Saturday, November 05, 2005

Launguage Bloopers

The word for and in Mongolain is "bac," pronounced "bas." We begin every day with conversation, usually about what we did the day before. As you can imagine, my conversation generally includes my girls. I often find myself saying "maggie bac lydia." Jeremy and I get a good laugh out of this as it often computes in my mind as "maggie boss Lydia!!!!"

One of the first words the girls learned in Mongolian we heard them saying around the house in a typical child sing-song voice. It happened to be "baexgue," which is the mongol word for "have not." It was then that I realized that 1. they didn't know what they were saying, and 2. the reason they had picked up on this was probably due to the fact that their mongolian caregiver was repeating it as often as they asked for a forbidden item such as gum, cookie, candy. . .the list goes on:) (Stranger things have happened--we came home one day and asked the girls what they had had for lunch to which they replied "cookie dough"!!!!!!) I had made cookies and put some dough in the refridgerator for another day.

We are beginning to learn handwriting instead of printing. We actually pronounced the capital as "Ulaanbammar" when trying to decipher the writing. We thought print was difficult! Upper case B is a mongol V. Handwritten lowercase g is a mongol d. Lower case p is a mongol r. T's look just like english m's. Handwritten mongol e's look like an english u. And our personal favorite is the letter N which is written just like an english H. What an adventure!

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