Kabir vani

Over the last few months Kabir's vocabulary has become a source of entertainment for us. He doesn't say a lot of words yet and I believe its because he's being exposed to three different languages. We speak Hindi at home but its sprinkled with a lot of English nouns. And all of Kabir's books are in English. So while he understands Hindi better than English, most of his spoken words at this point are English. And finally, his nanny cannot speak English and only speaks to him in Hungarian and she claims that he can understand her well! I don't know if Kabir speaks any Hungarian, but since I don't understand most of the words he uses, I'd like to assume that they are valid words in Hungarian :-)

In any case, the other day I wanted to count the number of words he speaks. So I made a list. This only includes words he uses in a meaningful way, not counting words he merely repeats after us. Here they are in no particular order:

1. No or no-no (his favorite word; spoken with a frequency of at least once in 2 minutes)
2. Book (or Booksh)
3. chooch (shoes)
4. cooker (for pressure cooker - his favorite toy)
5. phone (he perfected this word over a period of time. Started as "kun", then became "vun" and finally a perfect "phone")
6. papa (spoken regularly and with utmost love and affection. More like a musical phapppphaaaaa)
7. mamma (spoken very rarely after a lot of pestering by me)
8. tata (accompanied with hand waving)
9. foot (points to his foot)
10. eyej (points to his eyes)
11. noje (points to his nose)
12. bubble ( loves soap bubbles)
13. ball (another favorite word as seen in the last blog posting)
14. hat (points to his head)
15. apple (all fruits except banana are referred to as apple. This is interesting because apple is the only fruit he doesn't like)
16. bono or bonana or bonanana (he's confused about how many 'na's there are in banana)
17. bhau (barking sound used to describe all animals - dogs, cats, tigers, even birds and ants)
18. kutta (supposed to be "good job"; spoken at most inappropriate times like when asked to fold his hands in namaste to greet our friends' parents)
19. bubkun (popcorn - his latest craze in food)
20. car
21. aiplin (for airplane - accompanied by hand pointing up in the air)
22. boomboomba (used when he wants us to read his favorite Dr. Seuss book - theres a line in it -"boom boom boom, Mr. Brown is a wonder")
23. dudu (for milk)
24. chhee or chhi-chhee (for anything he considers dirty)
25. fooo-fooo (for anything that is hot)
26. chuk-chuk (train)

Of these words there are some that are so loved that he says them even in his sleep and/or first thing after waking up in the morning. These are: no-no, cooker, phone, dudu, bubkun and papa. Papa ofcourse is very proud that he's right up there with phone, cooker and bubkun. But I think its just because "papa" also means "byebye" in Hungarian. I know...sour grapes :-( I'm so upset he doesn't say mamma very much. And to add insult to injury, whenever I ask him to say "mamma", he says "papaaa" instead. So unfair!

I will keep adding to this list as I remember more words.