Tim is a chatterbox. He talks constantly -- to himself, to us, pointing at things, asking about things, asking for things, or just letting us know. Thing is, none of what he says comes out of his mouth in a language that we recognize as English (nor French). It's pure Timguistics. Whatever; it's damn cute. And because he uses quite specific syllables for specific things, we've been able to decode quite a lot of what he's saying so far.
Most spectacular is his "word" for berries. (Strawberries or blueberries interchangeably; they are among his favourite foods.) Most simply it would be written phonetically as "bugga-bugga-bug". But listen closely and there's actually a subtle "L" sound in there: buggla-buggla-bug. But even that doesn't do it justice, because the way he forms that hard "g" sound is complex and fantastic. It sort of starts at the back of his mouth near the throat, rolls out along the tongue where he flips it against his teeth and rolls it back to where it started. Try as we might, none of us can quite replicate it. It sounds so crazy and wonderful that we feed him more berries than any child should reasonably eat, just so we can hear him say it.
And I managed to capture him asking for berries on video (because I taped a whole lunchtime the other day). If I ever manage to find the cord for my video camera, along with the time to edit out the clip of Tim's pronunciation, I'll share with you the glory of buggla-buggla-bug.
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