Nora and I were at the park watching a man play frisbee with his two border collies on a hill. He was taking turns throwing to each dog, though, so we could only ever see one at a time. Nora was terribly, terribly excited and kept calling out “doggie! doggie!” and making the sign for ‘more’ and saying “more doggie!”. Until they got out of phase and both dogs came bounding up the hill together and Nora called out, in an amazed little voice, TWO DOGGIES!”
I nearly fainted. “two doggies”. She got the number right, she differentiated 2 from 1, she used the English plural inflection properly, she did the voicing assimilation on that morpheme properly… I’m still kind of amazed. It was a glorious moment to be alive; I’m still kind of buzzing.
