Otto Jespersen

CHAPTER V
SOUNDS

§ 1. From Screaming to Talking. § 2. First Sounds. § 3. Sound-laws of the Next Stage. § 4. Groups of Sounds. § 5. Mutilations and Reduplications. § 6. Correction. § 7. Tone.

V.—§ 1. From Screaming to Talking.

A Danish philosopher has said: “In his whole life man achieves nothing so great and so wonderful as what he achieved when he learnt to talk.” When Darwin was asked in which three years of his life a man learnt most, he said: “The first three.”

A child’s linguistic development covers three periods—the screaming time, the crowing or babbling time, and the talking time. But the last is a long one, and must again be divided into two periods—that of the “little language,” the child’s own language, and that of the common language or language of the community. In the former the child is linguistically an individualist, in the latter he is more and more socialized.

Of the screaming time little need be said. A child’s scream is not uttered primarily as a means of conveying anything to others, and so far is not properly to be called speech. But if from the child’s side a scream is not a way of telling anything, its elders may still read something in it and hurry to relieve the trouble. And if the child comes to remark—as it soon will—that whenever it cries someone comes and brings it something pleasant, if only company, it will not be long till it makes use of this instrument whenever it is uneasy or wants something. The scream, which was at first a reflex action, is now a voluntary action. And many parents have discovered that the child has learnt to use its power of screaming to exercise a tyrannical power over them—so that they have had to walk up and down all night with a screaming child that prefers this way of spending the night to lying quietly in its cradle. The only course is brutally to let the baby scream till it is tired, and persist in never letting it get its desire because it screams for it, but only because what it desires is good for it. The child learns its lesson, and a scream is once more what it was at first, an involuntary, irresistible result of the fact that something is wrong.

Screaming has, however, another side. It is of physiological value as an exercise of all the muscles and appliances which are afterwards to be called into play for speech and song. Nurses say—and there may be something in it—that the child who screams loudest as a baby becomes the best singer later.

Babbling time produces pleasanter sounds which are more adapted for the purposes of speech. Cooing, crowing, babbling—i.e. uttering meaningless sounds and series of sounds—is a delightful exercise like sprawling with outstretched arms and legs or trying to move the tiny fingers. It has been well said that for a long time a child’s dearest toy is its tongue—that is, of course, not the tongue only, but the other organs of speech as well, especially the lips and vocal chords. At first the movements of these organs are as uncontrolled as those of the arms, but gradually they become more systematic, and the boy knows what sound he wishes to utter and is in a position to produce it exactly.

First, then, come single vowels or vowels with a single consonant preceding them, as la, ra, lÖ, etc., though a baby’s sounds cannot be identified with any of ours or written down with our letters. For, though the head and consequently the mouth capacity is disproportionally great in an infant and grows more rapidly than its limbs, there is still a great difference between its mouth capacity and that required to utter normal speech-sounds. I have elsewhere (PhG, p. 81 ff.) given the results of a series of measurings of the jaw in children and adults and discussed the importance of these figures for phonetic theory: while there is no growth of any importance during the talking period (for a child of five may have the same jaw-length as a man of thirty-seven), the growth is enormous during the first months of a child’s life: in the case of my own child, from 45 mm. a few days after birth to 60 mm. at three months old and 75 mm. at eleven months, while the average of grown-up men is 99 mm. and of women 93 mm. The consequence is that the sounds of the baby are different from ours, and that even when they resemble ours the mechanism of production may be different from the normal one; when my son during the first weeks said something like la, I was able to see distinctly that the tip of the tongue was not at all in the position required for our l. This want of congruence between the acoustic manners of operation in the infant and the adult no doubt gives us the key to many of the difficulties that have puzzled previous observers of small children.

Babbling or crowing begins not earlier than the third week; it may be, not till the seventh or eighth week. The first sound exercises are to be regarded as muscular exercises pure and simple, as is clear from the fact that deaf-mutes amuse themselves with them, although they cannot themselves hear them. But the moment comes when the hearing child finds a pleasure in hearing its own sounds, and a most important step is taken when the little one begins to hear a resemblance between the sounds uttered by its mother or nurse and its own. The mother will naturally answer the baby’s syllables by repeating the same, and when the baby recognizes the likeness, it secures an inexhaustible source of pleasure, and after some time reaches the next stage, when it tries itself to imitate what is said to it (generally towards the close of the first year). The value of this exercise cannot be over-estimated: the more that parents understand how to play this game with the baby—of saying something and letting the baby say it after, however meaningless the syllable-sequences that they make—the better will be the foundation for the child’s later acquisition and command of language.

V.—§ 2. First Sounds.

It is generally said that the order in which the child learns to utter the different sounds depends on their difficulty: the easiest sounds are produced first. That is no doubt true in the main; but when we go into details we find that different writers bring forward lists of sounds in different order. All are agreed, however, that among the consonants the labials, p, b and m, are early sounds, if not the earliest. The explanation has been given that the child can see the working of his mother’s lips in these sounds and therefore imitates her movements. This implies far too much conscious thought on the part of the baby, who utters his ‘ma’ or ‘mo’ before he begins to imitate anything said to him by his surroundings. Moreover, it has been pointed out that the child’s attention is hardly ever given to its mother’s mouth, but is steadily fixed on her eyes. The real reason is probably that the labial muscles used to produce b or m are the same that the baby has exercised in sucking the breast or the bottle. It would be interesting to learn if blind children also produce the labial sounds first.

Along with the labial sounds the baby produces many other sounds—vowel and consonant—and in these cases one is certain that it has not been able to see how these sounds are produced by its mother. Even in the case of the labials we know that what distinguishes m from b, the lowering of the soft palate, and b from p, the vibrations of the vocal chords, is invisible. Some of the sounds produced by means of the tongue may be too hard to pronounce till the muscles of the tongue have been exercised in consequence of the child having begun to eat more solid things than milk.

By the end of the first year the number of sounds which the little babbler has mastered is already considerable, and he loves to combine long series of the same syllables, dadadada ..., nenenene ..., bygnbygnbygn ..., etc. That is a game which need not even cease when the child is able to talk actual language. It is strange that among an infant’s sounds one can often detect sounds—for instance k, g, h, and uvular r—which the child will find difficulty in producing afterwards when they occur in real words, or which may be unknown to the language which it will some day speak. The explanation lies probably in the difference between doing a thing in play or without a plan—when it is immaterial which movement (sound) is made—and doing the same thing of fixed intention when this sound, and this sound only, is required, at a definite point in the syllable, and with this or that particular sound before and after. Accordingly, great difficulties come to be encountered when the child begins more consciously and systematically to imitate his elders. Some sounds come without effort and may be used incessantly, to the detriment of others which the child may have been able previously to produce in play; and a time even comes when the stock of sounds actually diminishes, while particular sounds acquire greater precision. Dancing masters, singing masters and gymnastic teachers have similar experiences. After some lessons the child may seem more awkward than it was before the lessons began.

The ‘little language’ which the child makes for itself by imperfect imitation of the sounds of its elders seems so arbitrary that it may well be compared to the child’s first rude drawings of men and animals. A Danish boy named Gustav (1.6)[17] called himself [dodado] and turned the name Karoline into [nnn]. Other Danish children made skammel into [gramn] or [gap], elefant into [vat], Karen into [gaja], etc. A few examples from English children: Hilary M. (1.6) called Ireland (her sister) [a·ni], Gordon M. (1.10) called Millicent (his sister) [dadu·]. Tony E. (1.11) called his playmate Sheila [dubabud].

V.—§ 3. Sound-laws of the Next Stage.

As the child gets away from the peculiarities of his individual ‘little language,’ his speech becomes more regular, and a linguist can in many cases see reasons for his distortions of normal words. When he replaces one sound by another there is always some common element in the formation of the two sounds, which causes a kindred impression on the ear, though we may have difficulty in detecting it because we are so accustomed to noticing the difference. There is generally a certain system in the sound substitutions of children, and in many instances we are justified in speaking of ‘strictly observed sound-laws.’ Let us now look at some of these.

Children in all countries tend to substitute [t] for [k]: both sounds are produced by a complete stoppage of the breath for the moment by the tongue, the only difference being that it is the back of the tongue which acts in one case, and the tip of the tongue in the other. A child who substitutes t for k will also substitute d for g; if he says ‘tat’ for ‘cat’ he will say ‘do’ for ‘go.’

R is a difficult sound. Hilary M. (2.0) has no r’s in her speech. Initially they become w, as in [w?n] for ‘run,’ medially between vowels they become l, as in [veli, beli] for ‘very, berry,’ in consonantal combinations they are lost, as in [kai, b??] for ‘cry, brush.’ Tony E. (1.10 to 3.0) for medial r between vowels first substituted d, as in [vedi] for ‘very,’ and later g [vegi]; similarly in [mu·gi] for ‘Muriel,’ [tÆgi] for ‘carry’; he often dropped initial r, e.g. oom for ‘room.’ It is not unusual for children who use w for r in most combinations to say [t?] for tr and [d?] for dr, as in ‘chee,’ ‘jawer’ for ‘tree,’ ‘drawer.’ This illustrates the fact that what to us is one sound, and therefore represented in writing by one letter, appears to the child’s ear as different sounds—and generally the phonetician will agree with the child that there are really differences in the articulation of the sound according to position in the syllable and to surroundings, only the child exaggerates the dissimilarities, just as we in writing one and the same letter exaggerate the similarity.

The two th sounds offer some difficulties and are often imitated as f and v respectively, as in ‘frow’ and ‘muvver’ for ‘throw’ and ‘mother’; others say ‘ze’ or ‘de’ for ‘the.’ Hilary M. (2.0) has great difficulty with th and s; th usually becomes [?], [be?, ti·?, ?ri·] for ‘Beth,’ ‘teeth,’ ‘three’; s becomes [?], e.g. [fran?i?, ?ti·m] for ‘Francis,’ ‘steam’; in the same way z becomes [?] as in [l?b?, bou?] for ‘loves,’ ‘Bowes’; sw becomes [fw] as in [fwi?, fwi·t] for ‘swing,’ ‘sweet.’ She drops l in consonantal combinations, e.g. [ki·n, kaim, k?k, ?i·p] for ‘clean,’ ‘climb,’ ‘clock,’ ‘sleep.’

Sometimes it requires a phonetician’s knowledge to understand the individual sound-laws of a child. Thus I pick out from some specimens given by O’Shea, p. 135 f. (girl, 2.9), the following words: pell (smell), teeze (sneeze), poke (smoke), tow (snow), and formulate the rule: s + a nasal became the voiceless stop corresponding to the nasal, a kind of assimilation, in which the place of articulation and the mouth-closure of the nasals were preserved, and the sound was made unvoiced and non-nasal as the s. In other combinations m and n were intact.

Some further faults are illustrated in Tony E.’s [t?ouz, p?g, pus, tÆm, p?m, bÆk, pi·z, nou?, ?k, es, u·] for clothes, plug, push, tram, plum, black, please, nose, clock, yes, you.

V.—§ 4. Groups of Sounds.

Even when a sound by itself can be pronounced, the child often finds it hard to pronounce it when it forms part of a group of sounds. S is often dropped before another consonant, as in ‘tummy’ for ‘stomach.’ Other examples have already been given above. Hilary M. (2.0) had difficulty with lp and said [hÆpl] for ‘help.’ She also said [oint?n] for ‘ointment’; C. M. L. (2.3) said ‘sikkums’ for ‘sixpence.’ Tony E. (2.0) turns grannie into [nÆgi]. When initial consonant groups are simplified, it is generally, though not always, the stop that remains: b instead of bl-, br-, k instead of kr-, sk-, skr-, p instead of pl-, pr-, spr-, etc. For the groups occurring medially and finally no general rule seems possible.

V.—§ 5. Mutilations and Reduplications.

To begin with, the child is unable to master long sequences of syllables; he prefers monosyllables and often emits them singly and separated by pauses. Even in words that to us are inseparable wholes some children will make breaks between syllables, e.g. Shef-field, Ing-land. But more often they will give only part of the word, generally the last syllable or syllables; hence we get pet-names like Bet or Beth for Elizabeth and forms like ‘tatoes’ for potatoes, ‘chine’ for machine, ‘tina’ for concertina, ‘tash’ for moustache, etc. Hilary M. (1.10) called an express-cart a press-cart, bananas and pyjamas nanas and jamas.

It is not, however, the production of long sequences of syllables in itself that is difficult to the child, for in its meaningless babbling it may begin very early to pronounce long strings of sounds without any break; but the difficulty is to remember what sounds have to be put together to bring about exactly this or that word. We grown-up people may experience just the same sort of difficulty if after hearing once the long name of a Bulgarian minister or a Sanskrit book we are required to repeat it at once. Hence we should not wonder at such pronunciations as [pek?lout] for petticoat or [efel?nt] for elephant (Beth M., 2.6); Hilary M. called a caterpillar a pillarcat. Other transpositions are serreval for several and ocken for uncle; cf. also wops for wasp.

To explain the frequent reduplications found in children’s language it is not necessary, as some learned authors have done, to refer to the great number of reduplicated words in the languages of primitive tribes and to see in the same phenomenon in our own children an atavistic return to primitive conditions, on the HÄckelian assumption that the development of each individual has to pass rapidly through the same (‘phylogenetic’) stages as the whole lineage of his ancestors. It is simpler and more natural to refer these reduplications to the pleasure always felt in repeating the same muscular action until one is tired. The child will repeat over and over again the same movements of legs and arms, and we do the same when we wave our hand or a handkerchief or when we nod our head several times to signify assent, etc. When we laugh we repeat the same syllable consisting of h and a more or less indistinct vowel, and when we sing a melody without words we are apt to ‘reduplicate’ indefinitely. Thus also with the little ones. Apart from such words as papa and mamma, to which we shall have to revert in another chapter (VIII, § 8), children will often form words from those of their elders by repeating one syllable; cf. puff-puff, gee-gee. Tracy (p. 132) records pepe for ‘pencil,’ kaka for ‘Carrie.’ For a few weeks (1.11) Hilary M. reduplicated whole words, e.g. king-king, ring-ring (i.e. bell), water-water. Tony F. (1.10) uses [touto] for his own name. Hence pet-names like Dodo; they are extremely frequent in French—for instance, Fifine, Lolotte, Lolo, Mimi; the name Daudet has arisen in a similar way from Claudet, a diminutive of Claude.

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It is a similar phenomenon (a kind of partial reduplication) when sounds at a distance affect one another, as when Hilary M. (2.0) said [g?gi] for doggie, [b?bin] for Dobbin, [dezm?n di·n] for Jesmond Dene, [baikikl] for bicycle, [kekl] for kettle. Tracy (p. 133) mentions bopoo for ‘bottle,’ in which oo stands for the hollow sound of syllabic l. One correspondent mentions whoofing-cough for ‘whooping-cough’ (where the final sound has crept into the first word) and chicken-pops for ‘chicken-pox.’ Some children say ‘aneneme’ for anemone; and in S. L. (4.9) this caused a curious confusion during the recent war: “Mother, there must be two sorts of anenemies, flowers and Germans.”

Dr. Henry Bradley once told me that his youngest child had a difficulty with the name Connie, which was made alternatingly [t?ni] and [k??i], in both cases with two consonants articulated at the same point. Similar instances are mentioned in German books on children’s language, thus gigarr for ‘zigarre,’ baibift for ‘bleistift,’ autobobil (Meringer),[18] fotofafieren (Stern), ambam for ‘armband,’ dan for ‘dame,’ pap for ‘patte’ (Ronjat). I have given many Danish examples in my Danish book. Grammont’s child (see MÉlanges linguistiques offerts À A. Meillet, 1902) carried through these changes in a most systematic way.

V.—§ 6. Correction.

The time comes when the child corrects his mistakes—where it said ‘tat’ it now says ‘cat.’ Here there are two possibilities which both seem to occur in actual life. One is that the child hears the correct sound some time before he is able to imitate it correctly; he will thus still say t for k, though he may in some way object to other people saying ‘tum’ for ‘come.’ Passy relates how a little French girl would say tosson both for garÇon and cochon; but she protested when anybody else said “C’est un petit cochon” in speaking about a boy, or vice versa. Such a child, as soon as it can produce the new sound, puts it correctly into all the places where it is required. This, I take it, is the ordinary procedure. Frans (my own boy) could not pronounce h and said an, on for the Danish pronouns han, hun; but when he began to pronounce this sound, he never misplaced it (2.4).

The other possibility is that the child learns how to pronounce the new sound at a time when its own acoustic impression is not yet quite settled; in that case there will be a period during which his use of the new sound is uncertain and fluctuating. When parents are in too great a hurry to get a child out of some false pronunciation, they may succeed in giving it a new sound, but the child will tend to introduce it in places where it does not belong. On the whole, it seems therefore the safest plan to leave it to the child itself to discover that its sound is not the correct one.

Sometimes a child will acquire a sound or a sound combination correctly and then lose it till it reappears a few months later. In an English family where there was no question of the influence of h-less servants, each child in succession passed through an h-less period, and one of the children, after pronouncing h correctly, lost the use of it altogether for two or three months. I have had similar experiences with Danish children. S. L. (ab. 2) said ‘bontin’ for bonnet; but five months earlier she had said bonnet correctly.

The path to perfection is not always a straight one. Tony E. in order to arrive at the correct pronunciation of please passed through the following stages: (1) [bi·], (2) [bli·], (3) [pi·z], (4) [pwi·?], (5) [beisk, meis, mais] and several other impossible forms. Tracy (p. 139) gives the following forms through which the boy A. (1.5) had to pass before being able to say pussy: pooheh, poofie, poopoohie, poofee. A French child had four forms [mÈni, pÈti, mÈti, mÈsi] before being able to say merci correctly (Grammont). A Danish child passed through bejab and vamb before pronouncing svamp (‘sponge’), etc.

It is certain that all this while the little brain is working, and even consciously working, though at first it has not sufficient command of speech to say anything about it. Meringer says that children do not practise, but that their new acquisitions of sounds happen at once without any visible preparation. He may be right in the main with regard to the learning of single sounds, though even there I incline to doubt the possibility of a universal rule; but Ronjat (p. 55) is certainly right as against Meringer with regard to the way in which children learn new and difficult combinations. Here they certainly do practise, and are proudly conscious of the happy results of their efforts. When Frans (2.11) mastered the combination fl, he was very proud, and asked his mother: “Mother, can you say flyve?”; then he came to me and told me that he could say bluse and flue, and when asked whether he could say blad, he answered: “No, not yet; Frans cannot say b-lad” (with a little interval between the b and the l). Five weeks later he said: “Mother, won’t you play upon the klaver (piano)?” and after a little while, “Frans can say kla so well.” About the same time he first mispronounced the word manchetter, and then (when I asked what he was saying, without telling him that anything was wrong) he gave it the correct sound, and I heard him afterwards in the adjoining room repeat the word to himself in a whisper.

How well children observe sounds is again seen by the way in which they will correct their elders if they give a pronunciation to which they are not accustomed—for instance, in a verse they have learnt by heart. Beth M (2.6) was never satisfied with her parents’ pronunciation of “What will you buy me when you get there?” She always insisted on their gabbling the first words as quickly as they could and then coming out with an emphatic there.

V.—§ 7. Tone.

As to the differences in the tone of a voice, even a baby shows by his expression that he can distinguish clearly between what is said to him lovingly and what sharply, a long time before he understands a single word of what is said. Many children are able at a very early age to hit off the exact note in which something is said or sung. Here is a story of a boy of more advanced age. In Copenhagen he had had his hair cut by a Swedish lady and did not like it. When he travelled with his mother to Norway, as soon as he entered the house, he broke out with a scream: “Mother, I hope I’m not going to have my hair cut?” He had noticed the Norwegian intonation, which is very like the Swedish, and it brought an unpleasant association of ideas.

