Title: Exercises In Translation
Author: Tiamat's Child
Fandom: Fullmetal Alchemist Manga
Word Count: 595
Rating: K
Characters/Pairing: Izumi Curtis
Summary: Talking to small children is almost like speaking someone else's language.
Warnings: None.
A/N: Written for fma_fic_contest at Livejournal prompt 32, "rhythm". I don't know what I think of this one: I used to use this style a lot, but I no longer favor it.
Exercises In Translation
There were several key components to understanding small children. First, you had to be willing to listen to them. Sometimes you had to be willing to listen several times over, which meant you had to be interested in what they said, genuinely interested, and that was something a lot of adults had trouble mustering much of the time. Children were terribly interesting when taken seriously, but it wasn't something many people bothered to do.
You had to bend down or crouch down so as to be nearer their level, because when they attempted to raise their voices, it tended to lead to garbling. You had to have a sense of the most common mispronunciations. All small children mispronounced words, they couldn't help it. For one thing, they were learning a whole entire language, sometimes more than one, and everyone mispronounced words in a new language. For another, their mouths weren't quite the right shape yet, and their palates were still soft, and that made some consonants difficult, and some vowels too. It was easier when you knew what was likely to be mixed up with what.
You had to run with the occasionally peculiar logic of the youthful mind. There were considerably fewer stupid children in the world than stupid adults, but children thought about things differently, sometimes mostly as a factor of not having all the words, lacking vital statistics, being only vaguely and intellectually aware of such concepts as 'limits' and 'cause and effect', and sometimes more as a factor of simply having never been taught bad and lazy mental habits, such as 'because no one has before', and 'everyone knows'. If you kept that in mind you might still be confused, but it would be a much less exasperated confusion, less likely to be dismissive, and being dismissive was the real death knell of communication between those under age seven and those more in the general and non-specific area of thirty.
The real thing though, the best part, the part that was hard to get, that might mostly be an inborn gift, was having a knack for catching the rhythm of their speech, following their pauses and their breaks and their breathless races to the end of a sentence. Children's rhythms were not the same as adults'. Adults had learned how to moderate, how to pace themselves, how to use a pause to effect, how to let their voices rise and fall in a comfortable fashion, easy on the ear. Children knew none of that. They hadn't had a chance to practice and it was this, the unsophisticated nature of their verbal rhythm, that did the most to make them hard to follow.
"Oh, you're so terribly good at that," Mrs. MacGregor said, watching Susie Jenkins run from the shop, her mother's meat order safely stowed in the basket over her arm.
"Walk!" Izumi shouted after Susie, who obediently slowed, although Izumi had no doubt she'd be running again as soon as she was around the corner. "Thank you," she said to Mrs. MacGregor. "It's a knack. Decided what you need?"
"A pound of sausage as usual, dear," Mrs. MacGregor said. "Thank you for always assuming I'll suddenly turn into someone interesting."
"You're already someone interesting, Mrs. MacGregor. Don't go fishing for compliments."
"But you do it so prettily, my dear!" Mrs. MacGregor laughed and waved a hand. Then she sobered. "You really are good with children. It is such a shame," she said, "that you haven't any of your own."
"Yes," said Izumi, as she turned to her work. "It is."