Assorted comments from Jorie after she saw part of Disney's "Aladdin"

[mmcirvin]

We saw Aladdin.

Big Aladdin is little. (high voice) Would you like some Aladdin?

We saw Aladdin. We saw ALL the Laddins.

Aladdins are pretty.

Aladdin is NOT a genie.

Genie is NOT a genie.

Aladdin bumped his head. (high voice) Are you OK, Aladdin?

We saw Aladdin.

Comments

[antikythera.livejournal.com]

Aladdins are pretty.

Hahah, you've got a little fangirl on your hands.

We saw ALL the Laddins.

I wonder if this is the same leap of linguistic logic that made my brother think that really big dinosaur was called 'a Patosaurus'.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Once I pointed to the incongruously sleeping dog in the "big dog party" scene of P. D. Eastman's classic Go, Dog. Go! and told her that the dog was taking a nap.

Since then, she's never failed to point out this fact to me in return, only once or twice the dog was distinctly taking "an AP".

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Since a lot of Anglicized Arabic words have a definite article incorporated into them as a prefix "al-", I wondered if this might just be a case of Jorie reversing the process. However, as far as I can tell the name "Aladdin" isn't one of those, though the "-ad-" part does mean "of the".

The history of the Aladdin story turns out to be pretty peculiar--an apparently Syrian folktale set mostly in a fantastical "China" bearing little resemblance to China (the English panto is actually following the source material here, though most modern adaptations don't), but pasted into the 1001 Nights, which it had not been part of traditionally, by a French translator.

[alice-q.livejournal.com]

This kind of reanalysis is common in languages. Your kid, presumably, doesn't know yet where the "spaces" between words are, but does know that A is a singular article (A BALL, A BOOK, A BABY, A LADY). So, in the unfamiliar word ALLADIN, she interprets the A at the beginning as the same thing as in A LADY. She'll learn. But there are some English reinterpretations that caught on. That's why the English word borrowed from Spanish NARANJA is (AN) ORANGE. From French NAPERON, we have (AN) APRON. And that's just off the top of my head.

[aderack.livejournal.com]

This is reminding me of this (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EBM854BTGL0).