CHAPTER VI
WORDS

§ 1. Introductory. § 2. First Period. § 3. Father and Mother. § 4. The Delimitation of Meaning. § 5. Numerals. Time. § 6. Various Difficulties. § 7. Shifters. § 8. Extent of Vocabulary. § 9. Summary.

VI.—§ 1. Introductory.

In the preceding chapter, in order to simplify matters, we have dealt with sounds only, as if they were learnt by themselves and independently of the meanings attached to them. But that, of course, is only an abstraction: to the child, as well as to the grown-up, the two elements, the outer, phonetic element, and the inner element, the meaning, of a word are indissolubly connected, and the child has no interest, or very little interest, in trying to imitate the sounds of its parents except just in so far as these mean something. That words have a meaning, the child will begin to perceive at a very early age. Parents may of course deceive themselves and attribute to the child a more complete and exact understanding of speech than the child is capable of. That the child looks at its father when it hears the word ‘father,’ may mean at first nothing more than that it follows its mother’s glance; but naturally in this way it is prepared for actually associating the idea of ‘father’ with the sound. If the child learns the feat of lifting its arms when it is asked “How big is the boy?” it is not to be supposed that the single words of the sentence are understood, or that the child has any conception of size; he only knows that when this series of sounds is said he is admired if he lifts his arms up: and so the sentence as a whole has the effect of a word of command. A dog has the same degree of understanding. Hilary M. (1.0), when you said to her at any time the refrain “He greeted me so,” from “Here come three knights from Spain,” would bow and salute with her hand, as she had seen some children doing it when practising the song.

The understanding of what is said always precedes the power of saying the same thing oneself—often precedes it for an extraordinarily long time. One father notes that his little daughter of a year and seven months brings what is wanted and understands questions while she cannot say a word. It often happens that parents some fine day come to regret what they have said in the presence of a child without suspecting how much it understands. “Little pitchers have long ears.”

One can, however, easily err in regard to the range and certainty of a child’s understanding. The Swiss philologist Tappolet noticed that his child of six months, when he said “Where is the window?” made vague movements towards the window. He made the experiment of repeating his question in French—with the same intonation as in German, and the child acted just as it had done before. It is, properly speaking, only when the child begins to talk that we can be at all sure what it has really understood, and even then it may at times be difficult to sound the depths of the child’s conception.

The child’s acquisition of the meaning of words is truly a highly complicated affair. How many things are comprehended under one word? The answer is not easy in all cases. The single Danish word tÆppe covers all that is expressed in English by carpet, rug, blanket, counterpane, curtain (theatrical). And there is still more complication when we come to abstract ideas. The child has somehow to find out for himself with regard to his own language what ideas are considered to hang together and so come under the same word. He hears the word ‘chair’ applied to a particular chair, then to another chair that perhaps looks to him totally different, and again to a third: and it becomes his business to group these together.

What Stern tells about his own boy is certainly exceptional, perhaps unique. The boy ran to a door and said das? (‘That?’—his way of asking the name of a thing). They told him ‘tÜr.’ He then went to two other doors in the room, and each time the performance was repeated. He then did the same with the seven chairs in the room. Stern says, “As he thus makes sure that the objects that are alike to his eye and to his sense of touch have also the same name, he is on his way to general conceptions.” We should, however, be wary of attributing general ideas to little children.

VI.—§ 2. First Period.

In the first period we meet the same phenomena in the child’s acquisition of word-meanings that we found in his acquisition of sounds. A child develops conceptions of his own which are as unintelligible and strange to the uninitiated as his sounds.

Among the child’s first passions are animals and pictures of animals, but for a certain time it is quite arbitrary what animals are classed together under a particular name. A child of nine months noticed that his grandfather’s dog said ‘bow-wow’ and fancied that anything not human could say (and therefore should be called) bow-wow—pigs and horses included. A little girl of two called a horse he (Danish hest) and divided the animal kingdom into two groups, (1) horses, including all four-footed things, even a tortoise, and (2) fishes (pronounced iz), including all that moved without use of feet, for example, birds and flies. A boy of 1.8 saw a picture of a Danish priest in a ruff and was told that it was a prÆst, which he rendered as bÆp. Afterwards seeing a picture of an aunt with a white collar which recalled the priest’s ruff, he said again bÆp, and this remained the name of the aunt, and even of another aunt, who was called ‘other bÆp.’ These transferences are sometimes extraordinary. A boy who had had a pig drawn for him, the pig being called Öf, at the age of 1.6 used Öf (1) for a pig, (2) for drawing a pig, (3) for writing in general.

Such transferences may seem very absurd, but are not more so than some transferences occurring in the language of grown-up persons. The word Tripos passed from the sense of a three-legged stool to the man who sat on a three-legged stool to dispute with candidates for degrees at Cambridge. Then, as it was the duty of Mr. Tripos also to provide comic verses, these were called tripos verses, such verses being printed under that name till very near the end of the nineteenth century, though Mr. Tripos himself had disappeared long ago. And as the examination list was printed on the back of these verses, it was called the Tripos list, and it was no far cry to saying of a successful candidate, “he stands high on the Tripos,” which now came to mean the examination itself.

But to return to the classifications in the minds of the children. Hilary M. (1.6 to 2.0) used the word daisy (1) of the flower itself, (2) of any flower, (3) of any conventional flower in a pattern, (4) of any pattern. One of the first words she said was colour (1.4), and she got into a way of saying it when anything striking attracted her attention. Originally she heard the word of a bright patch of colour in a picture. The word was still in use at the age of two. For some months anything that moved was a fly, every man was a soldier, everybody that was not a man was a baby. S. L. (1.8) used bing (1) for a door, (2) for bricks or building with bricks. The connexion is through the bang of a door or a tumbling castle of bricks, but the name was transferred to the objects. It is curious that at 1.3 she had the word bang for anything dropped, but not bing; at 1.8 she had both, bing being specialized as above. From books about children’s language I quote two illustrations. Ronjat’s son used the word papement, which stands for ‘kaffemensch,’ in speaking about the grocer’s boy who brought coffee; but as he had a kind of uniform with a flat cap, papement was also used of German and Russian officers in the illustrated papers. Hilde Stern (1.9) used bichu for drawer or chest of drawers; it originated in the word bÜcher (books), which was said when her picture-books were taken out of the drawer.

A warning is, however, necessary. When a grown-up person says that a child uses the same word to denote various things, he is apt to assume that the child gives a word two or three definite meanings, as he does. The process is rather in this way. A child has got a new toy, a horse, and at the same time has heard its elders use the word ‘horse,’ which it has imitated as well as it can. It now associates the word with the delight of playing with its toy. If the next day it says the same sound, and its friends give it the horse, the child gains the experience that the sound brings the fulfilment of its wish: but if it sets its eye on a china cow and utters the same sound, the father takes note that the sound also denotes a cow, while for the child it is perhaps a mere experiment—“Could not I get my wish for that nice thing fulfilled in the same way?” If it succeeds, the experiment may very well be repeated, and the more or less faulty imitation of the word ‘horse’ thus by the co-operation of those around it may become also firmly attached to ‘cow.’

When Elsa B. (1.10), on seeing the stopper of a bottle in the garden, came out with the word ‘beer,’ it would be rash to conclude (as her father did) that the word ‘beer’ to her meant a ‘stopper’: all we know is that her thoughts had taken that direction, and that some time before, on seeing a stopper, she had heard the word ‘beer.’

Parents sometimes unconsciously lead a child into error about the use of words. A little nephew of mine asked to taste his father’s beer, and when refused made so much to-do that the father said, “Come, let us have peace in the house.” Next day, under the same circumstances, the boy asked for ‘peace in the house,’ and this became the family name for beer. Not infrequently what is said on certain occasions is taken by the child to be the name of some object concerned; thus a sniff or some sound imitating it may come to mean a flower, and ‘hurrah’ a flag. S. L. from an early age was fond of flowers, and at 1.8 used ‘pretty’ or ‘pretty-pretty’ as a substantive instead of the word ‘flower,’ which she learnt at 1.10.

I may mention here that analogous mistakes may occur when missionaries or others write down words from foreign languages with which they are not familiar. In the oldest list of Greenlandic words (of 1587) there is thus a word panygmah given with the signification ‘needle’; as a matter of fact it means ‘my daughter’s’: the Englishman pointed at the needle, but the Eskimo thought he wanted to know whom it belonged to. In an old list of words in the now extinct Polabian language we find “scumbe, yesterday, subuda, to-day, janidiglia, to-morrow”: the questions were put on a Saturday, and the Slav answered accordingly, for subuta (the same word as Sabbath) means Saturday, skumpe ‘fasting-day,’ and ja nedila ‘it is Sunday.’

According to O’Shea (p. 131) “a child was greatly impressed with the horns of a buck the first time he saw him. The father used the term ‘sheep’ several times while the creature was being inspected, and it was discovered afterwards that the child had made the association between the word and the animal’s horns, so now sheep signifies primarily horns, whether seen in pictures or in real life.” It is clear that mistakes of that kind will happen more readily if the word is said singly than when it is embodied in whole connected sentences: the latter method is on the whole preferable for many reasons.

VI.—§ 3. Father and Mother.

A child is often faced by some linguistic usage which obliges him again and again to change his notions, widen them, narrow them, till he succeeds in giving words the same range of meaning that his elders give them.

Frequently, perhaps most frequently, a word is at first for the child a proper name. ‘Wood’ means not a wood in general, but the particular picture which has been pointed out to the child in the dining-room. The little girl who calls her mother’s black muff ‘muff,’ but refuses to transfer the word to her own white one, is at the same stage. Naturally, then, the word father when first heard is a proper name, the name of the child’s own father. But soon it must be extended to other individuals who have something or other in common with the child’s father. One child will use it of all men, another perhaps of all men with beards, while ‘lady’ is applied to all pictures of faces without beards; a third will apply the word to father, mother and grandfather. When the child itself applies the word to another man it is soon corrected, but at the same time it cannot avoid hearing another child call a strange man ‘father’ or getting to know that the gardener is Jack’s ‘father,’ etc. The word then comes to mean to the child ‘a grown-up person who goes with or belongs to a little one,’ and he will say, “See, there goes a dog with his father.” Or, he comes to know that the cat is the kittens’ father, and the dog the puppies’ father, and next day asks, “Wasps, are they the flies’ father, or are they perhaps their mother?” (as Frans did, 4.10). Finally, by such guessing and drawing conclusions he gains full understanding of the word, and is ready to make acquaintance later with its more remote applications, as ‘The King is the father of his people; Father O’Flynn; Boyle was the father of chemistry,’ etc.

Difficulties are caused to the child when its father puts himself on the child’s plane and calls his wife ‘mother’ just as he calls his own mother ‘mother,’ though at other moments the child hears him call her ‘grandmother’ or ‘grannie.’ Professor Sturtevant writes to me that a neighbour child, a girl of about five years, called out to him, “I saw your girl and your mother,” meaning ‘your daughter and your wife.’ In many families the words ‘sister’ (‘Sissie’) or ‘brother’ are used constantly instead of his or her real name. Here we see the reason why so often such names of relations change their meaning in the history of languages; G. vetter probably at first meant ‘father’s brother,’ as it corresponds to Latin patruus; G. base, from ‘father’s sister,’ came to mean also ‘mother’s sister,’ ‘niece’ and ‘cousin.’ The word that corresponds etymologically to our mother has come to mean ‘wife’ or ‘woman’ in Lithuanian and ‘sister’ in Albanian.

The same extension that we saw in the case of ‘father’ now may take place with real proper names. Tony E. (3.5), when a fresh charwoman came, told his mother not to have this Mary: the last charwoman’s name was Mary.[19] In exactly the same way a Danish child applied the name of their servant, Ingeborg, as a general word for servant: “Auntie’s Ingeborg is called Ann,” etc., and a German girl said viele Augusten for ‘many girls.’ This, of course, is the way in which doll has come to mean a ‘toy baby,’ and we use the same extension when we say of a statesman that he is no Bismarck, etc.

VI.—§ 4. The Delimitation of Meaning.

The association of a word with its meaning is accomplished for the child by a series of single incidents, and as many words are understood only by the help of the situation, it is natural that the exact force of many of them is not seized at once. A boy of 4.10, hearing that his father had seen the King, inquired, “Has he a head at both ends?”—his conception of a king being derived from playing-cards. Another child was born on what the Danes call Constitution Day, the consequence being that he confused birthday and Constitution Day, and would speak of “my Constitution Day,” and then his brother and sister also began to talk of their Constitution Day.

Hilary M. (2.0) and Murdoch D. (2.6) used dinner, breakfast and tea interchangeably—the words might be translated ‘meal.’ Other more or less similar confusions may be mentioned here. Tony F. (2.8) used the term sing for (1) reading, (2) singing, (3) any game in which his elders amused him. Hilary said indifferently, ‘Daddy, sing a story three bears,’ and ‘Daddy, tell a story three bears.’ She cannot remember which is knife and which is fork. Beth M. (2.6) always used can’t when she meant won’t. It meant simply refusal to do what she did not want to.

VI.—§ 5. Numerals. Time.

It is interesting to watch the way in which arithmetical notions grow in extent and clearness. Many children learn very early to say one, two, which is often said to them when they learn how to walk; but no ideas are associated with these syllables. In the same way many children are drilled to say three when the parents begin with one, two, etc. The idea of plurality is gradually developed, but a child may very well answer two when asked how many fingers papa has; Frans used the combinations some-two and some-three to express ‘more than one’ (2.4). At the age of 2.11 he was very fond of counting, but while he always got the first four numbers right, he would skip over 5 and 7; and when asked to count the apples in a bowl, he would say rapidly 1-2-3-4, even if there were only three, or stop at 3, even if there were five or more. At 3.4 he counted objects as far as 10 correctly, but might easily pass from 11 to 13, and if the things to be counted were not placed in a row he was apt to bungle by moving his fingers irregularly from one to another. When he was 3.8 he answered the question “What do 2 and 2 make?” quite correctly, but next day to the same question he answered “Three,” though in a doubtful tone of voice. This was in the spring, and next month I noted: “His sense of number is evidently weaker than it was: the open-air life makes him forget this as well as all the verses he knew by heart in the winter.” When the next winter came his counting exercises again amused him, but at first he was in a fix as before about any numbers after 6, although he could repeat the numbers till 10 without a mistake. He was fond of doing sums, and had initiated this game himself by asking: “Mother, if I have two apples and get one more, haven’t I then three?” His sense of numbers was so abstract that he was caught by a tricky question: “If you have two eyes and one nose, how many ears have you?” He answered at once, “Three!” A child thus seems to think in abstract numbers, and as he learns his numbers as 1, 2, 3, 4, etc., not as one pear, two pears, three pears, one may well be skeptical about the justification for the recommendation made by many pedagogues that at an early stage of the school-life a child should learn to reckon with concrete things rather than with abstract numbers.

A child will usually be familiar with the sound of higher numerals long before it has any clear notion of what they mean. Frans (3.6) said, “They are coming by a train that is called four thirty-four,” and (4.4) he asked, “How much is twice hundred? Is that a thousand?”

A child’s ideas of time are necessarily extremely vague to begin with; it cannot connect very clear or very definite notions with the expressions it constantly hears others employ, such as ‘last Sunday,’ ‘a week ago,’ or ‘next year.’ The other day I heard a little girl say: “This is where we sat next time,” evidently meaning ‘last time.’ All observers of children mention the frequent confusion of words like to-morrow and yesterday, and the linguist remembers that Gothic gistradagis means ‘to-morrow,’ though it corresponds formally with E. yesterday and G. gestern.

VI.—§ 6. Various Difficulties.

Very small children will often say up both when they want to be taken up and when they want to be put down on the floor. This generally means nothing else than that they have not yet learnt the word down, and up to them simply is a means to obtain a change of position. In the same way a German child used hut auf for having the hat taken off as well as put on, but Meumann rightly interprets this as an undifferentiated desire to have something happen with the hat. But even with somewhat more advanced children there are curious confusions.

Hilary M. (2.0) is completely baffled by words of opposite meaning. She will say, “Daddy, my pinny is too hot; I must warm it at the fire.” She goes to the fire and comes back, saying, “That’s better; it’s quite cool now.” (The same confusion of hot and cold was also reported in the case of one Danish and one German child; cf. also Tracy, p. 134.) One morning while dressing she said, “What a nice windy day,” and an hour or two later, before she had been out, “What a nasty windy day.” She confuses good and naughty completely. Tony F. (2.5) says, “Turn the dark out.”

Sometimes a mere accidental likeness may prove too much for the child. When Hilary M. had a new doll (2.0) her mother said to her: “And is that your son?” Hilary was puzzled, and looking out of the window at the sun, said: “No, that’s my sun.” It was very difficult to set her out of this confusion.[20] Her sister Beth (3.8), looking at a sunset, said: “That’s what you call a sunset; where Ireland (her sister) is (at school) it’s a summerset.” About the same time, when staying at Longwood Farm, she said: “I suppose if the trees were cut down it would be Shortwood Farm?”

An English friend writes to me: “I misunderstood the text, ‘And there fell from his eyes as it were scales,’ as I knew the word scales only in the sense ‘balances.’ The phenomenon seemed to me a strange one, but I did not question that it occurred, any more than I questioned other strange phenomena recounted in the Bible. In the lines of the hymn—

Teach me to live that I may dread

The grave as little as my bed—

I supposed that the words ‘as little as my bed’ were descriptive of my future grave, and that it was my duty according to the hymn to fear the grave.”

Words with several meanings may cause children much difficulty. A Somerset child said, “Moses was not a good boy, and his mother smacked ’un and smacked ’un and smacked ’un till she couldn’t do it no more, and then she put ’un in the ark of bulrushes.” This puzzled the teacher till he looked at the passage in Exodus: “And when she could hide him no longer, she laid him in an ark of bulrushes.” Here, of course, we have technically two different words hide; but to the child the difficulty is practically as great where we have what is called one and the same word with two distinct meanings, or when a word is used figuratively.

The word ‘child’ means two different things, which in some languages are expressed by two distinct words. I remember my own astonishment at the age of nine when I heard my godmother talk of her children. “But you have no children.” “Yes, Clara and Eliza.” I knew them, of course, but they were grown up.

Take again the word old. A boy knew that he was three years, but could not be induced to say ‘three years old’; no, he is three years new, and his father too is new, as distinct from his grandmother, who he knows is old. A child asked, “Why have grand dukes and grand pianos got the same name?” (Glenconner, p. 21).

When Frans was told (4.4) “Your eyes are running,” he was much astonished, and asked, “Are they running away?”

Sometimes a child knows a word first in some secondary sense. When a country child first came to Copenhagen and saw a soldier, he said, “There is a tin-soldier” (2.0). Stern has a story about his daughter who was taken to the country and wished to pat the backs of the pigs, but was checked with the words, “Pigs always lie in dirt,” when she was suddenly struck with a new idea; “Ah, that is why they are called pigs, because they are so dirty: but what would people call them if they didn’t lie in the dirt?” History repeats itself: only the other day a teacher wrote to me that one of his pupils had begun his essay with the words: “Pigs are rightly called thus, for they are such swine.”

Words of similar sound are apt to be confused. Some children have had trouble till mature years with soldier and shoulder, hassock and cassock, diary and dairy. Lady Glenconner writes: “They almost invariably say ‘lemon’ [for melon], and if they make an effort to be more correct they still mispronounce it. ‘Don’t say melling.’ ‘Very well, then, mellum.’” Among other confusions mentioned in her book I may quote Portugal for ‘purgatory,’ King Solomon’s three hundred Columbines, David and his great friend Johnson, Cain and Mabel—all of them showing how words from spheres beyond the ordinary ken of children are assimilated to more familiar ones.

