I was fairly concerned when I heard my 4-year-old Catherine saying something about "black Negro".
It seems she was eating a pretzel and part of it was slightly blackened. So she was calling it by a Spanish word she had picked up somewhere, negro (which means black).
But I have no idea where she picked up that particular pronounciation. I corrected her and told her that the Spanish word was nay-gro.
3 comments:
I was similarly concerned when Noddie referred to a Somali boy as 'that black boy' - but then she started talking about his (white) friend, 'the blue boy' - it was their t-shirts she was talking about!
There are similar "Language issues". I remember using a foreign phrase around Catherine and she smugly asked me what the Spanish words meant. I had to explain to her that it was a French phrase, and that was different from Spanish. I don't think she understood. Today's American children learn very early that there's a second language out there that is very common, and indeed, Catherine can count up to ten in Spanish without missing a single number. She doesn't understand that English and Spanish are only 2 of a large variety of commonly-spoken languages in the world.
Teach her Portuguese---preto. ;-)
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