "bbwi." The double /bb/ at the beginning of the word is what I am using to represent the bilabial trill. That's right. Grace, no doubt wanting to make her daddy proud, chose a very cool sound to begin her first word. Y'all with Spanish influence around you know about, and are likely frustrated by, alveolar trills, that is, the Spanish "rolled" /r/. Grace's trill is in that same category except instead of occurring inside the mouth, with the tongue slapping the roof of the mouth, she chose to bring her trill out in the open with the her two lips flapping in the wind. Yes, though we might better recognize it as a poor sound effect for a motorcycle engine, the voiced bilabial trill is an actual linguistic sound used in some languages to create words. Apparently, Grace feels that she is living in one of those languages.

But she didn't stop there! Her two lips bouncing out of control wasn't quite enough lip-action to communicate what she was aiming for, so she added a common linguistic feature known as labialization, that is the /w/ that transitions from the trilled consonant /bb/ and into the vowel which then carries the syllable nucleus. I suspect that this labialization is due to assimilation to the sounds she hears in the Gmz language all around us, as labialization is very common for them as well. As a budding linguist, she was obviously very quick to pick up on that. That's my girl!

Lastly, the vowel. I have transcribed it here as an /i/ (which makes the sound of /ee/ as in /bee/), but often this vowel tends to centralize in the vowel space into something more resembling a /ə/ (which makes the sound of /uh/ as in /well huh/). Centralization of vowels is yet another common feature of the Gmz language, over which much academic ink has already been spilled. I figure by the time Grace starts kindergarten she will have cracked its mystery and presented a paper or two on the topic at academic forums across Africa and Europe.

So what does bbwi mean? Well, assuming that I was able to get the video loaded onto this post, you can likely see for yourself how this magnificently designed word finds meaning in the language of Grace. Her pronunciation in this particular take isn't quite complete, but her actions pretty well show what she means by it! If the video doesn't load or if it isn't clear to you, then think about it. What concept, highly important to an 11 month-old, deserves such a triple labialized word? It's absolute brilliance!