Schuchardt has a story of a little coloured boy in the West Indies who said, “It’s three hot in this room”: he had heard too = two and literally wanted to ‘go one better.’ According to Mr. James Payne, a boy for years substituted for the words ‘Hallowed be Thy name’ ‘Harold be Thy name.’ Many children imagine that there is a pole to mark where the North Pole is, and even (like Helen Keller) that polar bears climb the Pole.

This leads us naturally to what linguists call ‘popular etymology’—which is very frequent with children in all countries. I give a few examples from books. A four-year-old boy had heard several times about his nurse’s neuralgia, and finally said: “I don’t think it’s new ralgia, I call it old ralgia.” In this way anchovies are made into hamchovies, whirlwind into worldwind, and holiday into hollorday, a day to holloa. Professor Sturtevant writes: A boy of six or seven had frequently had his ear irrigated; when similar treatment was applied to his nose, he said that he had been ‘nosigated’—he had evidently given his own interpretation to the first syllable of irrigate.

There is an element of ‘popular etymology’ in the following joke which was made by one of the Glenconner children when four years old: “I suppose you wag along in the wagonette, the landau lands you at the door, and you sweep off in the brougham” (pronounced broom).

VI.—§ 7. Shifters.

A class of words which presents grave difficulty to children are those whose meaning differs according to the situation, so that the child hears them now applied to one thing and now to another. That was the case with words like ‘father,’ and ‘mother.’ Another such word is ‘enemy.’ When Frans (4.5) played a war-game with Eggert, he could not get it into his head that he was Eggert’s enemy: no, it was only Eggert who was the enemy. A stronger case still is ‘home.’ When a child was asked if his grandmother had been at home, and answered: “No, grandmother was at grandfather’s,” it is clear that for him ‘at home’ meant merely ‘at my home.’ Such words may be called shifters. When Frans (3.6) heard it said that ‘the one’ (glove) was as good as ‘the other,’ he asked, “Which is the one, and which is the other?”—a question not easy to answer.

The most important class of shifters are the personal pronouns. The child hears the word ‘I’ meaning ‘Father,’ then again meaning ‘Mother,’ then again ‘Uncle Peter,’ and so on unendingly in the most confusing manner. Many people realize the difficulty thus presented to the child, and to obviate it will speak of themselves in the third person as ‘Father’ or ‘Grannie’ or ‘Mary,’ and instead of saying ‘you’ to the child, speak of it by its name. The child’s understanding of what is said is thus facilitated for the moment: but on the other hand the child in this way hears these little words less frequently and is slower in mastering them.

If some children soon learn to say ‘I’ while others speak of themselves by their name, the difference is not entirely due to the different mental powers of the children, but must be largely attributed to their elders’ habit of addressing them by their name or by the pronouns. But Germans would not be Germans, and philosophers would not be philosophers, if they did not make the most of the child’s use of ‘I,’ in which they see the first sign of self-consciousness. The elder Fichte, we are told, used to celebrate not his son’s birthday, but the day on which he first spoke of himself as ‘I.’ The sober truth is, I take it, that a boy who speaks of himself as ‘Jack’ can have just as full and strong a perception of himself as opposed to the rest of the world as one who has learnt the little linguistic trick of saying ‘I.’ But this does not suit some of the great psychologists, as seen from the following quotation: “The child uses no pronouns; it speaks of itself in the third person, because it has no idea of its ‘I’ (Ego) nor of its ‘Not-I,’ because it knows nothing of itself nor of others.”

It is not an uncommon case of confusion for a child to use ‘you’ and ‘your’ instead of ‘I,’ ‘me,’ and ‘mine.’ The child has noticed that ‘will you have?’ means ‘will Jack have?’ so that he looks on ‘you’ as synonymous with his own name. In some children this confusion may last for some months. It is in some cases connected with an inverted word-order, ‘do you’ meaning ‘I do’—an instance of ‘echoism’ (see below). Sometimes he will introduce a further complication by using the personal pronoun of the third person, as though he had started the sentence with ‘Jack’—then ‘you have his coat’ means ‘I have my coat.’ He may even speak of the person addressed as ‘I.’ ‘Will I tell a story?’ = ‘Will you tell a story?’ Frans was liable to use these confused forms between the ages of two and two and a-half, and I had to quicken his acquaintance with the right usage by refusing to understand him when he used the wrong. Beth M. (2.6) was very jealous about her elder sister touching any of her property, and if the latter sat on her chair, she would shriek out: “That’s your chair; that’s your chair.”

The forms I and me are a common source of difficulty to English children. Both Tony E. (2.7 to 3.0) and Hilary M. (2.0) use my for me; it is apparently a kind of blending of me and I; e.g. “Give Hilary medicine, make my better,” “Maggy is looking at my,” “Give it my.” See also O’Shea, p. 81: ‘my want to do this or that; my feel bad; that is my pencil; take my to bed.’

His and her are difficult to distinguish: “An ill lady, his legs were bad” (Tony E., 3.3).

C. M. L. (about the end of her second year) constantly used wour and wours for our and ours, the connexion being with we, as ‘your’ with you. In exactly the same way many Danish children say vos for os on account of vi. But all this really falls under our next chapter.

VI.—§ 8. Extent of Vocabulary.

The number of words which the child has at command is constantly increasing, but not uniformly, as the increase is affected by the child’s health and the new experiences which life presents to him. In the beginning it is tolerably easy to count the words the child uses; later it becomes more difficult, as there are times when his command of speech grows with astonishing rapidity. There is great difference between individual children. Statistics have often been given of the extent of a child’s vocabulary at different ages, or of the results of comparing the vocabularies of a number of children.

An American child who was closely observed by his mother, Mrs. Winfield S. Hall, had in the tenth month 3 words, in the eleventh 12, in the twelfth 24, in the thirteenth 38, in the fourteenth 48, in the fifteenth 106, in the sixteenth 199, and in the seventeenth 232 words (Child Study Monthly, March 1897). During the first month after the same boy was six years old, slips of paper and pencils were distributed over the house and practically everything which the child said was written down. After two or three days these were collected and the words were put under their respective letters in a book kept for that purpose. New sets of papers were put in their places and other lists made. In addition to this, the record of his life during the past year was examined and all of his words not already listed were added. In this way his summer vocabulary was obtained; conversations on certain topics were also introduced to give him an opportunity to use words relating to such topics. The list is printed in the Journal of Childhood and Adolescence, January 1902, and is well worth looking through. It contains 2,688 words, apart from proper names and numerals. No doubt the child was really in command of words beyond that total.

This list perhaps is exceptional on account of the care with which it was compiled, but as a rule I am afraid that it is not wise to attach much importance to these tables of statistics. One is generally left in the dark whether the words counted are those that the child has understood, or those that it has actually used—two entirely different things. The passive or receptive knowledge of a language always goes far beyond the active or productive.

One also gets the impression that the observers have often counted up words without realizing the difficulties involved. What is to be counted as a word? Are I, me, we, us one word or four? Is teacup a new word for a child who already knows tea and cup? And so for all compounds. Is box (= a place at a theatre) the same word as box (= workbox)? Are the two thats in ‘that man that you see’ two words or one? It is clear that the process of counting involves so much that is arbitrary and uncertain that very little can be built on the statistics arrived at.

It is more interesting perhaps to determine what words at a given age a child does not know, or rather does not understand when he hears them or when they occur in his reading. I have myself collected such lists, and others have been given me by teachers, who have been astonished at words which their classes did not understand. A teacher can never be too cautious about assuming linguistic knowledge in his pupils—and this applies not only to foreign words, about which all teachers are on the alert, but also to what seem to be quite everyday words of the language of the country.

In connexion with the growth of vocabulary one may ask how many words are possessed by the average grown-up man? Max MÜller in his Lectures stated on the authority of an English clergyman that an English farm labourer has only about three hundred words at command. This is the most utter balderdash, but nevertheless it has often been repeated, even by such an authority on psychology as Wundt. A Danish boy can easily learn seven hundred English words in the first year of his study of the language—and are we to believe that a grown Englishman, even of the lowest class, has no greater stock than such a beginner? If you go through the list of 2,000 to 3,000 words used by the American boy of six referred to above, you will easily convince yourself that they would far from suffice for the rudest labourer. A Swedish dialectologist, after a minute investigation, found that the vocabulary of Swedish peasants amounted to at least 26,000 words, and his view has been confirmed by other investigators. This conclusion is not invalidated by the fact that Shakespeare in his works uses only about 20,000 words and Milton in his poems only about 8,000. It is easy to see what a vast number of words of daily life are seldom or never required by a poet, especially a poet like Milton, whose works are on elevated subjects. The words used by Zola or Kipling or Jack London would no doubt far exceed those used by Shakespeare and Milton.[21]

VI.—§ 9. Summary.

To sum up, then. There are only very few words that are explained to the child, and so long as it is quite small it will not even understand the explanations that might be given. Some it learns because, when the word is used, the object is at the same time pointed at, but most words it can only learn by drawing conclusions about their meaning from the situation in which they arise or from the context in which they are used. These conclusions, however, are very uncertain, or they may be correct for the particular occasion and not hold good on some other, to the child’s mind quite similar, occasion. Grown-up people are in the same position with regard to words they do not know, but which they come across in a book or newspaper, e.g. demise. The meanings of many words are at the same time extraordinarily vague and yet so strictly limited (at least in some respects) that the least deviation is felt as a mistake. Moreover, the child often learns a secondary or figurative meaning of a word before its simple meaning. But gradually a high degree of accuracy is obtained, the fittest meanings surviving—that is (in this connexion) those that agree best with those of the surrounding society. And thus the individual is merged in society, and the social character of language asserts itself through the elimination of everything that is the exclusive property of one person only.

CHAPTER VII
GRAMMAR

§ 1. Introductory. § 2. Substantives and Adjectives. § 3. Verbs. § 4. Degrees of Consciousness. § 5. Word-formation. § 6. Word-division. § 7. Sentences. § 8. Negation and Question. § 9. Prepositions and Idioms.

VII.—§ 1. Introductory.

To learn a language it is not enough to know so many words. They must be connected according to the particular laws of the particular language. No one tells the child that the plural of ‘hand’ is hands, of ‘foot’ feet, of ‘man’ men, or that the past of ‘am’ is was, of ‘love’ loved; it is not informed when to say he and when him, or in what order words must stand. How can the little fellow learn all this, which when set forth in a grammar fills many pages and can only be explained by help of many learned words?

Many people will say it comes by ‘instinct,’ as if ‘instinct’ were not one of those fine words which are chiefly used to cover over what is not understood, because it says so precious little and seems to say so precious much. But when other people, using a more everyday expression, say that it all ‘comes quite of itself,’ I must strongly demur: so far is it from ‘coming of itself’ that it demands extraordinary labour on the child’s part. The countless grammatical mistakes made by a child in its early years are a tell-tale proof of the difficulty which this side of language presents to him—especially, of course, on account of the unsystematic character of our flexions and the irregularity of its so-called ‘rules’ of syntax.

At first each word has only one form for the child, but he soon discovers that grown-up people use many forms which resemble one another in different connexions, and he gets a sense of the purport of these forms, so as to be able to imitate them himself or even develop similar forms of his own. These latter forms are what linguists call analogy-formations: by analogy with ‘Jack’s hat’ and ‘father’s hat’ the child invents such as ‘uncle’s hat’ and ‘Charlie’s hat’—and inasmuch as these forms are ‘correct,’ no one can say on hearing them whether the child has really invented them or has first heard them used by others. It is just on account of the fact that the forms developed on the spur of the moment by each individual are in the vast majority of instances perfectly identical with those used already by other people, that the principle of analogy comes to have such paramount importance in the life of language, for we are all thereby driven to apply it unhesitatingly to all those instances in which we have no ready-made form handy: without being conscious of it, each of us thus now and then really creates something never heard before by us or anybody else.

VII.—§ 2. Substantives and Adjectives.

The -s of the possessive is so regular in English that it is not difficult for the child to attach it to all words as soon as the character of the termination has dawned upon him. But at first there is a time with many children in which words are put together without change, so that ‘Mother hat’ stands for ‘Mother’s hat’; cf. also sentences like “Baby want baby milk.”

After the s-form has been learnt, it is occasionally attached to pronouns, as you’s for ‘your,’ or more rarely I’s or me’s for ‘my.’

The -s is now in English added freely to whole groups of words, as in the King of England’s power, where the old construction was the King’s power of England, and in Beaumont and Fletcher’s plays (see on the historical development of this group genitive my ChE iii.). In Danish we have exactly the same construction, and Danish children will very frequently extend it, placing the -s at the end of a whole interrogative sentence, e.g., ‘Hvem er det da’s?’ (as if in English, ‘Who is it then’s,’ instead of ‘Whose is it then?’). Dr. H. Bradley once wrote to me: “One of your samples of children’s Danish is an exact parallel to a bit of child’s English that I noted long ago. My son, when a little boy, used to say ‘Who is that-’s’ (with a pause before the s) for ‘Whom does that belong to?’”

Irregular plurals are often regularized, gooses for ‘geese,’ tooths, knifes, etc. O’Shea mentions one child who inversely formed the plural chieves for chiefs on the analogy of thieves.

Sometimes the child becomes acquainted with the plural form first, and from it forms a singular. I have noticed this several times with Danish children, who had heard the irregular plural kØer, ‘cows,’ and then would say en kØ instead of en ko (while others from the singular ko form a regular plural koer). French children will say un chevau instead of un cheval.

In the comparison of adjectives analogy-formations are frequent with all children, e.g. the littlest, littler, goodest, baddest, splendider, etc. One child is reported as saying quicklier, another as saying quickerly, instead of the received more quickly. A curious formation is “P’raps it was John, but p’rapser it was Mary.”

O’Shea (p. 108) notices a period of transition when the child may use the analogical form at one moment and the traditional one the next. Thus S. (4.0) will say better perhaps five times where he says gooder once, but in times of excitement he will revert to the latter form.

VII.—§ 3. Verbs.

The child at first tends to treat all verbs on the analogy of love, loved, loved, or kiss, kissed, kissed, thus catched, buyed, frowed for ‘caught, bought, threw or thrown,’ etc., but gradually it learns the irregular forms, though in the beginning with a good deal of hesitation and confusion, as done for ‘did,’ hunged for ‘hung,’ etc. O’Shea gives among other sentences (p. 94): “I drunked my milk.” “Budd swunged on the rings.” “Grandpa boughted me a ring.” “I caughted him.” “Aunt Net camed to-day.” “He gaved it to me”—in all of which the irregular form has been supplemented with the regular ending.

A little Danish incident may be thus rendered in English. The child (4.6): “I have seed a chestnut.” “Where have you seen it?” He: “I seen it in the garden.” This shows the influence of the form last heard.

I once heard a French child say “Il a pleuvy” for ‘plu’ from ‘pleuvoir.’ Other analogical forms are prendu for ‘pris’; assire for ‘asseoir’ (from the participle assis), se taiser for ‘se taire’ (from the frequent injunction taisez-vous). Similar formations are frequent in all countries.

VII.—§ 4. Degrees of Consciousness.

Do the little brains think about these different forms and their uses? Or is the learning of language performed as unconsciously as the circulation of the blood or the process of digestion? Clearly they do not think about grammatical forms in the way pursued in grammar-lessons, with all the forms of the same word arranged side by side of one another, with rules and exceptions. Still there is much to lead us to believe that the thing does not go of itself without some thinking over. The fact that in later years we speak our language without knowing how we do it, the right words and phrases coming to us no one knows how or whence, is no proof that it was always so. We ride a bicycle without giving a thought to the machine, look around us, talk with a friend, etc., and yet there was a time when every movement had to be mastered by slow and painful efforts. There would be nothing strange in supposing that it is the same with the acquisition of language.

Of course, it would be idle to ask children straight out if they think about these things, and what they think. But now and then one notices something which shows that at an early age they think about points of grammar a good deal. When Frans was 2.9, he lay in bed not knowing that anyone was in the next room, and he was heard to say quite plainly: “SmÅ hÆnder hedder det—lille hÅnd—smÅ hÆnder—lille hÆnder, nÆ smÅ hÆnder.” (“They are called small hands—little hand—small hands—little hands, no, small hands”: in Danish lille is not used with a plural noun.) Similar things have been related to me by other parents, one child, for instance, practising plural forms while turning over the leaves of a picture-book, and another one, who was corrected for saying nak instead of nikkede (‘nodded’), immediately retorted “Stikker stak, nikker nak,” thus showing on what analogy he had formed the new preterit. Frequently children, after giving a form which their own ears tell them is wrong, at once correct it: ‘I sticked it in—I stuck it in.’

A German child, not yet two, said: “Papa, hast du mir was mitgebringt—gebrungen—gebracht?” almost at a breath (Gabelentz), and another (2.5) said hausin, but then hesitated and added: “Man kann auch hÄuser sagen” (Meringer).

VII.—§ 5. Word-formation.

In the forming of words the child’s brain is just as active. In many cases, again, it will be impossible to distinguish between what the child has heard and merely copied and what it has itself fashioned to a given pattern. If a child, for example, uses the word ‘kindness,’ it is probable that he has heard it before, but it is not certain, because he might equally well have formed the word himself. If, however, we hear him say ‘kindhood,’ or ‘kindship,’ or ‘wideness,’ ‘broadness,’ ‘stupidness,’ we know for certain that he has made the word up himself, because the resultant differs from the form used in the language he hears around him. A child who does not know the word ‘spade’ may call the tool a digger; he may speak of a lamp as a shine. He may say it suns when the sun is shining (cf. it rains), or ask his mother to sauce his pudding. It is quite natural that the enormous number of nouns and verbs of exactly the same form in English (blossom, care, drink, end, fight, fish, ape, hand, dress, etc.) should induce children to make new verbs according to the same pattern; I quote a few of the examples given by O’Shea: “I am going to basket these apples.” “I pailed him out” (took a turtle out of a washtub with a pail). “I needled him” (put a needle through a fly).

Other words are formed by means of derivative endings, as sorrified, lessoner (O’Shea 32), flyable (able to fly, Glenconner 3); “This tooth ought to come out, because it is crookening the others” (a ten-year-old, told me by Professor Ayres). Compound nouns, too, may be freely formed, such as wind-ship, eye-curtain (O’Shea), a fun-copy of Romeo and Juliet (travesty, Glenconner 19). Bryan L. (ab. 5) said springklers for chrysalises (‘because they wake up in the spring’).

Sometimes a child will make up a new word through ‘blending’ two, as when Hilary M. (1.8 to 2) spoke of rubbish = the rubber to polish the boots, or of the backet, from bat and racquet. Beth M. (2.0) used breakolate, from breakfast and chocolate, and Chally as a child’s name, a compound of two sisters, Charity and Sally.

VII.—§ 6. Word-division.

We are so accustomed to see sentences in writing or print with a little space left after each word, that we have got altogether wrong conceptions of language as it is spoken. Here words follow one another without the least pause till the speaker hesitates for a word or has come to the end of what he has to say. ‘Not at all’ sounds like ‘not a tall.’ It therefore requires in many cases a great deal of comparison and analysis on the part of the child to find out what is one and what two or three words. We have seen before that the question ‘How big is the boy?’ is to the child a single expression, beyond his powers of analysis, and to a much later age it is the same with other phrases. The child, then, may make false divisions, and either treat a group of words as one word or one word as a group of words. A girl (2.6) used the term ‘Tanobijeu’ whenever she wished her younger brother to get out of her way. Her parents finally discovered that she had caught up and shortened a phrase that some older children had used—‘’Tend to your own business’ (O’Shea).

A child, addressing her cousin as ‘Aunt Katie,’ was told “I am not Aunt Katie, I am merely Katie.” Next day she said: “Good-morning, Aunt merely-Katie” (translated). A child who had been praised with the words, ‘You are a good boy,’ said to his mother, “You’re a good boy, mother” (2.8).

