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This is me

Addendum: I was wrong about the word ah-pey in my previous post. Or actually, I was right at the time but now outdated. But more on that in a moment. First: new photos! Yessir, finally more photos. I've cleared some back log, so if you can't wait, check out the following:

As for the addendum. In my previous post, I was talking about the word ah-pey, which sounds a bit like appel and aardbei. The meaning has now become completely clear: the word appel means fruit. Min Yi uses it for apples, strawberries, but also for bananas!

An interesting phenomenon, and one that caused me to reread part of a book called "Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things" by George Lakoff, a book about categorization and cognitive models. A book so thick with information that I haven't even completely read it yet! However, I remembered something about "basic-level categorization", mentioned at the very beginning of this book. "Basic-level categorization" is the theory that the way humans categorize the world is more than just a simple hierarchical structure of categories, of buckets within buckets. The categories are structured in such a way that the cognitively basic categories are "in the middle". You could, for example, have a hierarchy thing - plastic object - pen - red pen - red pen that I picked up as a goodie somewhere. Each term in this hierarchy describes the same thing at a different level of categorization, and somewhere "in the middle", probably pen in this case, would be the basic-level category.

Lakoff cites Roger Brown in his book Social Psychology describing a child learning words. This quote is so vivid that I will repeat part of it here:

"When Lewis' son first looked upon the yellow jonquils in a bowl and heard them named flowers he was also enjoined to smell them and we may guess that his mother leaned over and did just that. When a ball is named ball it is also likely to be bounced. When a cat is named kitty it is also likely to be petted. Smelling and bouncing and petting are actions distinctively linked to certain categories. We can be sure they are distinctive because they are able to function as symbols of these categories. In a game of charades one might symbolize cat by stroking the air at a suitable height in a certain fashion, or symbolize flower by inclining forward and sniffing."
Categorization then, according to Brown, begins at a certain basic level, where things have distinctive actions associated with them.

Could this be what is happening with the apple, that has come to mean fruit as a whole? It is clearly not a "mistake" that Min Yi indiscriminately applies to all other things: Min Yi clearly knows the difference between a 猫 (cat) and an oef (dog). But maybe, fruits to her are very similar to one another. They look different, but other than that, they (1) are all eaten after a warm meal, or as a snack, (2) are not eaten warm (3) share the same basket in the kitchen and (4) are all rather sweet. In short, quite similar right? Cats and dogs, on the other hand, are not so similar. Not only do they look different, but they sound different as well! A multimedia experience avant-la-lettre! Could this explain why Min Yi has picked up on only one word for different types of fruit, and a few words that designate actual animals?

I'm not entirely sure what's going on here, but I find it interesting and I will keep my eyes and ears open to see what goes on when Min Yi starts to name other things. Meanwhile, she's actually becoming quite the animal fan, as the following overheard conversation between Li and Min Yi shows:

Li: 猫说什么？ (māo shuō shénme - what does a cat say?)
Min Yi: 喵 (miāo - miaow)
Li: 狗说什么？ (gǒu shuō shénme - what does a dog say?)
Min Yi: 喔呒 (wōfu - woof)
Li: 蛇说什么？ (shé shuō shénme - what does a snake say?)
Min Yi: 咝 (sī - sssss)