Acquiring birds.

I know the title seems weird and please if making comments remember your audience! So this morning I was wide awake at silly o'clock listening to the dawn chorus. Thanks to Covid I appear to be living back in the countryside instead of the polluted metropolis, that is Reading. Of course, at any other time of the day I would be delighted to hear the calming tweet tweet of the fluffy darlings, not so much at 4am.

On the plus side as they chirped on I formulated an idea about acquiring birds, well not actually I mean lexically. How did every one of those little lovies get inside my lexicon? Is it because I come from the wilds of Essex, yep you heard! I have been told many a time, but I can't remember who by, that my first sentence was, 'listen mummy birdies singing'. The profoundness of the statement. I am so disappointed that I did not refer to the exact species, maybe there were too many to mention. How did I know to put those words together? Surely noone around me would have said 'listen mummy'. If it were my younger sister then she could have pinched the words from me but she was just a small blob lying in a pram somewhere at this point and I was learning nothing from her. It was before I attended playschool and even before we had a TV. All I can imagine is that my parents constantly said 'listen Lois' and I just thought, hang on I can play that game too. The 'birdies' are easier to explain, with no TV and living in the country what else can you chat about? I love the way the diminutive forms made to make things easier for a child are so often longer than the original word. Call a bird a bird, don't get all cutesie on me. Do not patronise me I know the present continuous, well the colloquial form. I suppose if you want to be pedantic you could argue that I should have said 'are singing' but you have to remember that at this stage I am only 2 and still telegraphic, some of my limited peers were lagging behind at the two word stage, there's a clue in the word. You could argue that I have grammatical agreement. Give it another couple of months and I would start questioning my verb endings, especially on the tricky irregular verbs which I will want to follow the pattern. If you asked me what the birdies were doing yesterday I would have had to say 'listen the birdies singed'! Noone would have dared correct me however, when I would have started hearing 'the birds sang' in general conversation I would soon have corrected the error of my ways before I looked like an idiot again. So much acquiring in one simple declarative!

When I started writing this I was going to question why and how I knew the names of so many birds but my brain wandered. Enough for this morning, the red kites are circling out the window, must move.