Cecil H. (4.0) came back from a party and said that she had been given something very nice to eat. “What was it?” “Rats.” “No, no.” “Well, it was mice then.” She had been asked if she would have ‘some-ice,’ and had taken it to be ‘some mice.’ S. L. (2.6) constantly used ‘ababana’ for ‘banana’; the form seems to have come from the question “Will you have a banana?” but was used in such a sentence as “May I have an ababana?” Children will often say napple for apple through a misdivision of an-apple, and normous for enormous; cf. Ch. X § 2.

A few examples may be added from children’s speech in other countries. Ronjat’s child said nÉsey for ‘Échelle,’ starting from u'ne?Échelle; Grammont’s child said un tarbre, starting from cet arbre, and ce nos for ‘cet os,’ from un os; a German child said motel for ‘hotel,’ starting from the combination ‘im?(h)?otel’ (Stern). Many German children say arrhÖe, because they take the first syllable of ‘diarrhÖe’ as the feminine article. A Dutch child heard the phrase ‘’k weet ’t niet’ (‘I don’t know’), and said “Papa, hij kweet ’t niet” (Van Ginneken). A Danish child heard his father say, “Jeg skal op i ministeriet” (“I’m going to the Government office”), and took the first syllable as min (my); consequently he asked, “Skal du i dinisteriet?” A French child was told that they expected MunkÁcsy (the celebrated painter, in French pronounced as Mon-), and asked his aunt: “Est-ce que ton KÁcsy ne viendra pas?” Antoinette K. (7.), in reply to “C’est bien, je te fÉlicite,” said, “Eh bien, moi je ne te fais pas licite.”

The German ‘Ich habe antgewortet’ is obviously on the analogy of angenommen, etc. (Meringer). Danish children not unfrequently take the verb telefonere as two words, and in the interrogative form will place the personal pronoun in the middle of it, ‘Tele hun fonerer?’ (‘Does she telephone?’) A girl asked to see ele mer fant (as if in English she had said ‘ele more phant’). Cf. ‘Give me more handier-cap’ for ‘Give me a greater handicap’—in a foot-race (O’Shea 108).

VII.—§ 7. Sentences.

In the first period the child knows nothing of grammar: it does not connect words together, far less form sentences, but each word stands by itself. ‘Up’ means what we should express by a whole sentence, ‘I want to get up,’ or ‘Lift me up’; ‘Hat’ means ‘Put on my hat,’ or ‘I want to put my hat on,’ or ‘I have my hat on,’ or ‘Mamma has a new hat on’; ‘Father’ can be either ‘Here comes Father,’ or ‘This is Father,’ or ‘He is called Father,’ or ‘I want Father to come to me,’ or ‘I want this or that from Father.’ This particular group of sounds is vaguely associated with the mental picture of the person in question, and is uttered at the sight of him or at the mere wish to see him or something else in connexion with him.

When we say that such a word means what we should express by a whole sentence, this does not amount to saying that the child’s ‘Up’ is a sentence, or a sentence-word, as many of those who have written about these questions have said. We might just as well assert that clapping our hands is a sentence, because it expresses the same idea (or the same frame of mind) that is otherwise expressed by the whole sentence ‘This is splendid.’ The word ‘sentence’ presupposes a certain grammatical structure, which is wanting in the child’s utterance.

Many investigators have asserted that the child’s first utterances are not means of imparting information, but always an expression of the child’s wishes and requirements. This is certainly somewhat of an exaggeration, since the child quite clearly can make known its joy at seeing a hat or a plaything, or at merely being able to recognize it and remember the word for it; but the statement still contains a great deal of truth, for without strong feelings a child would not say much, and it is a great stimulus to talk that he very soon discovers that he gets his wishes fulfilled more easily when he makes them known by means of certain sounds.

Frans (1.7) was accustomed to express his longings in general by help of a long m with rising tone, while at the same time stretching out his hand towards the particular thing that he longed for. This he did, for example, at dinner, when he wanted water. One day his mother said, “Now see if you can say vand (water),” and at once he said what was an approach to the word, and was delighted at getting something to drink by that means. A moment later he repeated what he had said, and was inexpressibly delighted to have found the password which at once brought him something to drink. This was repeated several times. Next day, when his father was pouring out water for himself, the boy again said ‘van,’ ‘van,’ and was duly rewarded. He had not heard the word during the intervening twenty-four hours, and nothing had been done to remind him of it. After some repetitions (for he only got a few drops at a time) he pronounced the word for the first time quite correctly. The day after, the same thing occurred; the word was never heard but at dinner. When he became rather a nuisance with his constant cries for water, his mother said: “Say please”—and immediately came his “Bebe vand” (“Water, please”)—his first attempt to put two words together.

Later—in this formless period—the child puts more and more words together, often in quite haphazard order: ‘My go snow’ (‘I want to go out into the snow’), etc. A Danish child of 2.1 said the Danish words (imperfectly pronounced, of course) corresponding to “Oh papa lamp mother boom,” when his mother had struck his father’s lamp with a bang. Another child said “Papa hen corn cap” when he saw his father give corn to the hens out of his cap.

When Frans was 1.10, passing a post-office (which Danes call ‘posthouse’), he said of his own accord the Danish words for ‘post, house, bring, letter’(a pause between the successive words)—I suppose that the day before he had heard a sentence in which these words occurred. In the same month, when he had thrown a ball a long way, he said what would be in English ‘dat was good.’ This was not a sentence which he had put together for himself, but a mere repetition of what had been said to him, clearly conceived as a whole, and equivalent to ‘bravo.’ Sentences of this kind, however, though taken as units, prepare the way for the understanding of the words ‘that’ and ‘was’ when they turn up in other connexions.

One thing which plays a great rÔle in children’s acquisition of language, and especially in their early attempts to form sentences, is Echoism: the fact that children echo what is said to them. When one is learning a foreign language, it is an excellent method to try to imitate to oneself in silence every sentence which one hears spoken by a native. By that means the turns of phrases, the order of words, the intonation of the sentence are firmly fixed in the memory—so that they can be recalled when required, or rather recur to one quite spontaneously without an effort. What the grown man does of conscious purpose our children to a large extent do without a thought—that is, they repeat aloud what they have just heard, either the whole, if it is a very short sentence, or more commonly the conclusion, as much of it as they can retain in their short memories. The result is a matter of chance—it need not always have a meaning or consist of entire words. Much, clearly, is repeated without being understood, much, again, without being more than half understood. Take, for example (translated):

Shall I carry you?—Frans (1.9): Carry you.

Shall Mother carry Frans?—Carry Frans.

The sky is so blue.—So boo.

I shall take an umbrella.—Take rella.

Though this feature in a child’s mental history has been often noticed, no one seems to have seen its full significance. One of the acutest observers (Meumann, p. 28) even says that it has no importance in the development of the child’s speech. On the contrary, I think that Echoism explains very much indeed. First let us bear in mind the mutilated forms of words which a child uses: ’chine for machine, ’gar for cigar, Trix for Beatrix, etc. Then a child’s frequent use of an indirect form of question rather than direct, ‘Why you smoke, Father?’ which can hardly be explained except as an echo of sentences like ‘Tell me why you smoke.’ This plays a greater rÔle in Danish than in English, and the corresponding form of the sentence has been frequently remarked by Danish parents. Another feature which is nearly constant with Danish children at the age when echoing is habitual is the inverted word order: this is used after an initial adverb (nu kommer hun, etc.), but the child will use it in all cases (kommer hun, etc.). Further, the extremely frequent use of the infinitive, because the child hears it towards the end of a sentence, where it is dependent on a preceding can, or may, or must. ‘Not eat that’ is a child’s echo of ‘You mustn’t eat that.’ In German this has become the ordinary form of official order: “Nicht hinauslehnen” (“Do not lean out of the window”).

VII.—§ 8. Negation and Question.

Most children learn to say ‘no’ before they can say ‘yes’—simply because negation is a stronger expression of feeling than affirmation. Many little children use nenenene (short e) as a natural expression of fretfulness and discomfort. It is perhaps so natural that it need not be learnt: there is good reason for the fact that in so many languages words of negation begin with n (or m). Sometimes the n is heard without a vowel: it is only the gesture of ‘turning up one’s nose’ made audible.

At first the child does not express what it is that it does not want—it merely puts it away with its hand, pushes away, for example, what is too hot for it. But when it begins to express in words what it is that it will not have, it does so often in the form ‘Bread no,’ often with a pause between the words, as two separate utterances, as when we might say, in our fuller forms of expression: ‘Do you offer me bread? I won’t hear of it.’ So with verbs: ‘I sleep no.’ Thus with many Danish children, and I find the same phenomenon mentioned with regard to children of different nations. Tracy says (p. 136): “Negation was expressed by an affirmative sentence, with an emphatic no tacked on at the end, exactly as the deaf-mutes do.” The blind-deaf Helen Keller, when she felt her little sister’s mouth and her mother spelt ‘teeth’ to her, answered: “Baby teeth—no, baby eat—no,” i.e., baby cannot eat because she has no teeth. In the same way, in German, ‘Stul nei nei—schossel,’ i.e., I won’t sit on the chair, but in your lap, and in French, ‘Papa abeiÉ ato non, iaian abeiÉ non,’ i.e., Papa n’est pas encore habillÉ, Suzanne n’est pas habillÉe (Stern, 189, 203). It seems thus that this mode of expression will crop up everywhere as an emphatic negation.

Interrogative sentences come generally rather early—it would be better to say questions, because at first they do not take the form of interrogative sentences, the interrogation being expressed by bearing, look or gesture: when it begins to be expressed by intonation we are on the way to question expressed in speech. Some of the earliest questions have to do with place: ‘Where is...?’ The child very often hears such sentences as ‘Where is its little nose?’ which are not really meant as questions; we may also remark that questions of this type are of great practical importance for the little thing, who soon uses them to beg for something which has been taken away from him or is out of his reach. Other early questions are ‘What’s that?’ and ‘Who?’

Later—generally, it would seem, at the close of the third year—questions with ‘why’ crop up: these are of the utmost importance for the child’s understanding of the whole world and its manifold occurrences, and, however tiresome they may be when they come in long strings, no one who wishes well to his child will venture to discourage them. Questions about time, such as ‘When? How long?’ appear much later, owing to the child’s difficulty in acquiring exact ideas about time.

Children often find a difficulty in double questions, and when asked ‘Will you have brown bread or white?’ merely answer the last word with ‘Yes.’ So in reply to ‘Is that red or yellow?’ ‘Yes’ means ‘yellow’ (taken from a child of 4.11). I think this is an instance of the short memories of children, who have already at the end of the question forgotten the beginning, but Professor Mawer thinks that the real difficulty here is in making a choice: they cannot decide between alternatives: usually they are silent, and if they say ‘Yes’ it only means that they do not want to go without both or feel that they must say something.

VII.—§ 9. Prepositions and Idioms.

Prepositions are of very late growth in a child’s language. Much attention has been given to the point, and Stern has collected statistics of the ages at which various children have first used prepositions: the earliest age is 1.10, the average age is 2.3. It does not, however, seem to me to be a matter of much interest how early an individual word of some particular grammatical class is first used; it is much more interesting to follow up the gradual growth of the child’s command of this class and to see how the first inevitable mistakes and confusions arise in the little brain. Stern makes the interesting remark that when the tendency to use prepositions first appears, it grows far more rapidly than the power to discriminate one preposition from another; with his own children there came a time when they employed the same word as a sort of universal preposition in all relations. Hilda used von, Eva auf. I have never observed anything corresponding to this among Danish children.

All children start by putting the words for the most important concepts together without connective words, so ‘Leave go bedroom’ (‘May I have leave to go into the bedroom?’), ‘Out road’ (‘I am going out on the road’). The first use of prepositions is always in set phrases learnt as wholes, like ‘go to school,’ ‘go to pieces,’ ‘lie in bed,’ ‘at dinner.’ Not till later comes the power of using prepositions in free combinations, and it is then that mistakes appear. Nor is this surprising, since in all languages prepositional usage contains much that is peculiar and arbitrary, chiefly because when we once pass beyond a few quite clear applications of time and place, the relations to be expressed become so vague and indefinite, that logically one preposition might often seem just as right as another, although usage has laid down a fast law that this preposition must be used in this case and that in another. I noted down a great number of mistakes my own boy made in these words, but in all cases I was able to find some synonymous or antonymous expression in which the preposition used would have been the correct one, and which may have been vaguely before his mind.

The multiple meanings of prepositions sometimes have strange results. A little girl was in her bath, and hearing her mother say: “I will wash you in a moment,” answered: “No, you must wash me in the bath”! She was led astray by the two uses of in. We know of the child at school who was asked “What is an average?” and said: “What the hen lays eggs on.” Even men of science are similarly led astray by prepositions. It is perfectly natural to say that something has passed over the threshold of consciousness: the metaphor is from the way in which you enter a house by stepping over the threshold. If the metaphor were kept, the opposite situation would be expressed by the statement that such and such a thing is outside the threshold of consciousness. But psychologists, in the thoughtless way of little children, take under to be always the opposite of over, and so speak of things ‘lying under (or below) the threshold of our consciousness,’ and have even invented a Latin word for the unconscious, viz. subliminal.[22]

Children may use verbs with an object which require a preposition (‘Will you wait me?’), or which are only used intransitively (‘Will you jump me?’), or they may mix up an infinitival with a direct construction (‘Could you hear me sneezed?’). But it is surely needless to multiply examples.

When many years ago, in my Progress in Language, I spoke of the advantages, even to natives, of simplicity in linguistic structure, Professor Herman MÖller, in a learned review, objected to me that to the adult learning a foreign tongue the chief difficulty consists in “the countless chicaneries due to the tyrannical and capricious usage, whose tricks there is no calculating; but these offer to the native child no such difficulty as morphology may,” and again, in speaking of the choice of various prepositions, which is far from easy to the foreigner, he says: “But any considerable mental exertion on the part of the native child learning its mother-tongue is here, of course, out of the question.” Such assertions as these cannot be founded on actual observation; at any rate, it is my experience in listening to children’s talk that long after they have reached the point where they make hardly any mistake in pronunciation and verbal forms, etc., they are still capable of using many turns of speech which are utterly opposed to the spirit of the language, and which are in the main of the same kind as those which foreigners are apt to fall into. Many of the child’s mistakes are due to mixtures or blendings of two turns of expression, and not a few of them may be logically justified. But learning a language implies among other things learning what you may not say in the language, even though no reasonable ground can be given for the prohibition.

CHAPTER VIII
SOME FUNDAMENTAL PROBLEMS

VIII.—§ 1. Why is the Native Language learnt so well?

How does it happen that children in general learn their mother-tongue so well? That this is a problem becomes clear when we contrast a child’s first acquisition of its mother-tongue with the later acquisition of any foreign tongue. The contrast is indeed striking and manifold: here we have a quite little child, without experience or prepossessions; there a bigger child, or it may be a grown-up person with all sorts of knowledge and powers: here a haphazard method of procedure; there the whole task laid out in a system (for even in the schoolbooks that do not follow the old grammatical system there is a certain definite order of progress from more elementary to more difficult matters): here no professional teachers, but chance parents, brothers and sisters, nursery-maids and playmates; there teachers trained for many years specially to teach languages: here only oral instruction; there not only that, but reading-books, dictionaries and other assistance. And yet this is the result: here complete and exact command of the language as a native speaks it, however stupid the children; there, in most cases, even with people otherwise highly gifted, a defective and inexact command of the language. On what does this difference depend?

The problem has never been elucidated or canvassed from all sides, but here and there one finds a partial answer, often given out to be a complete answer. Often one side of the question only is considered, that which relates to sounds, as if the whole problem had been solved when one had found a reason for children acquiring a better pronunciation of their mother-tongue than one generally gets in later life of a foreign speech.

Many people accordingly tell us that children’s organs of speech are especially flexible, but that this suppleness of the tongue and lips is lost in later life. This explanation, however, does not hold water, as is shown sufficiently by the countless mistakes in sound made by children. If their organs were as flexible as is pretended, they could learn sounds correctly at once, while as a matter of fact it takes a long time before all the sounds and groups of sounds are imitated with tolerable accuracy. Suppleness is not something which is original, but something acquired later, and acquired with no small difficulty, and then only with regard to the sounds of one’s own language, and not universally.

The same applies to the second answer (given by Bremer, Deutsche Phonetik, 2), namely, that the child’s ear is especially sensitive to impressions. The ear also requires development, since at first it can scarcely detect a number of nuances which we grown-up people hear most distinctly.

Some people say that the reason why a child learns its native language so well is that it has no established habits to contend against. But that is not right either: as any good observer can see, the process by which the child acquires sounds is pursued through a continuous struggle against bad habits which it has acquired at an earlier stage and which may often have rooted themselves remarkably firmly.

Sweet (H 19) says among other things that the conditions of learning vernacular sounds are so favourable because the child has nothing else to do at the time. On the contrary, one may say that the child has an enormous deal to do while it is learning the language; it is at that time active beyond all belief: in a short time it subdues wider tracts than it ever does later in a much longer time. The more wonderful is it that along with those tasks it finds strength to learn its mother-tongue and its many refinements and crooked turns.

Some point to heredity and say that a child learns that language most easily which it is disposed beforehand to learn by its ancestry, or in other words that there are inherited convolutions of the brain which take in this language better than any other. Perhaps there is something in this, but we have no definite, carefully ascertained facts. Against the theory stands the fact that the children of immigrants acquire the language of their foster-country to all appearance just as surely and quickly as children of the same age whose forefathers have been in the country for ages. This may be observed in England, in Denmark, and still more in North America. Environment clearly has greater influence than descent.

The real answer in my opinion (which is not claimed to be absolutely new in every respect) lies partly in the child itself, partly in the behaviour towards it of the people around it. In the first place, the time of learning the mother-tongue is the most favourable of all, namely, the first years of life. If one assumes that mental endowment means the capacity for development, without doubt all children are best endowed in their first years: from birth onwards there is a steady decline in the power of grasping what is new and of accommodating oneself to it. With some this decline is a very rapid one—they quickly become fossilized and unable to make a change in their habits; with others one can notice a happy power of development even in old age; but no one keeps very long in its full range the adaptability of his first years.

Further, we must remember that the child has far more abundant opportunities of hearing his mother-tongue than one gets, as a rule, with any language one learns later. He hears it from morning to night, and, be it noted, in its genuine shape, with the right pronunciation, right intonation, right use of words and right syntax: the language comes to him as a fresh, ever-bubbling spring. Even before he begins to say anything himself, his first understanding of the language is made easier by the habit that mothers and nurses have of repeating the same phrases with slight alterations, and at the same time doing the thing which they are talking about. “Now we must wash the little face, now we must wash the little forehead, now we must wash the little nose, now we must wash the little chin, now we must wash the little ear,” etc. If men had to attend to their children, they would never use so many words—but in that case the child would scarcely learn to understand and talk as soon as it does when it is cared for by women.[23]

Then the child has, as it were, private lessons in its mother-tongue all the year round. There is nothing of the kind in the learning of a language later, when at most one has six hours a week and generally shares them with others. The child has another priceless advantage: he hears the language in all possible situations and under such conditions that language and situation ever correspond exactly to one another and mutually illustrate one another. Gesture and facial expression harmonize with the words uttered and keep the child to a right understanding. Here there is nothing unnatural, such as is often the case in a language-lesson in later years, when one talks about ice and snow in June or excessive heat in January. And what the child hears is just what immediately concerns him and interests him, and again and again his own attempts at speech lead to the fulfilment of his dearest wishes, so that his command of language has great practical advantages for him.

