What was your first word when you were a baby?

Griz

44 responses total.

"Button."

"Ba" (meaning "bottle").  I loved to eat even then....

Griz

I'm not sure what my first word was, but my sister's first word
(she's 2 and a half years younger than I) was "lelie", baby
talk for Leslie.  I imagine my mother was chagrined.

Oh, that's wonderful!  I like that.

"Quiet"
(some careers are ordained, apparently)

"Shit"

As I said.

(that was most certainly meant as a joke, Mr. tcc, and not a flame of
any variety)

"Light".  Apparently, I didn't appreciate being put in the dark
every night.

Gee, Marcus, wasn't "More light" someone's famous *last* words?

"Bud Light".

You know what they say, great minds think alike.  :-)

Heh, I only take responses from tnt as a flame, be at rest.

"Kick out the Jams, Brothers and Sisters!"

Cigarette.  My uncle spent the better part of a weekend visit trying
to get me to say that--boy, was Mom pissed when I did!

This response has been erased.

but wait a minute, popcorn, it was the MOST original thing you
ever said (redundancy aside, please).
  

My first word was "Norflin".

Mine, too.

 I think my first word was " Mine!!!!" 

  <<sibling rivalry for breast milk?>>

One of my friends' first word was "book", and her son's first word
was "thirteen", or "firteen" as he put it.

A friend relates that her first word was "big truck" (spoken from a car).

No, her first word was "big" and her second was "truck".  :)

I plead guilty - I suspect that she said "my first words were ...", but I
don't remember.  We were talking around 3 years ago...

indigo has been saying 'ca'
i believe she is trying to say 'cat'
since she gets very excited
every time she sees one
and says 'ca!' over and over.
does this count as a first word
even if she is missing the 't'?

It does indeed! 

I believe Jonathan's first word was also "cat" pronounced "ca" (short "a").
Somewhat later this caused him confusion with "car" pronounced similarly.

In other words, I second mta.

(Otherwise, many or most children would be in the anomalous position of
talking for weeks or months before they said their first words!  Even now,
at 2, Paul has only a few complete, clear, correct words.  Peanut butter
is "ahmbur" (for almond butter, which was originally preferred).)

My rule of thumb is that if *the child* knows what <s>he means, and you can 
guess...then it's a real attempt at communication.  ie. a word.

... hmm ...
What do you mean, "mean"?  In a case like this?  (I'm not denying, only
questioning.)  If you look at a lot of recent work (my real acquaintance
being 15 years ago) in epistemology & philosophy of language, you find
some people seriously questioning whether statements like "The dog knows its
master is on the other side of the door" (or substitute "thinks" for "knows")
can ever be true, because thinking requires concepts which requires language.
(That's rough - sorry.)  I think that the same arguments would apply equally
well (or equally badly) to pre-linguistic children.

Mind you, I always kind of thought these people were wrong ... but I never
got my hands dirty at the level of detail necessary to say I could prove it.

On recalling some more, I think I oversimplified the position I describe a
bit too much to be fair.  Let me try again: knowledge & belief *that*
something (not "knowing how") require something like a proposition as the
object of belief.  For propositions to have content of a sort that can be
expressed in language requires something like a language on the part of the
subject.  I think that at issue would be (partly) whether we could pick out
THIS proposition as the content of the belief as opposed to a myriad of other
significantly-different propositions.

I think I'm still not being fair - a sign that I disagree and that my weed-
grown memory isn't cooperating.  The whole line of argument requires drawing
a line between conceptual equivalence between different languages & concep-
tual equivalence between language & non-linguistic-but-simple concepts.
Sigh.  If anyone finds my rambling interesting or even comprehensible I could
probably dig up a couple of references in the literature.  (Or more likely
someone else can jump in & clear me up - Jennie, don't sociolinguists haave
to study this stuff too?)

What I think I should have said is:  You're right, but there are complicated
& important issues lurking just under the surface.  (And you *did* say this
was a rule of thumb.)
p

Iwas told that my "first word" was ma-ma, which shortly became "wa-wa"
for water, and taht was only because I couldn't say "beer."

My first word was "duuh!", apparently meaning "duck!"

Mine was "clock"

Jeez, 6 years between responses, that must be a record!  :-)

Let's see- I think Timothy's was bird.  Gareth's was an attempt at "thank
you".

(Hmmm... then "clock" seems to be a really appropriate first word after a
6-year time lapse in the conversation!)

Comment on #28 -- Jonathan's first word was not just "cat" but "kitty-cat",
pronounced more like "ki'y-ca'".

That's impressive.

There were three very important parties in his everyday life at the time:
Mommy, Daddy, and the kitty-cat.  After impressing us with "ki'y-ca", he then 
spent weeks on his version of "Daddy".  My theory was that he didn't need
to talk *about* me because I was usually there.

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