The Anglicization of Tehva

Slowly, slowly, the vocabulary is creeping in. Slowly, slowly her tones are twisting... a subtle lilt at the end of a sentence, an emphasis added at the end of a word instead of the middle. Tehva is beginning to sound like a citizen of the United Kingdom and, just as in spite of our protestations she once developed a deep drawling Southern accent, there is nothing we can do at this moment to change her Anglicized linguistics. Things have gotten to the point that she is beginning to sound like she is expecting an invitation to the upcoming royal wedding.



The responsible party is, of course, preschool, with the primary offender being the reading program they have elected to use. Published by Oxford, it includes such engaging titles as, "Kipper Plays Cricket", "Mum and Dad", and "What A Din!" The characters have all sorts of rollicking adventures and love to ride the Tube, whine "Oh, Mum!", and drink tea thick with milk and sugar. Tehva loves Mum, Dad, Kipper, Chip, and Biff; they have become like the highly functional and enviable British half of the family to us during the past two months. I only wish that they would tell us their address in England so that we would have a free place to stay if we decide to visit this summer.



The other culprit is her teachers. Preschool is not just a time for socialization, block building, and exploration here. It is a year where the wee ones are expected to learn their odd and even numbers, verb tenses, phonology, and expand their vocabulary. For example, they recently studied healthy foods and did a long unit on fruits and vegetables. Tehva returned home to us at the end of one school day completely unimpressed that she had been calling vegetables by improper names for the past five years. "It's not a pepper," she lectured. "It's a 'capsicum', and it's not an eggplant, it's called an 'aubergine'. Those are healthy foods. We should eat them more often."

"We do," I countered.

"No, we don't," she replied and that was the end of the argument. I wanted to shove a crumpet up her nose.

Tehva is also coming to prefer Britishisms to Americanisms, simply because that is what surrounds her for half of her daily routine. She has begun describing food as "nice" instead of "yummy" or "good"; she has been heard to suggest someone "carry on" instead of "continue"; she is using "quite" as a modifier more often than "very"; she has opted to describe things as "lovely" instead of "cute". Is this a problem?

Admittedly, not really at this point in her little life. However, I have visions of her in a couple of years, entering second grade in the USA, and asking the teacher, "I feel quite parched and fancy a nice drink of water from the fountain just now. Would that be all right, then?"

Instead of telling Tehva, "Oh yes, that would be lovely, wouldn't it? Carry on with that," the teacher may be so doubled over laughing that Tehva will never get her drink of water.

And that would be quite tragic, wouldn't it then?