Along with what he himself sees the use of, he hears a great deal which does not directly concern him, but goes into the little brain and is stored up there to turn up again later. Nothing is heard but leaves its traces, and at times one is astonished to discover what has been preserved, and with what exactness. One day, when Frans was 4.11 old, he suddenly said: “Yesterday—isn’t there some who say yesterday?” (giving yesterday with the correct English pronunciation), and when I said that it was an English word, he went on: “Yes, it is Mrs. B.: she often says like that, yesterday.” Now, it was three weeks since that lady had called at the house and talked English. It is a well-known fact that hypnotized persons can sometimes say whole sentences in a language which they do not know, but have merely heard in childhood. In books about children’s language there are many remarkable accounts of such linguistic memories which had lain buried for long stretches of time. A child who had spent the first eighteen months of its life in Silesia and then came to Berlin, where it had no opportunity of hearing the Silesian pronunciation, at the age of five suddenly came out with a number of Silesian expressions, which could not after the most careful investigation be traced to any other source than to the time before it could talk (Stern, 257 ff.). Grammont has a story of a little French girl, whose nurse had talked French with a strong Italian accent; the child did not begin to speak till a month after this nurse had left, but pronounced many words with Italian sounds, and some of these peculiarities stuck to the child till the age of three.

We may also remark that the baby’s teachers, though, regarded as teachers of language, they may not be absolutely ideal, still have some advantages over those one encounters as a rule later in life. The relation between them and the child is far more cordial and personal, just because they are not teachers first and foremost. They are immensely interested in every little advance the child makes. The most awkward attempt meets with sympathy, often with admiration, while its defects and imperfections never expose it to a breath of unkind criticism. There is a Slavonic proverb, “If you wish to talk well, you must murder the language first.” But this is very often overlooked by teachers of language, who demand faultless accuracy from the beginning, and often keep their pupils grinding so long at some little part of the subject that their desire to learn the language is weakened or gone for good. There is nothing of this sort in the child’s first learning of his language.

It is here that our distinction between the two periods comes in, that of the child’s own separate ‘little language’ and that of the common or social language. In the first period the little one is the centre of a narrow circle of his own, which waits for each little syllable that falls from his lips as though it were a grain of gold. What teachers of languages in later years would rejoice at hearing such forms as we saw before used in the time of the child’s ‘little language,’ fant or vat or ham for ‘elephant’? But the mother really does rejoice: she laughs and exults when he can use these syllables about his toy-elephant, she throws the cloak of her love over the defects and mistakes in the little one’s imitations of words, she remembers again and again what his strange sounds stand for, and her eager sympathy transforms the first and most difficult steps on the path of language to the merriest game.

It would not do, however, for the child’s ‘little language’ and its dreadful mistakes to become fixed. This might easily happen, if the child were never out of the narrow circle of its own family, which knows and recognizes its ‘little language.’ But this is stopped because it comes more and more into contact with others—uncles and aunts, and especially little cousins and playmates: more and more often it happens that the mutilated words are not understood, and are corrected and made fun of, and the child is incited in this way to steady improvement: the ‘little language’ gradually gives place to the ‘common language,’ as the child becomes a member of a social group larger than that of his own little home.

We have now probably found the chief reasons why a child learns his mother-tongue better than even a grown-up person who has been for a long time in a foreign country learns the language of his environment. But it is also a contributory reason that the child’s linguistic needs, to begin with, are far more limited than those of the man who wishes to be able to talk about anything, or at any rate about something. Much more is also linguistically required of the latter, and he must have recourse to language to get all his needs satisfied, while the baby is well looked after even if it says nothing but wawawawa. So the baby has longer time to store up his impressions and continue his experiments, until by trying again and again he at length gets his lesson learnt in all its tiny details, while the man in the foreign country, who must make himself understood, as a rule goes on trying only till he has acquired a form of speech which he finds natives understand: at this point he will generally stop, at any rate as far as pronunciation and the construction of sentences are concerned (while his vocabulary may be largely increased). But this ‘just recognizable’ language is incorrect in thousands of small details, and, inasmuch as bad little habits quickly become fixed, the kind of language is produced which we know so well in the case of resident foreigners—who need hardly open their lips before everyone knows they are not natives, and before a practised ear can detect the country they hail from.[24]

VIII.—§ 2. Natural Ability and Sex.

An important factor in the acquisition of language which we have not considered is naturally the individuality of the child. Parents are apt to draw conclusions as to the abilities of their young hopeful from the rapidity with which he learns to talk; but those who are in despair because their Tommy cannot say a single word when their neighbours’ Harry can say a great deal may take comfort. Slowness in talking may of course mean deficiency of ability, or even idiocy, but not necessarily. A child who chatters early may remain a chatterer all his life, and children whose motto is ‘Slow and sure’ may turn out the deepest, most independent and most trustworthy characters in the end. There are some children who cannot be made to say a single word for a long time, and then suddenly come out with a whole sentence, which shows how much has been quietly fructifying in their brain. Carlyle was one of these: after eleven months of taciturnity he heard a child cry, and astonished all by saying, “What ails wee Jock?” Edmund Gosse has a similar story of his own childhood, and other examples have been recorded elsewhere (Meringer, 194; Stern, 257).

The linguistic development of an individual child is not always in a steady rising line, but in a series of waves. A child who seems to have a boundless power of acquiring language suddenly stands still or even goes back for a short time. The cause may be sickness, cutting teeth, learning to walk, or often a removal to new surroundings or an open-air life in summer. Under such circumstances even the word ‘I’ may be lost for a time.

Some children develop very rapidly for some years until they have reached a certain point, where they stop altogether, while others retain the power to develop steadily to a much later age. It is the same with some races: negro children in American schools may, while they are little, be up to the standard of their white schoolfellows, whom they cannot cope with in later life.

The two sexes differ very greatly in regard to speech—as in regard to most other things. Little girls, on the average, learn to talk earlier and more quickly than boys; they outstrip them in talking correctly; their pronunciation is not spoilt by the many bad habits and awkwardnesses so often found in boys. It has been proved by statistics in many countries that there are far more stammerers and bad speakers among boys and men than among girls and women. The general receptivity of women, their great power of, and pleasure in, imitation, their histrionic talent, if one may so say—all this is a help to them at an early age, so that they can get into other people’s way of talking with greater agility than boys of the same age.

Everything that is conventional in language, everything in which the only thing of importance is to be in agreement with those around you, is the girls’ strong point. Boys may often show a certain reluctance to do exactly as others do: the peculiarities of their ‘little language’ are retained by them longer than by girls, and they will sometimes steadily refuse to correct their own abnormalities, which is very seldom the case with girls. Gaucherie and originality thus are two points between which the speech of boys is constantly oscillating. Cf. below, Ch. XIII.

VIII.—§ 3. Mother-tongue and Other Tongue.

The expression “mother-tongue” should not be understood too literally: the language which the child acquires naturally is not, or not always, his mother’s language. When a mother speaks with a foreign accent or in a pronounced dialect, her children as a rule speak their language as correctly as other children, or keep only the slightest tinge of their mother’s peculiarities. I have seen this very distinctly in many Danish families, in which the mother has kept up her Norwegian language all her life, and in which the children have spoken pure Danish. Thus also in two families I know, in which a strong Swedish accent in one mother, and an unmistakable American pronunciation in the other, have not prevented the children from speaking Danish exactly as if their mothers had been born and bred in Denmark. I cannot, therefore, agree with Passy, who says that the child learns his mother’s sound system (Ch § 32), or with Dauzat’s dictum to the same effect (V 20). The father, as a rule, has still less influence; but what is decisive is the speech of those with whom the child comes in closest contact from the age of three or so, thus frequently servants, but even more effectually playfellows of his own age or rather slightly older than himself, with whom he is constantly thrown together for hours at a time and whose prattle is constantly in his ears at the most impressionable age, while he may not see and hear his father and mother except for a short time every day, at meals and on such occasions. It is also a well-known fact that the children of Danish parents in Greenland often learn the Eskimo language before Danish; and Meinhof says that German children in the African colonies will often learn the language of the natives earlier than German (MSA 139).

This is by no means depreciating the mother’s influence, which is strong indeed, but chiefly in the first period, that of the child’s ‘little language.’ But that is the time when the child’s imitative power is weakest. His exact attention to the minutiÆ of language dates from the time when he is thrown into a wider circle and has to make himself understood by many, so that his language becomes really identical with that of the community, where formerly he and his mother would rest contented with what they, but hardly anyone else, could understand.

The influence of children on children cannot be overestimated.[25] Boys at school make fun of any peculiarities of speech noticed in schoolfellows who come from some other part of the country. Kipling tells us in Stalky and Co. how Stalky and Beetle carefully kicked McTurk out of his Irish dialect. When I read this, I was vividly reminded of the identical method my new friends applied to me when at the age of ten I was transplanted from Jutland to a school in Seeland and excited their merriment through some Jutlandish expressions and intonations. And so we may say that the most important factor in spreading the common or standard language is children themselves.

It often happens that children who are compelled at home to talk without any admixture of dialect talk pure dialect when playing with their schoolfellows out of doors. They can keep the two forms of speech distinct. In the same way they can learn two languages less closely connected. At times this results in very strange blendings, at least for a time; but many children will easily pass from one language to the other without mixing them up, especially if they come in contact with the two languages in different surroundings or on the lips of different people.

It is, of course, an advantage for a child to be familiar with two languages: but without doubt the advantage may be, and generally is, purchased too dear. First of all the child in question hardly learns either of the two languages as perfectly as he would have done if he had limited himself to one. It may seem, on the surface, as if he talked just like a native, but he does not really command the fine points of the language. Has any bilingual child ever developed into a great artist in speech, a poet or orator?

Secondly, the brain effort required to master two languages instead of one certainly diminishes the child’s power of learning other things which might and ought to be learnt. Schuchardt rightly remarks that if a bilingual man has two strings to his bow, both are rather slack, and that the three souls which the ancient Roman said he possessed, owing to his being able to talk three different languages, were probably very indifferent souls after all. A native of Luxemburg, where it is usual for children to talk both French and German, says that few Luxemburgers talk both languages perfectly. “Germans often say to us: ‘You speak German remarkably well for a Frenchman,’ and French people will say, ‘They are Germans who speak our language excellently.’ Nevertheless, we never speak either language as fluently as the natives. The worst of the system is, that instead of learning things necessary to us we must spend our time and energy in learning to express the same thought in two or three languages at the same time.”[26]

VIII.—§ 4. Playing at Language.

The child takes delight in making meaningless sounds long after it has learnt to talk the language of its elders. At 2.2 Frans amused himself with long series of such sounds, uttered with the most confiding look and proper intonation, and it was a joy to him when I replied with similar sounds. He kept up this game for years. Once (4.11) after such a performance he asked me: “Is that English?”—“No.”—“Why not?”—“Because I understand English, but I do not understand what you say.” An hour later he came back and asked: “Father, do you know all languages?”—“No, there are many I don’t know.”—“Do you know German?”—“Yes.” (Frans looked rather crestfallen: the servants had often said of his invented language that he was talking German. So he went on) “Do you know Japanese?”—“No.”—(Delighted) “So remember when I say something you don’t understand, it’s Japanese.”

It is the same everywhere. Hawthorne writes: “Pearl mumbled something into his ear, that sounded, indeed, like human language, but was only such gibberish as children may be heard amusing themselves with, by the hour together” (The Scarlet Letter, 173). And R. L. Stevenson: “Children prefer the shadow to the substance. When they might be speaking intelligibly together, they chatter senseless gibberish by the hour, and are quite happy because they are making believe to speak French” (Virginibus P., 236; cf. Glenconner, p. 40; Stern, pp. 76, 91, 103). Meringer’s boy (2.1) took the music-book and sang a tune of his own making with incomprehensible words.

Children also take delight in varying the sounds of real words, introducing, for instance, alliterations, as “Sing a song of sixpence, A socket full of sye,” etc. Frans at 2.3 amused himself by rounding all his vowels (o for a, y for i), and at 3.1 by making all words of a verse line he had learnt begin with d, then the same words begin with t. O’Shea (p. 32) says that “most children find pleasure in the production of variations upon some of their familiar words. Their purpose seems to be to test their ability to be original. The performance of an unusual act affords pleasure in linguistics as in other matters. H., learning the word dessert, to illustrate, plays with it for a time and exhibits it in a dozen or more variations—dissert, dishert, desot, des'sert, and so on.”

Rhythm and rime appeal strongly to the children’s minds. One English observer says that “a child in its third year will copy the rhythm of songs and verses it has heard in nonsense words.” The same thing is noted by Meringer (p. 116) and Stern (p. 103). Tony E. (2.10) suddenly made up the rime “My mover, I lov-er,” and Gordon M. (2.6) never tired of repeating a phrase of his own composition, “Custard over mustard.” A Danish girl of 3.1 is reported as having a “curious knack of twisting all words into rimes: bestemor hestemor prestemor, Gudrun sludrun pludrun, etc.”

VIII.—§ 5. Secret Languages.

Children, as we have seen, at first employ play-language for its own sake, with no arriÈre-pensÉe, but as they get older they may see that such language has the advantage of not being understood by their elders, and so they may develop a ‘secret language’ consciously. Some such languages are confined to one school, others may be in common use among children of a certain age all over a country. ‘M-gibberish’ and ‘S-gibberish’ consist in inserting m and s, as in goming mout tomdaym or gosings outs tosdays for ‘going out to-day’; ‘Marrowskying’ or ‘Hospital Greek’ transfers the initial letters of words, as renty of plain for ‘plenty of rain,’ flutterby for ‘butterfly’; ‘Ziph’ or ‘Hypernese’ (at Winchester) substitutes wa for the first of two initial consonants and inserts p or g, making ‘breeches’ into wareechepes and ‘penny’ into pegennepy. From my own boyhood in Denmark I remember two languages of this sort, in which a sentence like ‘du er et lille asen’ became dupu erper etpet lilpillepe apasenpen and durbe erbe erbe lirbelerbe arbeserbe respectively. Closely corresponding languages, with insertion of p and addition of -erbse, are found in Germany; in Holland we find ‘de schoone Mei’ made into depÉ schoopÓonepÉ MeipÉi, besides an -erwi-taal with a variation in which the ending is -erf. In France such a language is called javanais; ‘je vais bien’ is made into je-de-que vais-dai-qai bien-den-qen. In Savoy the cowherds put deg after each syllable and thus make ‘a-te kogneu se vaÇhi’ (‘as-tu connu ce vacher?’ in the local dialect) into a-degÁ te-dege ko-dego gnu-degu sÉ-degÉ va-dega chi-degi? Nay, even among the Maoris of New Zealand there is a similar secret language, in which instead of ‘kei te, haere au ki reira’ is said te-kei te-i-te te-haere-te-re te-a te-u te-ki te-re-te-i-te-ra. Human nature is pretty much the same everywhere.[27]

VIII.—§ 6. Onomatopoeia.

Do children really create new words? This question has been much discussed, but even those who are most skeptical in that respect incline to allow them this power in the case of words which imitate sounds. Nevertheless, it should be remembered that the majority of onomatopoeic words heard from children are not their own invention, but are acquired by them in the same way as other words. Hence it is that such words have different forms in different languages. Thus to English cockadoodledoo corresponds French coquerico, German kikeriki and Danish kykeliky, to E. quack-quack, F. cancan, Dan. raprap, etc. These words are an imperfect representation of the birds’ natural cry, but from their likeness to it they are easier for the child to seize than an entirely arbitrary name such as duck.

But, side by side with these, children do invent forms of their own, though the latter generally disappear quickly in favour of the traditional forms. Thus Frans (2.3) had coined the word vakvak, which his mother had heard sometimes without understanding what he meant, when one day he pointed at some crows while repeating the same word; but when his mother told him that these birds were called krager, he took hold of this word with eagerness and repeated it several times, evidently recognizing it as a better name than his own. A little boy of 2.1 called soda-water ft, another boy said ging or gingging for a clock, also for the railway train, while his brother said dann for a bell or clock; a little girl (1.9) said pooh (whispered) for ‘match, cigar, pipe,’ and gagag for ‘hen,’ etc.

When once formed, such words may be transferred to other things, where the sound plays no longer any rÔle. This may be illustrated through two extensions of the same word boom or bom, used by two children first to express the sound of something falling on the floor; then Ellen K. (1.9) used it for a ‘blow,’ and finally for anything disagreeable, e.g. soap in the eyes, while Kaare G. (1.8), after seeing a plate smashed, used the word for a broken plate and afterwards for anything broken, a hole in a dress, etc., also when a button had come off or when anything else was defective in any way.

VIII.—§ 7. Word-inventions.

Do children themselves create words—apart from onomatopoeic words? To me there is no doubt that they do. Frans invented many words at his games that had no connexion, or very little connexion, with existing words. He was playing with a little twig when I suddenly heard him exclaim: “This is called lampetine,” but a little while afterwards he said lanketine, and then again lampetine, and then he said, varying the play, “Now it is kluatine and traniklualalilua” (3.6). A month later I write: “He is never at a loss for a self-invented word; for instance, when he has made a figure with his bricks which resembles nothing whatever, he will say, ‘That shall be lindam.’” When he played at trains in the garden, there were many stations with fanciful names, and at one time he and two cousins had a word kukukounen which they repeated constantly and thought great fun, but whose inner meaning I never succeeded in discovering. An English friend writes about his daughter: “When she was about two and a quarter she would often use some nonsense word in the middle of a perfectly intelligible sentence. When you asked her its meaning she would explain it by another equally unintelligible, and so on through a series as long as you cared to make it.” At 2.10 she pretended she had lost her bricks, and when you showed her that they were just by her, she insisted that they were not ‘bricks’ at all, but mums.

In all accounts of children’s talk you find words which cannot be referred back to the normal language, but which have cropped up from some unsounded depth of the child’s soul. I give a few from notes sent to me by Danish friends: goi ‘comb,’ putput ‘stocking, or any other piece of garment,’ i-a-a ‘chocolate,’ gÖn ‘water to drink, milk’ (kept apart from the usual word vand for water, which she used only for water to wash in), hesh ‘newspaper, book.’ Some such words have become famous in psychological literature because they were observed by Darwin and Taine. Among less famous instances from other books I may mention tibu ‘bird’ (StrÜmpel), adi ‘cake’ (Ament), be’lum-be’lum ‘toy with two men turning about,’ wakaka ‘soldier,’ nda ‘jar,’ pamma ‘pencil,’ bium ‘stocking’ (Meringer).

An American correspondent writes that his boy was fond of pushing a stick over the carpet after the manner of a carpet-sweeper and called the operation jazing. He coined the word borkens as a name for a particular sort of blocks with which he was accustomed to play. He was a nervous child and his imagination created objects of terror that haunted him in the dark, and to these he gave the name of Boons. This name may, however, be derived from baboons. Mr. Harold Palmer tells me that his daughter (whose native language was French) at an early age used ['fu'w?] for ‘soap’ and [d?'d?t?] for ‘horse, wooden horse, merry-go-round.’

Dr. F. Poulsen, in his book Rejser og rids (Copenhagen, 1920), says about his two-year-old daughter that when she gets hold of her mother’s fur-collar she will pet it and lavish on it all kinds of tender self-invented names, such as apu or a-fo-me-me. The latter word, “which has all the melodious euphony and vague signification of primitive language,” is applied to anything that is rare and funny and worth rejoicing at. On a summer day’s excursion there was one new a-fo-me-me after the other.

In spite of all this, a point on which all the most distinguished investigators of children’s language of late years are agreed is that children never invent words. Wundt goes so far as to say that “the child’s language is the result of the child’s environment, the child being essentially a passive instrument in the matter” (S 1. 196)—one of the most wrong-headed sentences I have ever read in the works of a great scientist. Meumann says: “Preyer and after him almost every careful observer among child-psychologists have strongly held the view that it is impossible to speak of a child inventing a word.” Similarly Meringer, L 220, Stern, 126, 273, 337 ff., Bloomfield, SL 12.

