Thursday, July 23, 2015

jeux de mots avec Griffin

Griffin loves to play with words in all three of his languages--he tells and invents jokes, plays word games, does crossword puzzles and word searches, and even makes up puns.  Here's his best one in French so far--I am soooo happy that he has fun doing this sort of thing!

Maman : Oh, non, je me suis trompée. [Oh, no, I was wrong.]

Griffin: No, Mom, you're not all wet!  ["Trempée," soaked, is pronounced the same way as "trompée," wrong.]

Maman: [giggles appreciatively]

Griffin, on a roll: And you're not an elephant, either!  You're not "trompée" !  You don't have a trompe ! ["une trompe" is an elephant's trunk; he turned the noun into a new adjective, "trunked."]

(Okay, so I guess you had to be there.)

Here's one more example.  During a long car ride on vacation, Griffin and my mom and I were playing "Last Letter/First Letter" in French.  (One person says a word, and then the next player says a word that begins with the last letter of the previous word, and so on.)

After a while, they were getting stuck on "E" and "R," both of which appear very frequently in French.  Knowing that the words for some animals' young are formed by adding a suffix like -on (ourson, chaton) or -eau (éléphanteau, souriceau), Griffin started adding these suffixes to words where they don't belong, and in such a confident voice that my mother believed that words like rhinocéroseau (baby rhino) actually existed!

(Again, you had to be there--but I'm really glad that I was.)

5 comments:

  1. I am so excited (and jealous) by all of these!
    I casually mentioned to my French friend as we were talking about camping in the backyard "Ouais, l'idée ne m'a jamais trop "tente"ée! (Silence, she did not even realize the pun and somehow didn't notice when I elbowed her and grinned).
    Just had to share that one with someone. Keep up the good work with Griffin!

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