Who cares what language I use? I am Toddler and must be obeyed!

Griffin started talking in January 2009 with the words you would expect--Dada, Mama, uh-oh, arf. He had four general categories of words: people's names, sounds, nouns in French, and nouns in English. (Verbs and adjectives arrived much later, and we're still waiting for pronouns, prepositions, articles, and adverbs.) He would learn one word in either French or English and use it with everyone, regardless of what language they spoke with him. (This was fine and dandy for words like ball, soup, and panda, which sound more or less the same in both.)

With rare exceptions, everyone around Griffin speaks English to him except me, so it's no surprise that he says more words in English than in French. On the other hand, I spend more time one-on-one with him than anyone else, so it makes sense that many of his early words in French described elements of a baby's daily routine: couche (diaper), lolo (breast milk), dodo (sleep), pain (bread), biscuit (cookie/cracker).

Because I tended to use words like these constantly and contextually, it was easy for my husband and his parents to understand Griffin when he asked for something basic. (In fact, Ed uses the words himself now, eg "Griffin, you can have lolo after I change your couche.")

It's only the past two weeks that Griffin has shown us that he can refer to the same object with different words in the two languages. When he wants Ed to hold his hand, he says "hand" to him, but he'll turn to me and say "main." When he needs to be changed, he takes a clean diaper to his daddy and says "diaper," but he uses the word "couche" with me. His grasp on numbers and how they work is still quite tenuous, but he seems to use French-like sounds with me ("dooo," "cat," deeeese," "douche") and Englishy ones with others ("foh," "sih," "ay," "den"). When Ed and I both took him to the pumpkin patch, he learned to say both "pumpkin" and "citrouille" (the latter is quite difficult to pronounce--see-twroo-ee-yah--so he tends to use "pumpkin" more frequently even around me). In his newest pair, "all done" has joined "fini."

In most areas, though, he sticks with what he knows best, even if it seems arbitrary to the rest of us: "please" but "merci," "awwwww" (which means elephant and airplane--you have to watch for the hand sign to know which one he wants), "pomme" (apple) but "bean-bean" (usually refers to peas, though can also be green beans or black beans), "marche" (walk) but "jump."

This is SO much fun to observe and try to figure out!

French underwear

That title caught your attention, didn't it?

(First let me take a moment to welcome the visitors who googled "French underwear" and were very disappointed to land on a website about language learning. No, don't leave so soon! You just got here! I don't think you're all perverts, really I don't.)

Because I haven't been around many native French speakers since Griffin was born, I rely on dictionaries, wordreference.com, and one child-rearing book in French to brush up my vocabulary. There are SO many essential words and phrases concerning babies and toddlers that I never learned in college! ("Griffin had a diaper blow-out all over his onsie while he was sitting in his bouncy seat," for example, or "We can tell that Griffin's entering the Terrible Twos by the increase of frequency and volume of his tantrums and the amount of yogurt that ends up on the floor during every meal as he conducts experiments in physics despite our assurance that yogurt is delicious and gravity still works, no you don't need to check just in case. Oh, and also because of the number of times we look out the front window to see if there are any Gypsies passing to whom we could sell him. Cheap.")

Anyway, this vocabulary word has been on my mind for a couple of weeks, ever since we started reading Un petit pot pour un grand garcon (a board book whose title translates as "A Little Potty for a Big Boy") and the grand garcon in question proudly wears his big-boy underpants at the end of the book. His "culotte." His culotte?

Now, when I lived in France and had to shop for unmentionables, I learned that men wear a slip and women wear a culotte. Hang on--so boys wear culottes too, but graduate to slips as they age? (What do little girls start off with, then? Culottettes?) Or have I just missed out on on the latest Continental cutting-edge undergarment lingo during this past decade and a half in the States?

It's not that we're starting to potty train Griffin--nowhere near that. But he likes to help me sort laundry and identify the garments, and right now he refers to both his father's and my underwear as a slip. I don't want to keep reminding him that my underthings are culottes if he's later going to get confused when his undies look like Daddy's but have the same name as Maman's. The dictionaries I have consulted only complicate matters. (I should have expected that--wasn't it the French who invented, or at least named, lingerie?)

So someone, please, take pity on me and my undergarment nomenclature dilemma (and my poor readers who have been subjected to waaaaay more paragraphs about undies than is appropriate for a G-rated blog with an educational bent). Would a native or near-native speaker of French familiar with men's, women's, and children's underwear please let me know what to call the darn things?

Thanks. I promise I won't write about this topic again for at least another year.