A couple weeks ago I was talking with a friend about her daughter (16 months old) who is learning to talk.

Two things came up in the discussion that, after some thinking, fascinated me.

First, was that she is learning nouns, and doesn’t yet have any verbs. (We had a brief discussion about whether bye-bye was a verb. I concluded it’s a noun.[We’re going bye-bye.]) That’s a very interesting concept. To have words for things, but not words for doing. (IIRC, young children who are first learning verbs speak grammatically correctly [assuming their parents do that is] but once they start to learn the rules of grammar, they seem to forget what they learned intuitively and then make mistakes of tense. Assuming I am remembering correctly.)

What a strange world, to know that things have names, but not to know that actions have associated words.

It also came up that toddlers don’t really have a sense of time (which helps a bit to clarify why verbs are a problem) and for a toddler, everything is NOW. Not only is there no sense of future, there isn’t particularly a memory of the past, at least memory as we have it. You can’t tell a toddler “we’ll do that in five minutes” or “in a couple hours” because those ideas don’t make any sense to them.

I remember reading one story written from the sense of a creature that had no sense of past or future but only now. It was in the first Thieves’ World anthology series, and was written from the point of view of a dog. The idea in that story is that there is a sense of recognition or places or smells, but not of the past or future. It was a world of nouns, with only a few verbs, such as RUN and SMELL.

Is that how the world of a toddler is? Do they have a memory of senses, but not of events? What a frightening world that would be: not only would you have no control over anything in your life, you would recognize presences that are comforting (or not) and smells and sounds, but if someone goes away, you have no guarantee they will ever return.

I think it’s far more difficult than we imagine, being a child.