These investigators seem to have been led astray by expressions such as ‘shape out of nothing,’ ‘invent,’ ‘original creation’ (UrschÖpfung), and to have taken this doctrinaire attitude in partial defiance of the facts they have themselves advanced. Expressions like those adduced occur over and over again in their discussions, and Meumann says openly: “Invention demands a methodical proceeding with intention, a conception of an end to be realized.” Of course, if that is necessary it is clear that we can speak of invention of words in the case of a chemist seeking a word for a new substance, and not in the case of a tiny child. But are there not many inventions in the technical world, which we do not hesitate to call inventions, which have come about more or less by chance? Wasn’t it so probably with gunpowder? According to the story it certainly was so with blotting-paper: the foreman who had forgotten to add size to a portion of writing-paper was dismissed, but the manufacturer who saw that the paper thus spoilt could be turned to account instead of the sand hitherto used made a fortune. So according to Meumann blotting-paper has never been ‘invented.’ If in order to acknowledge a child’s creation of a word we are to postulate that it has been produced out of nothing, what about bicycles, fountain-pens, typewriters—each of which was something existing before, carried just a little further? Are they on that account not inventions? One would think not, when one reads these writers on children’s language, for as soon as the least approximation to a word in the normal language is discovered, the child is denied both ‘invention’ and ‘the speech-forming faculty’! Thus Stern (p. 338) says that his daughter in her second year used some words which might be taken as proof of the power to create words, but for the fact that it was here possible to show how these ‘new’ words had grown out of normal words. Eischei, for instance, was used as a verb meaning ‘go, walk,’ but it originated in the words eins, zwei (one, two) which were said when the child was taught to walk. Other examples are given comparable to those mentioned above (106, 115) as mutilations of the first period. Now, even if all those words given by myself and others as original inventions of children could be proved to be similar perversions of ‘real’ words (which is not likely), I should not hesitate to speak of a word-creating faculty, for eischei, ‘to walk,’ is both in form and still more in meaning far enough from eins, zwei to be reckoned a totally new word.

We can divide words ‘invented’ by children into three classes:

But the three classes cannot always be kept apart, especially when the child imitates the grown-up person’s sound so badly or seizes the meaning so imperfectly that very little is left of what the grown-up person gives. As a rule, the self-created words will be very short-lived; still, there are exceptions.

O’Shea’s account of one of these words is very instructive. “She had also a few words of her own coining which were attached spontaneously to objects, and these her elders took up, and they became fixed in her vocabulary for a considerable period. A word resembling Ndobbin was employed for every sort of thing which she used for food. The word came originally from an accidental combination of sounds made while she was eating. By the aid of the people about her in responding to this term and repeating it, she ‘selected’ it and for a time used it purposefully. She employed it at the outset for a specific article of food; then her elders extended it to other articles, and this aided her in making the extension herself. Once started in this process, she extended the term to many objects associated with her food, even objects as remote from her original experience as dining-room, high-chair, kitchen, and even apple and plum trees” (O’Shea, 27).

To Class A I assign most of the words already given as the child’s creations, whether the child be great or small.

Class B is that which is most sparsely represented. A child in Finland often heard the well-known line about King Karl (Charles XII), “Han stod i rÖk och damm” (“He stood in smoke and dust”), and taking rÖ to be the adjective meaning ‘red,’ imagined the remaining syllables, which he heard as kordamm, to be the name of some piece of garment. This amused his parents so much that kordamm became the name of a dressing-gown in that family.

To Class C, where the child contributes only the sound and the older people give a meaning to what on the child’s side was meaningless—a process that reminds one of the invention of blotting-paper—belong some of the best-known words, which require a separate section.

VIII.—§ 8. ‘Mamma’ and ‘Papa.’

In the nurseries of all countries a little comedy has in all ages been played—the baby lies and babbles his ‘mamama’ or ‘amama’ or ‘papapa’ or ‘apapa’ or ‘bababa’ or ‘ababab’ without associating the slightest meaning with his mouth-games, and his grown-up friends, in their joy over the precocious child, assign to these syllables a rational sense, accustomed as they are themselves to the fact of an uttered sound having a content, a thought, an idea, corresponding to it. So we get a whole class of words, distinguished by a simplicity of sound-formation—never two consonants together, generally the same consonant repeated with an a between, frequently also with an a at the end—words found in many languages, often in different forms, but with essentially the same meaning.

First we have words for ‘mother.’ It is very natural that the mother who is greeted by her happy child with the sound ‘mama’ should take it as though the child were calling her ‘mama,’ and since she frequently comes to the cradle when she hears the sound, the child himself does learn to use these syllables when he wants to call her. In this way they become a recognized word for the idea ‘mother’—now with the stress on the first syllable, now on the second. In French we get a nasal vowel either in the last syllable only or in both syllables. At times we have only one syllable, ma. When once these syllables have become a regular word they follow the speech laws which govern other words; thus among other forms we get the German muhme, the meaning of which (‘aunt’) is explained as in the words mentioned, p. 118. In very early times ma in our group of languages was supplied with a termination, so that we get the form underlying Greek meter, Lat. mater (whence Fr. mÈre, etc.), our own mother, G. mutter, etc. These words became the recognized grown-up words, while mama itself was only used in the intimacy of the family. It depends on fashion, however, how ‘high up’ mama can be used: in some countries and in some periods children are allowed to use it longer than in others.

The forms mama and ma are not the only ones for ‘mother.’ The child’s am has also been seized and maintained by the grown-ups. The Albanian word for ‘mother’ is ama, the Old Norse word for ‘grandmother’ is amma. The Latin am-ita, formed from am with a termination added, came to mean ‘aunt’ and became in OFr. ante, whence E. aunt and Modern Fr. tante. In Semitic languages the words for ‘mother’ also have a vowel before m: Assyrian ummu, Hebrew ’Êm, etc.

Baba, too, is found in the sense ‘mother,’ especially in Slavonic languages, though it has here developed various derivative meanings, ‘old woman,’ ‘grandmother,’ or ‘midwife.’ In Tonga we have bama ‘mother.’

Forms with n are also found for ‘mother’; so Sanskrit nanÁ, Albanian nane. Here we have also Gr. nanne ‘aunt’ and Lat. nonna; the latter ceased in the early Middle Ages to mean ‘grandmother’ and became a respectful way of addressing women of a certain age, whence we know it as nun, the feminine counterpart of ‘monk.’ From less known languages I may mention Greenlandic a'na·na ‘mother,’ 'a·na ‘grandmother.’

Now we come to words meaning ‘father,’ and quite naturally, where the sound-groups containing m have already been interpreted in the sense ‘mother,’ a word for ‘father’ will be sought in the syllables with p. It is no doubt frequently noticed in the nursery that the baby says mama where one expected papa, and vice versa; but at last he learns to deal out the syllables ‘rightly,’ as we say. The history of the forms papa, pappa and pa is analogous to the history of the m syllables already traced. We have the same extension of the sound by tr in the word pater, which according to recognized laws of sound-change is found in the French pÈre, the English father, the Danish fader, the German vater, etc. Philologists no longer, fortunately, derive these words from a root pa ‘to protect,’ and see therein a proof of the ‘highly moral spirit’ of our aboriginal ancestors, as Fick and others did. Papa, as we know, also became an honourable title for a reverend ecclesiastic, and hence comes the name which we have in the form Pope.

Side by side with the p forms we have forms in b—Italian babbo, Bulgarian babÁ, Serbian bÁba, Turkish baba. Beginning with the vowel we have the Semitic forms ab, abu and finally abba, which is well known, since through Greek abbas it has become the name for a spiritual father in all European languages, our form being Abbot.

Again, we have some names for ‘father’ with dental sounds: Sanskrit tatÁ, Russian tata, tyatya, Welsh tat, etc. The English dad, now so universal, is sometimes considered to have been borrowed from this Welsh word, which in certain connexions has an initial d, but no doubt it had an independent origin. In Slavonic languages dÉd is extensively used for ‘grandfather’ or ‘old man.’ Thus also deite, teite in German dialects. Tata ‘father’ is found in Congo and other African languages, also (tatta) in Negro-English (Surinam). And just as words for ‘mother’ change their meaning from ‘mother’ to ‘aunt,’ so these forms in some languages come to mean ‘uncle’: Gr. theios (whence Italian zio), Lithuanian dede, Russian dyadya.

With an initial vowel we get the form atta, in Greek used in addressing old people, in Gothic the ordinary word for ‘father,’ which with a termination added gives the proper name Attila, originally ‘little father’; with another ending we have Russian otec. Outside our own family of languages we find, for instance, Magyar atya, Turkish ata, Basque aita, Greenlandic a'ta·ta ‘father,’ while in the last-mentioned language a·ta means ‘grandfather.’[28]

The nurse, too, comes in for her share in these names, as she too is greeted by the child’s babbling and is tempted to take it as the child’s name for her; thus we get the German and Scandinavian amme, Polish niania, Russian nyanya, cf. our Nanny. These words cannot be kept distinct from names for ‘aunt,’ cf. amita above, and in Sanskrit we find mama for ‘uncle.’

It is perhaps more doubtful if we can find a name for the child itself which has arisen in the same way; the nearest example is the Engl. babe, baby, German bube (with u as in muhme above); but babe has also been explained as a word derived normally from OFr. baube, from Lat. balbus ‘stammering.’ When the name Bab or Babs (Babbe in a Danish family) becomes the pet-name for a little girl, this has no doubt come from an interpretation put on her own meaningless sounds. Ital. bambo (bambino) certainly belongs here. We may here mention also some terms for ‘doll,’ Lat. pupa or puppa, G. puppe; with a derivative ending we have Fr. poupÉe, E. puppet (Chaucer, A 3254, popelote). These words have a rich semantic development, cf. pupa (Dan. puppe, etc.) ‘chrysalis,’ and the diminutive Lat. pupillus, pupilla, which was used for ‘a little child, minor,’ whence E. pupil ‘disciple,’ but also for the little child seen in the eye, whence E. (and other languages) pupil, ‘central opening of the eye.’

A child has another main interest—that is, in its food, the breast, the bottle, etc. In many countries it has been observed that very early a child uses a long m (without a vowel) as a sign that it wants something, but we can hardly be right in supposing that the sound is originally meant by children in this sense. They do not use it consciously till they see that grown-up people on hearing the sound come up and find out what the child wants. And it is the same with the developed forms which are uttered by the child in its joy at getting something to eat, and which are therefore interpreted as the child’s expression for food: am, mam, mammam, or the same words with a final a—that is, really the same groups of sounds which came to stand for ‘mother.’ The determination of a particular form to a particular meaning is always due to the adults, who, however, can subsequently teach it to the child. Under this heading comes the sound ham, which Taine observed to be one child’s expression for hunger or thirst (h mute?), and similarly the word mum, meaning ‘something to eat,’ invented, as we are told, by Darwin’s son and often uttered with a rising intonation, as in a question, ‘Will you give me something to eat?’ Lindner’s child (1.5) is said to have used papp for everything eatable and mem or mÖm for anything drinkable. In normal language we have forms like Sanskrit mamsa (Gothic mimz) and mas ‘flesh,’ our own meat (which formerly, like Dan. mad, meant any kind of food), German mus ‘jam’ (whence also gemÜse), and finally Lat. mandere and manducare, ‘to chew’ (whence Fr. manger)—all developments of this childish ma(m).

As the child’s first nourishment is its mother’s breast, its joyous mamama can also be taken to mean the breast. So we have the Latin mamma (with a diminutive ending mammilla, whence Fr. mamelle), and with the other labial sound Engl. pap, Norwegian and Swed. dial. pappe, Lat. papilla; with a different vowel, It. poppa, Fr. poupe, ‘teat of an animal, formerly also of a woman’; with b, G. bÜbbi, obsolete E. bubby; with a dental, E. teat (G. zitze), Ital. tetta, Dan. titte, Swed. dial. tatte. Further we have words like E. pap ‘soft food,’ Latin papare ‘to eat,’ orig. ‘to suck,’ and some G. forms for the same, pappen, pampen, pampfen. Perhaps the beginning of the word milk goes back to the baby’s ma applied to the mother’s breast or milk; the latter half may then be connected with Lat. lac. In Greenlandic we have ama·ma ‘suckle.’

Inseparable from these words is the sound, a long m or am, which expresses the child’s delight over something that tastes good; it has by-forms in the Scotch nyam or nyamnyam, the English seaman’s term yam ‘to eat,’ and with two dentals the French nanan ‘sweetmeats.’ Some linguists will have it that the Latin amo ‘I love’ is derived from this am, which expresses pleasurable satisfaction. When a father tells me that his son (1.10) uses the wonderful words nananÆi for ‘chocolate’ and jajajaja for picture-book, we have no doubt here also a case of a grown person’s interpretation of the originally meaningless sounds of a child.

Another meaning that grown-up people may attach to syllables uttered by the child is that of ‘good-bye,’ as in English tata, which has now been incorporated in the ordinary language.[29] Stern probably is right when he thinks that the French adieu would not have been accepted so commonly in Germany and other countries if it had not accommodated itself so easily, especially in the form commonly used in German, ade, to the child’s natural word.

There are some words for ‘bed, sleep’ which clearly belong to this class: Tuscan nanna ‘cradle,’ Sp. hacer la nana ‘go to sleep,’ E. bye-bye (possibly associated with good-bye, instead of which is also said byebye); Stern mentions baba (Berlin), beibei (Russian), bobo (Malay), but bischbisch, which he also gives here, is evidently (like the Danish visse) imitative of the sound used for hushing.

Words of this class stand in a way outside the common words of a language, owing to their origin and their being continually new-created. One cannot therefore deduce laws of sound-change from them in their original shape; and it is equally wrong to use them as evidence for an original kinship between different families of language and to count them as loan-words, as is frequently done (for example, when the Slavonic baba is said to be borrowed from Turkish). The English papa and mam(m)a, and the same words in German and Danish, Italian, etc., are almost always regarded as borrowed from French; but Cauer rightly points out that Nausikaa (Odyssey 6. 57) addresses her father as pappa fil, and Homer cannot be suspected of borrowing from French. Still, it is true that fashion may play a part in deciding how long children may be permitted to say papa and mamma, and a French fashion may in this respect have spread to other European countries, especially in the seventeenth century. We may not find these words in early use in the literatures of the different countries, but this is no proof that the words were not used in the nursery. As soon as a word of this class has somewhere got a special application, this can very well pass as a loan-word from land to land—as we saw in the case of the words abbot and pope. And it may be granted with respect to the primary use of the words that there are certain national or quasi-national customs which determine what grown people expect to hear from babies, so that one nation expects and recognizes papa, another dad, a third atta, for the meaning ‘father.’

When the child hands something to somebody or reaches out for something he will generally say something, and if, as often happens, this is ta or da, it will be taken by its parents and others as a real word, different according to the language they speak; in England as there or thanks, in Denmark as tak ‘thanks’[30] or tag ‘take,’ in Germany as da ‘there,’ in France as tiens ‘hold,’ in Russia as day ‘give,’ in Italy as to, (= togli) ‘take.’ The form tÊ in Homer is interpreted by some as an imperative of teino ‘stretch.’ These instances, however, are slightly different in character from those discussed in the main part of this chapter.[31]

CHAPTER IX
THE INFLUENCE OF THE CHILD ON LINGUISTIC DEVELOPMENT

IX.—§ 1. Conflicting Views.

We all know that in historical times languages have been constantly changing, and we have much indirect evidence that in prehistoric times they did the same thing. But when it is asked if these changes, unavoidable as they seem to be, are to be ascribed primarily to children and their defective imitation of the speech of their elders, or if children’s language in general plays no part at all in the history of language, we find linguists expressing quite contrary views, without the question having ever been really thoroughly investigated.

Some hold that the child acquires its language with such perfection that it cannot be held responsible for the changes recorded in the history of languages: others, on the contrary, hold that the most important source of these changes is to be found in the transmission of the language to new generations. How undecided the attitude even of the foremost linguists may be towards the question is perhaps best seen in the views expressed at different times by Sweet. In 1882 he reproaches Paul with paying attention only to the shiftings going on in the pronunciation of the same individual, and not acknowledging “the much more potent cause of change which exists in the fact that one generation can learn the sounds of the preceding one by imitation only. It is an open question whether the modifications made by the individual in a sound he has once learnt, independently of imitation of those around him, are not too infinitesimal to have any appreciable effect” (CP 153). In the same spirit he asserted in 1899 that the process of learning our own language in childhood is a very slow one, “and the results are always imperfect.... If languages were learnt perfectly by the children of each generation, then languages would not change: English children would still speak a language as old at least as ‘Anglo-Saxon,’ and there would be no such languages as French and Italian. The changes in languages are simply slight mistakes, which in the course of generations completely alter the character of the language” (PS 75). But only one year later, in 1900, he maintains that the child’s imitation “is in most cases practically perfect”—“the main cause of sound-change must therefore be sought elsewhere. The real cause of sound-change seems to be organic shifting—failure to hit the mark, the result either of carelessness or sloth ... a slight deviation from the pronunciation learnt in infancy may easily pass unheeded, especially by those who make the same change in their own pronunciation” (H 19 f.). By the term “organic shifting” Sweet evidently, as seen from his preface, meant shifting in the pronunciation of the adult, thus a modification of the sound learnt ‘perfectly’ in childhood. Paul, who in the first edition (1880) of his Prinzipien der Sprachgeschichte did not mention the influence of children, in all the following editions (2nd, 1886, p. 58; 3rd, 1898, p. 58; 4th, 1909, p. 63) expressly says that “die hauptveranlassung zum lautwandel in der Übertragung der laute auf neue individuen liegt,” while the shiftings within the same generation are very slight. Paul thus modified his view in the opposite direction of Sweet[32]—and did so under the influence of Sweet’s criticism of his own first view!

When one finds scholars expressing themselves in this manner and giving hardly any reasons for their views, one is tempted to believe that the question is perhaps insoluble, that it is a mere toss-up, or that in the sentence “children’s imitation is nearly perfect” the stress may be laid, according to taste, now on the word nearly, and now on the word perfect. I am, however, convinced that we can get a little farther, though only by breaking up the question, instead of treating it as one vague and indeterminate whole.

IX.—§ 2. Meringer. Analogy.

Among recent writers Meringer has gone furthest into the question, adhering in the main to the general view that, just as in other fields, social, economic, etc., it is grown-up men who take the lead in new developments, so it is grown-up men, and not women or children, who carry things forward in the field of language. In one place he justifies his standpoint by a reference to a special case, and I will take this as the starting-point of my own consideration of the question. He says: “It can be shown by various examples that they [changes in language] are decidedly not due to children. In Ionic, Attic and Lesbian Greek the words for ‘hundreds’ are formed in -kosioi (diakÓsioi, etc.), while elsewhere (in Doric and Boeotian) they appear as -kÁtioi. How does the o arise in -kÓsioi? It is generally said that it comes from o in the ‘tens’ in the termination -konta. Can it be children who have formed the words for hundreds on the model of the words for tens, children under six years old, who are just learning to talk? Such children generally have other things to attend to than to practise themselves in numerals above a hundred.” Similar formations are adduced from Latin, and it is stated that the personal pronouns are especially subject to change, but children do not use the personal pronouns till an age when they are already in firm possession of the language. Meringer then draws the conclusion that the share which children take in bringing about linguistic change is a very small one.

Now, I should like first to remark that even if it is possible to point to certain changes in language which cannot be ascribed to little children, this proves nothing with regard to the very numerous changes which lie outside these limits. And next, that all the cases here mentioned are examples of formation by analogy. But from the very nature of the case, the conditions requisite for the occurrence of such formations are exactly the same in the case of adults and in that of the children. For what are the conditions? Some one feels an impulse to express something, and at the moment has not got the traditional form at command, and so is driven to evolve a form of his own from the rest of the linguistic material. It makes no difference whether he has never heard a form used by other people which expresses what he wants, or whether he has heard the traditional form, but has not got it ready at hand at the moment. The method of procedure is exactly the same whether it takes place in a three-year-old or in an eighty-three-year-old brain: it is therefore senseless to put the question whether formations by analogy are or are not due to children. A formation by analogy is by definition a non-traditional form. It is therefore idle to ask if it is due to the fact that the language is transmitted from generation to generation and to the child’s imperfect repetition of what has been transmitted to it, and Meringer’s argument thus breaks down in every respect.

