Buttercup English

Now that Buttercup is talking, we hear lots of Lugandan words that we don't know, some Luganda words that we recognize, quite a few Lugandan words that we don't recognize but we actually do know, all peppered together with English bits and pieces, some of which sound like English.  She still has that adorable toddler habit of speaking each word or each tiny phrase with a complete stop afterwords, so everything sounds like many tiny sentences after each other.

"Mama, you see" is her preferred way of drawing my attention to things.  When we were in the national park, even after the older children got tired of looking up for each new scattering of buffalo or kob, Buttercup still said "mama, you see.... BAH-flo!" each time there was one out the window.  But lest one feel too proud of exposing her to the glories of spectacular animals, the entire way home she still kept pointing out the window and crying "mama, you see .... goat!"

When I see something, assuming it is not a buffalo, I should probably give it to her.  When "mama, you see, abananana" I am not supposed to merely admire it, I am supposed to put in in her mouth.

But much of the time, the things that "you see" are in Luganda, and I don't know whether or not I've seen them.  When out the window, I admire them anyway and she is satisfied, but she is less satisfied with the going-in-mouth you-sees.  I spent an entire day trying to figure out the Luganda word "macha," as in "mama, you see macha."  Finally, I realized it was amazzi, which means "water," and I know the word perfectly well.  (In fact, it was my first word I used to make myself understood when the person really didn't know English.)  "Macha" isn't a dialectical pronunciation, it's just two-year-old-ese.  

How do we give her a "tabu"?  Is it something at the table?  No, it's a book, "echitabo" (another Luganda word I know).  On the other hand, I had almost figured out the context for the new Luganda word something like "ayagoo," before I realized it was just repeating "here you go." 

Her sister speaks to her a great deal in English that she learns from school, and now she's hearing English all around her.  Buttercup still responds much more quickly to "jiangoo" than "come here," but the English words are starting to pepper in, just like we're starting to pepper in the Luganda words that she uses all the time.  Thus we have adorable phrases like "njiango... pot-tee.  Njiango... pot-tee," as she is headed to the bathroom.  (The "n" prefix is "I," jiango" is "go."  "Do you need to go potty?"  "I go potty.")

African English adds extra vowels to blunt and boring English words, to make it flow like Italian or Spanish.  The best example is the local word for our holy book... the Bayabuli.  Make sense?  Say it out loud.  Usually, for fluent speakers, they just add an extra -i or -o here or there at the ends of phrases or on important words, or where the English is just impossibly ugly, but Buttercup has taken this to it's full conclusion.  Single-syllable words do not exist.  It is food-oo and foot-sa and fish-a and going-y.  It's also elephant-y and 

Oh, and then there are the backwards words.  I remember quite a while how Buttercup liked to point out to me all the flowers, but now she points out the umbrellas.  Everywhere.  All the umbrellas on trees and shrubgs, and the vases full of nice umbrellas.  And we spent an entire boat trip learning to call the colorful creatures with wings "birds" instead of "fish."  Not that they were "birds" or "f