Prattle

After a long spell of talking mainly with her hands, Lily is trying out her voice. Not to say anything, but just to hear the sound of it. I remember this phase with Luke 16 years before, and it's fascinating, to anyone interested in language. She makes the most difficult and convoluted sounds, in combinations of consonants and vowels not found in English. It reminds you that learning your mother tongue is not a matter of acquiring the sound-skills so much as limiting and focusing on 50 or so among the limitless range of sounds a human mouth can make.

To try to catch it on film, I turned the camera on and set it down in her general direction, then pretended to be busy doing something else, so she would feel unobserved. The results turned out pretty well, though it's far from the full range of her vocalizations.



P.S.: There's a rough editing cut about a third of the way into it. She does not, in fact, have magical teleportation powers.