It must not, of course, be overlooked that children naturally come to invent more formations by analogy than grown-up people, because the latter in many cases have heard the older forms so often that they find a place in their speech without any effort being required to recall them. But that does not touch the problem under discussion; besides, formations by analogy are unavoidable and indispensable, in the talk of all, even of the most ‘grown-up’: one cannot, indeed, move in language without having recourse to forms and constructions that are not directly and fully transmitted to us: speech is not alone reproduction, but just as much new-production, because no situation and no impulse to communication is in every detail exactly the same as what has occurred on earlier occasions.

IX.—§ 3. Herzog’s Theory of Sound Changes.

If, leaving the field of analogical changes, we begin to inquire whether the purely phonetic changes can or must be ascribed to the fact that a new generation has to learn the mother-tongue by imitation, we shall first have to examine an interesting theory in which the question is answered in the affirmative, at least with regard to those phonetic changes which are gradual and not brought about all at once; thus, when in one particular language one vowel, say [e·], is pronounced more and more closely till finally it becomes [i·], as has happened in E. see, formerly pronounced [se·] with the same vowel as in G. see, now [si·]. E. Herzog maintains that such changes happen through transference to new generations, even granted that the children imitate the sound of the grown-up people perfectly. For, it is said, children with their little mouths cannot produce acoustically the same sound as adults, except by a different position of the speech-organs; this position they keep for the rest of their lives, so that when they are grown-up and their mouth is of full size they produce a rather different sound from that previously heard—which altered sound is again imitated by the next generation with yet another position of the organs, and so on. This continuous play of generation v. generation may be illustrated in this way:

It is, however, easy to prove that this theory cannot be correct. (1) It is quite certain that the increase in size of the mouth is far less important than is generally supposed (see my Fonetik, p. 379 ff., PhG, p. 80 ff.; cf. above, V § 1). (2) It cannot be proved that people, after once learning one definite way of producing a sound, go on producing it in exactly the same way, even if the acoustic result is a different one. It is much more probable that each individual is constantly adapting himself to the sounds heard from those around him, even if this adaptation is neither as quick nor perhaps as perfect as that of children, who can very rapidly accommodate their speech to the dialect of new surroundings: if very far-reaching changes are rare in the case of grown-up people, this proves nothing against such small adaptations as are here presupposed. In favour of the continual regulation of the sound through the ear may be adduced the fact that adults who become perfectly deaf and thus lose the control of sounds through hearing may come to speak in such a way that their words can hardly be understood by others. (3) The theory in question also views the relations between successive generations in a way that is far removed from the realities of life: from the wording one might easily imagine that there were living together at any given time only individuals of ages separated by, say, thirty years’ distance, while the truth of the matter is that a child is normally surrounded by people of all ages and learns its language more or less from all of them, from Grannie down to little Dick from over the way, and that (as has already been remarked) its chief teachers are its own brothers and sisters and other playmates of about the same age as itself. If the theory were correct, there would at any rate be a marked difference in vowel-sounds between anyone and his grandfather, or, still more, great-grandfather: but nothing of the kind has ever been described. (4) The chief argument, however, against the theory is this, that were it true, then all shiftings of sounds at all times and in all languages would proceed in exactly the same direction. But this is emphatically contradicted by the history of language. The long a in English in one period was rounded and raised into o, as in OE. stan, na, ham, which have become stone, no, home; but when a few centuries later new long a’s had entered the language, they followed the opposite direction towards e, now [ei], as in name, male, take. Similarly in Danish, where an old stratum of long a’s have become Å, as in Ål, gÅs, while a later stratum tends rather towards [Æ], as in the present pronunciation of gade, hale, etc. At the same time the long a in Swedish tends towards the rounded pronunciation (cf. Fr. Âme, pas): in one sister language we thus witness a repetition of the old shifting, in the other a tendency in the opposite direction. And it is the same with all those languages which we can pursue far enough back: they all present the same picture of varying vowel shiftings in different directions, which is totally incompatible with Herzog’s view.

IX.—§ 4. Gradual Shiftings.

We shall do well to put aside such artificial theories and look soberly at the facts. When some sounds in one century go one way, and in another, another, while at times they remain long unchanged, it all rests on this, that for human habits of this sort there is no standard measure. Set a man to saw a hundred logs, measuring No. 2 by No. 1, No. 3 by No. 2, and so on, and you will see considerable deviations from the original measure—perhaps all going in the same direction, so that No. 100 is very much longer than No. 1 as the result of the sum of a great many small deviations—perhaps all going in the opposite direction; but it is also possible that in a certain series he was inclined to make the logs too long, and in the next series too short, the two sets of deviations about balancing one another.

It is much the same with the formation of speech sounds: at one moment, for some reason or other, in a particular mood, in order to lend authority or distinction to our words, we may happen to lower the jaw a little more, or to thrust the tongue a little more forward than usual, or inversely, under the influence of fatigue or laziness, or to sneer at someone else, or because we have a cigar or potato in our mouth, the movements of the jaw or of the tongue may fall short of what they usually are. We have all the while a sort of conception of an average pronunciation, of a normal degree of opening or of protrusion, which we aim at, but it is nothing very fixed, and the only measure at our disposal is that we are or are not understood. What is understood is all right: what does not meet this requirement must be repeated with greater correctness as an answer to ‘I beg your pardon?’

Everyone thinks that he talks to-day just as he did yesterday, and, of course, he does so in nearly every point. But no one knows if he pronounces his mother-tongue in every respect in the same manner as he did twenty years ago. May we not suppose that what happens with faces happens here also? One lives with a friend day in and day out, and he appears to be just what he was years ago, but someone who returns home after a long absence is at once struck by the changes which have gradually accumulated in the interval.

Changes in the sounds of a language are not, indeed, so rapid as those in the appearance of an individual, for the simple reason that it is not enough for one man to alter his pronunciation, many must co-operate: the social nature and social aim of language has the natural consequence that all must combine in the same movement, or else one neutralizes the changes introduced by the other; each individual also is continually under the influence of his fellows, and involuntarily fashions his pronunciation according to the impression he is constantly receiving of other people’s sounds. But as regards those little gradual shiftings of sounds which take place in spite of all this control and its conservative influence, changes in which the sound and the articulation alter simultaneously, I cannot see that the transmission of the language to a new generation need exert any essential influence: we may imagine them being brought about equally well in a society which for hundreds of years consisted of the same adults who never died and had no issue.

IX.—§ 5. Leaps.

While in the shiftings mentioned in the last paragraphs articulation and acoustic impression went side by side, it is different with some shiftings in which the old sound and the new resemble one another to the ear, but differ in the position of the organs and the articulations. For instance, when [Þ] as in E. thick becomes [f] and [Ð] as in E. mother becomes [v], one can hardly conceive the change taking place in the pronunciation of people who have learnt the right sound as children. It is very natural, on the other hand, that children should imitate the harder sound by giving the easier, which is very like it, and which they have to use in many other words: forms like fru for through, wiv, muvver for with, mother, are frequent in the mouths of children long before they begin to make their appearance in the speech of adults, where they are now beginning to be very frequent in the Cockney dialect. (Cf. MEG i. 13. 9.) The same transition is met with in Old Fr., where we have muef from modu, nif from nidu, fief from feodu, seif, now soif, from site, estrif (E. strife) from stridh, glaive from gladiu, parvis from paradis, and possibly avoutre from adulteru, poveir, now pouvoir, from potere. In Old Gothonic we have the transition from Þ to f before l, as in Goth. Þlaqus = MHG. vlach, Goth. Þlaihan = OHG. flÊhan, Þliuhan = OHG. fliohan; cf. also E. file, G. feile = ON. Þel, OE. Þengel and fengel ‘prince,’ and probably G. finster, cf. OHG. dinstar (with d from Þ), OE. Þeostre. In Latin we have the same transition, e.g. in fumus, corresponding to Sansk. dhumÁs, Gr. thumÓs.[34]

The change from the back-open consonant [x]—the sound in G. buch and Scotch loch—to f, which has taken place in enough, cough, etc., is of the same kind. Here clearly we have no gradual passage, but a jump, which could hardly take place in the case of those who had already learnt how to pronounce the back sound, but is easily conceivable as a case of defective imitation on the part of a new generation. I suppose that the same remark holds good with regard to the change from kw to p, which is found in some languages, for instance, Gr. hippos, corresponding to Lat. equus, Gr. hepomai = Lat. sequor, hÊpar = Lat. jecur; Rumanian apa from Lat. aqua, Welsh map, ‘son’ = Gaelic mac, pedwar = Ir. cathir, ‘four,’ etc. In France I have heard children say [pizin] and [pidin] for cuisine.

IX.—§ 6. Assimilations, etc.

There is an important class of sound changes which have this in common with the class just treated, that the changes take place suddenly, without an intermediate stage being possible, as in the changes considered in IX § 4. I refer to those cases of assimilation, loss of consonants in heavy groups and transposition (metathesis), with which students of language are familiar in all languages. Instances abound in the speech of all children; see above, V § 4.

If now we dared to assert that such pronunciations are never heard from people who have passed their babyhood, we should here have found a field in which children have exercised a great influence on the development of language: but of course we cannot say anything of the sort. Any attentive observer can testify to the frequency of such mispronunciations in the speech of grown-up people. In many cases they are noticed neither by the speaker nor by the hearer, in many they may be noticed, but are considered too unimportant to be corrected, and finally, in some cases the speaker stops to repeat what he wanted to say in a corrected form. Now it would not obviously do, from their frequency in adult speech, to draw the inference: “These changes are not to be ascribed to children,” because from their frequent appearance on the lips of the children one could equally well infer: “They are not to be ascribed to grown-up people.” When we find in Latin impotens and immeritus with m side by side with indignus and insolitus with n, or when English handkerchief is pronounced with [?k] instead of the original [ndk], the change is not to be charged against children or grown-up people exclusively, but against both parties together: and so when t is lost in waistcoat [wesk?t], or postman or castle, or k in asked. There is certainly this difference, that when the change is made by older people, we get in the speech of the same individual first the heavier and then the easier form, while the child may take up the easier pronunciation first, because it hears the [n] before a lip consonant as [m], and before a back consonant as [?], or because it fails altogether to hear the middle consonant in waistcoat, postman, castle and asked. But all this is clearly of purely theoretical interest, and the result remains that the influence of the two classes, adults and children, cannot possibly be separated in this domain.[35]

IX.—§ 7. Stump-words.

Next we come to those changes which result in what one may call ‘stump-words.’ There is no doubt that words may undergo violent shortenings both by children and adults, but here I believe we can more or less definitely distinguish between their respective contributions to the development of language. If it is the end of the word that is kept, while the beginning is dropped, it is probable that the mutilation is due to children, who, as we have seen (VII § 7), echo the conclusion of what is said to them and forget the beginning or fail altogether to apprehend it. So we get a number of mutilated Christian names, which can then be used by grown-up people as pet-names. Examples are Bert for Herbert or Albert, Bella for Arabella, Sander for Alexander, Lottie for Charlotte, Trix for Beatrix, and with childlike sound-substitution Bess (and Bet, Betty) for Elizabeth. Similarly in other languages, from Danish I may mention Bine for Jakobine, Line for Karoline, Stine for Kristine, Dres for Andres: there are many others.

If this way of shortening a word is natural to a child who hears the word for the first time and is not able to remember the beginning when he comes to the end of it, it is quite different when others clip words which they know perfectly well: they will naturally keep the beginning and stop before they are half through the word, as soon as they are sure that their hearers understand what is alluded to. Dr. Johnson was not the only one who “had a way of contracting the names of his friends, as Beauclerc, Beau; Boswell, Bozzy; Langton, Lanky; Murphy, Mur; Sheridan, Sherry; and Goldsmith, Goldy, which Goldsmith resented” (Boswell, Life, ed. P. Fitzgerald, 1900, i. 486). Thackeray constantly says Pen for Arthur Pendennis, Cos for Costigan, Fo for Foker, Pop for Popjoy, old Col for Colchicum. In the beginning of the last century Napoleon Bonaparte was generally called Nap or Boney; later we have such shortened names of public characters as Dizzy for Disraeli, Pam for Palmerston, Labby for Labouchere, etc. These evidently are due to adults, and so are a great many other clippings, some of which have completely ousted the original long words, such as mob for mobile, brig for brigantine, fad for fadaise, cab for cabriolet, navvy for navigator, while others are still felt as abbreviations, such as photo for photograph, pub for public-house, caps for capital letters, spec for speculation, sov for sovereign, zep for Zeppelin, divvy for dividend, hip for hypochondria, the Cri and the Pavvy for the Criterion and the Pavilion, and many other clippings of words which are evidently far above the level of very small children. The same is true of the abbreviations in which school and college slang abounds, words like Gym(nastics), undergrad(uate), trig(onometry), lab(oratory), matric(ulation), prep(aration), the Guv for the governor, etc. The same remark is true of similar clippings in other languages, such as kilo for kilogram, G. ober for oberkellner, French aristo(crate), rÉac(tionnaire), college terms like desse for descriptive (gÉomÉtrie d.), philo for philosophie, preu for premier, seu for second; Danish numerals like tres for tresindstyve (60), halvfjerds(indstyve), firs(indstyve). We are certainly justified in extending the principle that abbreviation through throwing away the end of the word is due to those who have previously mastered the full form, to the numerous instances of shortened Christian names like Fred for Frederick, Em for Emily, Alec for Alexander, Di for Diana, Vic for Victoria, etc. In other languages we find similar clippings of names more or less carried through systematically, e.g. Greek Zeuxis for Zeuxippos, Old High German Wolfo for Wolfbrand, Wolfgang, etc., Icelandic Sigga for SigrÍÐr, Siggi for SigurÐr, etc.

I see a corroboration of my theory in the fact that there are hardly any family names shortened by throwing away the beginning: children as a rule have no use for family names.[36] The rule, however, is not laid down as absolute, but only as holding in the main. Some of the exceptions are easily accounted for. ’Cello for violoncello undoubtedly is an adults’ word, originating in France or Italy: but here evidently it would not do to take the beginning, for then there would be confusion with violin (violon). Phone for telephone: the beginning might just as well stand for telegraph. Van for caravan: here the beginning would be identical with car. Bus, which made its appearance immediately after the first omnibus was started in the streets of London (1829), probably was thought expressive of the sound of these vehicles and suggested bustle. But bacco (baccer, baccy) for tobacco and taters for potatoes belong to a different sphere altogether: they are not clippings of the usual sort, but purely phonetic developments, in which the first vowel has been dropped in rapid pronunciation (as in I s’pose), and the initial voiceless stop has then become inaudible; Dickens similarly writes ’tickerlerly as a vulgar pronunciation of particularly.[37]

CHAPTER X
THE INFLUENCE OF THE CHILD—continued

X.—§ 1. Confusion of Words.

Some of the most typical childish sound-substitutions can hardly be supposed to leave any traces in language as permanently spoken, because they are always thoroughly corrected by the children themselves at an early age; among these I reckon the almost universal pronunciation of t instead of k. When, therefore, we do find that in some words a t has taken the place of an earlier k, we must look for some more specific cause of the change: but this may, in some cases at any rate, be found in a tendency of children’s speech which is totally independent of the inability to pronounce the sound of k at an early age, and is, indeed, in no way to be reckoned among phonetic tendencies, namely, the confusion resulting from an association of two words of similar sound (cf. above, p. 122). This, I take it, is the explanation of the word mate in the sense ‘husband or wife,’ which has replaced the earlier make: a confusion was here natural, because the word mate, ‘companion,’ was similar not only in sound, but also in signification. The older name for the ‘soft roe’ of fishes was milk (as Dan. mÆlk, G. milch), but from the fifteenth century milt has been substituted for it, as if it were the same organ as the milt, ‘the spleen.’ Children will associate words of similar sound even in cases where there is no connecting link in their significations; thus we have bat for earlier bak, bakke (the animal, vespertilio), though the other word bat, ‘a stick,’ is far removed in sense.

I think we must explain the following cases of isolated sound-substitution as due to the same confusion with unconnected words in the minds of children hearing the new words for the first time: trunk in the sense of ‘proboscis of an elephant,’ formerly trump, from Fr. trompe, confused with trunk, ‘stem of a tree’; stark-naked, formerly start-naked, from start, ‘tail,’ confused with stark, ‘stiff’; vent, ‘air-hole,’ from Fr. fente, confused with vent, ‘breath’ (for this v cannot be due to the Southern dialectal transition from f, as in vat from fat, for that transition does not, as a rule, take place in French loans); cocoa for cacao, confused with coconut; match, from Fr. mÈche, by confusion with the other match; chine, ‘rim of cask,’ from chime, cf. G. kimme, ‘border,’ confused with chine, ‘backbone.’ I give some of these examples with a little diffidence, though I have no doubt of the general principle of childish confusion of unrelated words as one of the sources of irregularities in the development of sounds.

These substitutions cannot of course be separated from instances of ‘popular etymology,’ as when the phrase to curry favour was substituted for the former to curry favel, where favel means ‘a fallow horse,’ as the type of fraud or duplicity (cf. G. den fahlen hengst reiten, ‘to act deceitfully,’ einen auf einem fahlen pferde ertappen, ‘to catch someone lying’).

X.—§ 2. Metanalysis.

We now come to the phenomenon for which I have ventured to coin the term ‘metanalysis,’ by which I mean that words or word-groups are by a new generation analyzed differently from the analysis of a former age. Each child has to find out for himself, in hearing the connected speech of other people, where one word ends and the next one begins, or what belongs to the kernel and what to the ending of a word, etc. (VII § 6). In most cases he will arrive at the same analysis as the former generation, but now and then he will put the boundaries in another place than formerly, and the new analysis may become general. A naddre (the ME. form for OE. an nÆdre) thus became an adder, a napron became an apron, an nauger: an auger, a numpire: an umpire; and in psychologically the same way an ewte (older form evete, OE. efete) became a newt: metanalysis accordingly sometimes shortens and sometimes lengthens a word. Riding as a name of one of the three districts of Yorkshire is due to a metanalysis of North Thriding (ON. ÞriÐjungr, ‘third part’), as well as of East Thriding, West Thriding, after the sound of th had been assimilated to the preceding t.

One of the most frequent forms of metanalysis consists in the subtraction of an s, which originally belonged to the kernel of a word, but is mistaken for the plural ending; in this way we have pea instead of the earlier peas, pease, cherry for ME. cherris, Fr. cerise, asset from assets, Fr. assez, etc. Cf. also the vulgar Chinee, Portuguee, etc.[38]

The influence of a new generation is also seen in those cases in which formerly separate words coalesce into one, as when he breakfasts, he breakfasted, is said instead of he breaks fast, he broke fast; cf. vouchsafe, don (third person, vouchsafes, dons), instead of vouch safe, do on (third person, vouches safe, does on). Here, too, it is not probable that a person who has once learnt the real form of a word, and thus knows where it begins and where it ends, should have subsequently changed it: it is much more likely that all such changes originate with children who have once made a wrong analysis of what they have heard and then go on repeating the new forms all their lives.

X.—§ 3. Shiftings of Meanings.

