Language Lessons From Music Class

So, last week I was teaching a music class, and one of the things I had with me was my guitar. We had a few percussion pieces I had to look up the names of, "sand blocks," "cluster bells," and possibly the best named piece, the "clatterpillar," which also might be the most unpleasant of the bunch, at least in its plastic form.

In Japan this instrument is called the 小切子 kokiriko, which I just think is a regular word, but I can't seem to find my dictionary right now to check it out, if anything interesting pans out, I'll be sure to update. (There are also a couple of other ways of writing this name, it seems)

The other thing interesting that came up during the lesson was a girl who speaks Spanish in the house, and English most elsewhere. A couple of times she told me that she wanted to "touch the guitar." As it turns out, she actually wanted to play the guitar, or at least bang on it a bit. By the second time I decided that it probably wasn't the quick-changing nature of children to suddenly want to start playing after fulfilling her desire just to hold the guitar.

Those hispanophones among us might be aware that the Spanish word tocar can be translated as both "to touch" and also "to play (a musical instrument, for instance)."

If I had to guess, it almost looks like she is mapping right off of Spanish and doing more or less a one to one translation and doesn't really sort out some of these finer points. For the most part this doesn't seem to affect her English, and most of her quirks are quite unrelated (she'll say miss instead of mister, and once in a while the other way around) but I'll have to pay more careful attention and see if any other examples show up.