a mother can tell

Arturo I Fleming, the first born.
Age 19

age 63

Lucilla had no inkling he was to be the first of seventeen. Plumber, dentist, or rocket-engineer, that's what she thought he would become. At 8, a boy's war gone wild left him deaf of the left ear. He turned into a musicolinguist. He actually invented the branch.  When asked (it happened once), he explained his theory sprouted in the always different ways his many brothers learned to speak. He helped them a lot. (Truth be told, he taught them, Lucilla worked too much to be very present). His method, a strange sing-song that made his mother suspicious of brain damage, got so efficient that almost all of his brothers spoke before they walked. Yep. He himself, Arturo I ( that's an I, not a 1 ) almost stopped talking after the last of his brothers had entererd his first important extra-familial relationship. He'd achieved the practical part of his work, now he embraced theory.
Lucía, on the other hand.... Lucilla pretends her only daughter made herself heard before being born. Not by way of words of course but with a soft rustling, like a girl-cricket rubbing her feet against the fleshy vault. She's Arturo I's weak spot, his one interlocutor. She opens his dams, she lets him flow.
These days, they meet twice a year. Once for Lucilla's birthday, with every Fleming still alive, and once in private. Over clam chowder.