Changes in the meaning of words are often so gradual that one cannot detect the different steps of the process, and changes of this sort, like the corresponding changes in the sounds of words, are to be ascribed quite as much to people already acquainted with the language as to the new generation. As examples we may mention the laxity that has changed the meaning of soon, which in OE. meant ‘at once,’ and in the same way of presently, originally ‘at present, now,’ and of the old anon. Dinner comes from OF. disner, which is the infinitive of the verb which in other forms was desjeun, whence modern French dÉjeune (Lat. *desjejunare); it thus meant ‘breakfast,’ but the hour of the meal thus termed was gradually shifted in the course of centuries, so that now we may have dinner twelve hours after breakfast. When picture, which originally meant ‘painting,’ came to be applied to drawings, photographs and other images; when hard came to be used as an epithet not only of nuts and stones, etc., but of words and labour; when fair, besides the old sense of ‘beautiful,’ acquired those of ‘blond’ and ‘morally just’; when meat, from meaning all kinds of food (as in sweetmeats, meat and drink), came to be restricted practically to one kind of food (butcher’s meat); when the verb grow, which at first was used only of plants, came to be used of animals, hairs, nails, feelings, etc., and, instead of implying always increase, might even be combined with such a predicative as smaller and smaller; when pretty, from the meaning ‘skilful, ingenious,’ came to be a general epithet of approval (cf. the modern American, a cunning child = ‘sweet’), and, besides meaning good-looking, became an adverb of degree, as in pretty bad: neither these nor countless similar shiftings need be ascribed to any influence on the part of the learners of English; they can easily be accounted for as the product of innumerable small extensions and restrictions on the part of the users of the language after they have once acquired it.

But along with changes of this sort we have others that have come about with a leap, and in which it is impossible to find intermediate stages between two seemingly heterogeneous meanings, as when bead, from meaning a ‘prayer,’ comes to mean ‘a perforated ball of glass or amber.’ In these cases the change is occasioned by certain connexions, where the whole sense can only be taken in one way, but the syntactical construction admits of various interpretations, so that an ambiguity at one point gives occasion for a new conception of the meaning of the word. The phrase to count your beads originally meant ‘to count your prayers,’ but because the prayers were reckoned by little balls, the word beads came to be transferred to these objects, and lost its original sense.[39] It seems clear that this misapprehension could not take place in the brains of those who had already associated the word with the original signification, while it was quite natural on the part of children who heard and understood the phrase as a whole, but unconsciously analyzed it differently from the previous generation.

There is another word which also meant ‘prayer’ originally, but has lost that meaning, viz. boon; through such phrases as ‘ask a boon’ and ‘grant a boon’ it came to be taken as meaning ‘a favour’ or ‘a good thing received.’

Orient was frequently used in such connexions as ‘orient pearl’ and ‘orient gem,’ and as these were lustrous, orient became an adjective meaning ‘shining,’ without any connexion with the geographical orient, as in Shakespeare, Venus 981, “an orient drop” (a tear), and Milton, PL i. 546, “Ten thousand banners rise into the air, With orient colours waving.”

There are no connecting links between the meanings of ‘glad’ and ‘obliged,’ ‘forced,’ but when fain came to be chiefly used in combinations like ‘he was fain to leave the country,’ it was natural for the younger generation to interpret the whole phrase as implying necessity instead of gladness.

We have similar phenomena in certain syntactical changes. When me thinks and me likes gave place to I think and I like, the chief cause of the change was that the child heard combinations like Mother thinks or Father likes, where mother and father can be either nominative or accusative-dative, and the construction is thus syntactically ambiguous. This leads to a ‘shunting’ of the meaning as well as of the construction of the verbs, which must have come about in a new brain which was not originally acquainted with the old construction.

As one of the factors bringing about changes in meaning many scholars mention forgetfulness; but it is important to keep in view that what happens is not real forgetting, that is, snapping of threads of thought that had already existed within the same consciousness, but the fact that the new individual never develops the threads of thought which in the elder generation bound one word to another. Sometimes there is no connexion of ideas in the child’s brain: a word is viewed quite singly as a whole and isolated, till later perhaps it is seen in its etymological relation. A little girl of six asked when she was born. “You were born on the 2nd of October.” “Why, then, I was born on my birthday!” she cried, her eyes beaming with joy at this wonderfully happy coincidence. Originally Fare well was only said to some one going away. If now the departing guest says Farewell to his friend who is staying at home, it can only be because the word Farewell has been conceived as a fixed formula, without any consciousness of the meaning of its parts.

Sometimes, on the other hand, new connexions of thought arise, as when we associate the word bound with bind in the phrase ‘he is bound for America.’ Our ancestors meant ‘he is ready to go’ (ON. bÚinn, ‘ready’), not ‘he is under an obligation to go.’ The establishment of new associations of this kind seems naturally to take place at the moment when the young mind makes acquaintance with the word: the phenomenon is, of course, closely related to “popular etymology” (see Ch. VI § 6).

X.—§ 4. Differentiations.

Linguistic ‘splittings’ or differentiations, whereby one word becomes two, may also be largely due to the transmission of the language to a new generation. The child may hear two pronunciations of the same word from different people, and then associate these with different ideas. Thus Paul Passy learnt the word meule in the sense of ‘grindstone’ from his father, and in the sense of ‘haycock’ from his mother; now the former in both senses pronounced [moel], and the latter in both [mØ·l], and the child thus came to distinguish [moel] ‘grindstone’ and [mØ·l] ‘haycock’ (Ch 23).

Or the child may have learnt the word at two different periods of its life, associated with different spheres. This, I take it, may be the reason why some speakers make a distinction between two pronunciations of the word medicine, in two and in three syllables: they take [medsin], but study [medisin].

Finally, the child can itself split words. A friend writes: “I remember that when a schoolboy said that it was a good thing that the new Headmaster was Dr. Wood, because he would then know when boys were ‘shamming,’ a schoolfellow remarked, ‘Wasn’t it funny? He did not know the difference between Doctor and Docter.’” In Danish the Japanese are indiscriminately called either Japanerne or Japaneserne; now, I once overheard my boy (6.10) lecturing his playfellows: “Japaneserne, that is the soldiers of Japan, but Japanerne, that is students and children and such-like.” It is, of course, possible that he may have heard one form originally when shown some pictures of Japanese soldiers, and the other on another occasion, and that this may have been the reason for his distinction. However this may be, I do not doubt that a number of differentiations of words are to be ascribed to the transmission of the language to a new generation. Others may have arisen in the speech of adults, such as the distinction between off and of (at first the stressed and unstressed form of the same preposition), or between thorough and through (the former is still used as a preposition in Shakespeare: “thorough bush, thorough brier”). But complete differentiation is not established till some individuals from the very first conceive the forms as two independent words.

X.—§ 5. Summary.

Instead of saying, as previous writers on these questions have done, either that children have no influence or that they have the chief influence on the development of language, it will be seen that I have divided the question into many, going through various fields of linguistic change and asking in each what may have been the influence of the child. The result of this investigation has been that there are certain fields in which it is both impossible and really also irrelevant to separate the share of the child and of the adult, because both will be apt to introduce changes of that kind; such are assimilations of neighbouring sounds and droppings of consonants in groups. Also, with regard to those very gradual shiftings either of sound or of meaning in which it is natural to assume many intermediate stages through which the sound or signification must have passed before arriving at the final result, children and adults must share the responsibility for the change. Clippings of words occur in the speech of both classes, but as a rule adults will keep the beginning of a word, while very small children will perceive or remember only the end of a word and use that for the whole. But finally there are some kinds of changes which must wholly or chiefly be charged to the account of children: such are those leaps in sound or signification in which intermediate stages are out of the question, as well as confusions of similar words and misdivisions of words, and the most violent differentiations of words.

I wish, however, here to insist on one point which has, I think, become more and more clear in the course of our disquisition, namely, that we ought not really to put the question like this: Are linguistic changes due to children or to grown-up people? The important distinction is not really one of age, which is evidently one of degree only, but that between the first learners of the sound or word in question and those who use it after having once learnt it. In the latter case we have mainly to do with infinitesimal glidings, the results of which, when summed up in the course of long periods of time, may be very considerable indeed, but in which it will always be possible to detect intermediate links connecting the extreme points. In contrast to these changes occurring after the correct (or original) form has been acquired by the individual, we have changes occurring simultaneously with the first acquisition of the word or form in question, and thus due to the fact of its transmission to a new generation, or, to speak more generally, and, indeed, more correctly, to new individuals. The exact age of the learner here is of little avail, as will be seen if we take some examples of metanalysis. It is highly probable that the first users of forms like a pea or a cherry, instead of a pease and a cherries, were little children; but a Chinee and a Portuguee are not necessarily, or not pre-eminently, children’s words: on the other hand, it is to me indubitable that these forms do not spring into existence in the mind of someone who has previously used the forms Chinese and Portuguese in the singular number, but must be due to the fact that the forms the Chinese and the Portuguese (used as plurals) have been at once apprehended as made up of Chinee, Portuguee + the plural ending -s by a person hearing them for the first time; similarly in all the other cases. We shall see in a later chapter that the adoption (on the part of children and adults alike) of sounds and words from a foreign tongue presents certain interesting points of resemblance with these instances of change: in both cases the innovation begins when some individual is first made acquainted with linguistic elements that are new to him.

X.—§ 6. Indirect Influence.

We have hitherto considered what elements of the language may be referred to a child’s first acquisition of language. But we have not yet done with the part which children play in linguistic development. There are two things which must be sharply distinguished from the phenomena discussed in the preceding chapter—the first, that grown-up people in many cases catch up the words and forms used by children and thereby give them a power of survival which they would not have otherwise; the second, that grown-up people alter their own language so as to meet children half-way.

As for the first point, we have already seen examples in which mothers and nurses have found the baby’s forms so pretty that they have adopted them themselves. Generally these forms are confined to the family circle, but they may under favourable circumstances be propagated further. A special case of the highest interest has been fully discussed in the section about words of the mamma-class.

As for the second point, grown-up people often adapt their speech to the more or less imaginary needs of their children by pronouncing words as they do, saying dood and tum for ‘good’ and ‘come,’ etc. This notion clearly depends on a misunderstanding, and can only retard the acquisition of the right pronunciation; the child understands good and come at least as well, if not better, and the consequence may be that when he is able himself to pronounce [g] and [k] he may consider it immaterial, because one can just as well say [d] and [t] as [g] and [k], or may be bewildered as to which words have the one sound and which the other. It can only be a benefit to the child if all who come in contact with it speak from the first as correctly, elegantly and clearly as possible—not, of course, in long, stilted sentences and with many learned book-words, but naturally and easily. When the child makes a mistake, the most effectual way of correcting it is certainly the indirect one of seeing that the child, soon after it has made the mistake, hears the correct form. If he says ‘A waps stinged me’: answer, ‘It stung you: did it hurt much when the wasp stung you?’ etc. No special emphasis even is needed; next time he will probably use the correct form.

But many parents are not so wise; they will say stinged themselves when once they have heard the child say so. And nurses and others have even developed a kind of artificial nursery language which they imagine makes matters easier for the little ones, but which is in many respects due to erroneous ideas of how children ought to talk rather than to real observation of the way children do talk. Many forms are handed over traditionally from one nurse to another, such as totties, tootems or tootsies for ‘feet’ (from trotters?), toothy-peg for ‘tooth,’ tummy or tumtum for ‘stomach,’ tootleums for ‘babies,’ shooshoo for ‘a fly.’ I give a connected specimen of this nursery language (from Egerton, Keynotes, 85): “Didsum was denn? Oo did! Was ums de prettiest itta sweetums denn? Oo was. An’ did um put ’em in a nasty shawl an’ joggle ’em in an ole puff-puff, um did, was a shame! Hitchy cum, hitchy cum, hitchy cum hi, Chinaman no likey me.” This reminds one of pidgin-English, and in a later chapter we shall see that that and similar bastard languages are partly due to the same mistaken notion that it is necessary to corrupt one’s language to be easily understood by children and inferior races.

Very frequently mothers and nurses talk to children in diminutives. When many of these have become established in ordinary speech, losing their force as diminutives and displacing the proper words, this is another result of nursery language. The phenomenon is widely seen in Romance languages, where auricula, Fr. oreille, It. orecchio, displaces auris, and avicellus, Fr. oiseau, It. uccello, displaces avis; we may remember that classical Latin had already oculus, for ‘eye.’[40] It is the same in Modern Greek. An example of the same tendency, though not of the same formal means of a diminutive ending, is seen in the English bird (originally = ‘young bird’) and rabbit (originally = ‘young rabbit’), which have displaced fowl and coney.

A very remarkable case of the influence of nursery language on normal speech is seen in many countries, viz. in the displacing of the old word for ‘right’ (as opposed to left). The distinction of right and left is not easy for small children: some children in the upper classes at school only know which is which by looking at some wart, or something of the sort, on one of their hands, and have to think every time. Meanwhile mothers and nurses will frequently insist on the use of the right (dextera) hand, and when they are not understood, will think they make it easier for the child by saying ‘No, the right hand,’ and so it comes about that in many languages the word that originally means ‘correct’ is used with the meaning ‘dexter.’ So we have in English right, in German recht, which displaces zeso, Fr. droit, which displaces destre; in Spanish also la derecha has begun to be used instead of la diestra; similarly, in Swedish den vackra handen instead of hÖgra, and in Jutlandish dialects den kjÖn hÅnd instead of hÖjre.

X.—§ 7. New Languages.

In a subsequent chapter (XIV § 5) we shall consider the theory that epochs in which the changes of some language proceed at a more rapid pace than at others are due to the fact that in times of fierce, widely extended wars many men leave home and remain abroad, either as settlers or as corpses, while the women left behind have to do the field-work, etc., and neglect their homes, the consequence being that the children are left more to themselves, and therefore do not get their mistakes in speech corrected as much as usual.

A somewhat related idea is at the bottom of a theory advanced as early as 1886 by the American ethnologist Horatio Hale (see “The Origin of Languages,” in the American Association for the Advancement of Science, XXXV, 1886, and “The Development of Language,” the Canadian Institute, Toronto, 1888). As these papers seem to have been entirely unnoticed by leading philologists, I shall give a short abstract of them, leaving out what appears to me to be erroneous in the light of recent linguistic thought and research, namely, his application of the theory to explain the supposed three stages of linguistic development, the monosyllabic, the agglutinative and the flexional.

Hale was struck with the fact that in Oregon, in a region not much larger than France, we find at least thirty different families of languages living together. It is impossible to believe that thirty separate communities of speechless precursors of man should have begun to talk independently of one another in thirty distinct languages in this district. Hale therefore concludes that the origin of linguistic stocks is to be found in the language-making instinct of very young children. When two children who are just beginning to speak are thrown much together, they sometimes invent a complete language, sufficient for all purposes of mutual intercourse, and yet totally unintelligible to their parents. In an ordinary household, the conditions under which such a language would be formed are most likely to occur in the case of twins, and Hale now proceeds to mention those instances—five in all—that he has come across of languages framed in this manner by young children. He concludes: “It becomes evident that, to ensure the creation of a speech which shall be a parent of a new language stock, all that is needed is that two or more young children should be placed by themselves in a condition where they will be entirely, or in a large degree, free from the presence and influence of their elders. They must, of course, continue in this condition long enough to grow up, to form a household, and to have descendants to whom they can communicate their new speech.”

These conditions he finds among the hunting tribes of America, in which it is common for single families to wander off from the main band. “In modern times, when the whole country is occupied, their flight would merely carry them into the territory of another tribe, among whom, if well received, they would quickly be absorbed. But in the primitive period, when a vast uninhabited region stretched before them, it would be easy for them to find some sheltered nook or fruitful valley.... If under such circumstances disease or the casualties of a hunter’s life should carry off the parents, the survival of the children would, it is evident, depend mainly upon the nature of the climate and the ease with which food could be procured at all seasons of the year. In ancient Europe, after the present climatal conditions were established, it is doubtful if a family of children under ten years of age could have lived through a single winter. We are not, therefore, surprised to find that no more than four or five language stocks are represented in Europe.... Of Northern America, east of the Rocky Mountains and north of the tropics, the same may be said.... But there is one region where Nature seems to offer herself as the willing nurse and bountiful stepmother of the feeble and unprotected ... California. Its wonderful climate (follows a long description).... Need we wonder that, in such a mild and fruitful region, a great number of separate tribes were found, speaking languages which a careful investigation has classed in nineteen distinct linguistic stocks?” In Oregon, and in the interior of Brazil, Hale finds similar climatic conditions with the same result, a great number of totally dissimilar languages, while in Australia, whose climate is as mild as that of any of these regions, we find hundreds, perhaps thousands, of petty tribes, as completely isolated as those of South America, but all speaking languages of the same stock—because “the other conditions are such as would make it impossible for an isolated group of young children to survive. The whole of Australia is subject to severe droughts, and is so scantily provided with edible products that the aborigines are often reduced to the greatest straits.”

This, then, is Hale’s theory. Let us now look a little closer into the proofs adduced. They are, as it will be seen, of a twofold order. He invokes the language-creating tendencies of young children on the one hand, and on the other the geographical distribution of linguistic stocks or genera.

As to the first, it is true that so competent a psychologist as Wundt denies the possibility in very strong terms.[41] But facts certainly do not justify this foregone conclusion. I must first refer the reader to Hale’s own report of the five instances known to him. Unfortunately, the linguistic material collected by him is so scanty that we can form only a very imperfect idea of the languages which he says children have developed and of the relation between them and the language of the parents. But otherwise his report is very instructive, and I shall call special attention to the fact that in most cases the children seem to have been ‘spoilt’ by their parents; this is also the case with regard to one of the families, though it does not appear from Hale’s own extracts from the book in which he found his facts (G. Watson, Universe of Language, N.Y., 1878).

The only word recorded in this case is ni-si-boo-a for ‘carriage’; how that came into existence, I dare not conjecture; but when it is said that the syllables of it were sometimes so repeated that they made a much longer word, this agrees very well with what I have myself observed with regard to ordinary children’s playful word-coinages. In the next case, described by E. R. Hun, M.D., of Albany, more words are given. Some of these bear a strong resemblance to French, although neither the parents nor servants spoke that language; and Hale thinks that some person may have “amused herself, innocently enough, by teaching the child a few words of that tongue.” This, however, does not seem necessary to explain the words recorded. Feu, pronounced, we are told, like the French word, signified ‘fire, light, cigar, sun’: it may be either E. fire or else an imitation of the sound fff without a vowel, or [f?·] used in blowing out a candle or a match or in smoking, so as to amuse the child, exactly as in the case of one of my little Danish friends, who used fff as the name for ‘smoke, steam,’ and later for ‘funnel, chimney,’ and finally anything standing upright against the sky, for instance, a flagstaff. Petee-petee, the name which the Albany girl gave to her brother, and which Dr. Hun derived from F. petit, may be just as well from E. pet or petty; and to explain her word for ‘I,’ ma, we need not go to F. moi, as E. me or my may obviously be thus distorted by any child. Her word for ‘not’ is said to have been ne-pas, though the exact pronunciation is not given. This cannot have been taken from the French, at any rate not from real French, as ne and pas are here separated, and ne is more often than not pronounced without the vowel or omitted altogether; the girl’s word, if pronounced something like ['nepa·] may be nothing else than an imperfect childish pronunciation of never, cf. the negroes’ form nebber. Too, ‘all, everything,’ of course resembles Fr. tout, but how should anyone have been able to teach this girl, who did not speak any intelligible language, a French word of this abstract character? Some of the other words admit of a natural explanation from English: go-go, ‘delicacy, as sugar, candy or dessert,’ is probably goody-goody, or a reduplicated form of good; deer, ‘money,’ may be from dear, ‘expensive’; odo, ‘to send for, to go out, to take away,’ is evidently out, as in ma odo, ‘I want to go out’; gaÄn, ‘God,’ must be the English word, in spite of the difference in pronunciation, for the child would never think of inventing this idea on its own accord; pa-ma, ‘to go to sleep, pillow, bed,’ is from by-bye or an independent word of the mamma-class; mea, ‘cat, fur,’ of course is imitative of the sound of the cat. For the rest of the words I have no conjectures to offer. Some of the derived meanings are curious, though perhaps not more startling than many found in the speech of ordinary children; papa and mamma separately had their usual signification, but papa-mamma meant ‘church, prayer-book, cross, priest’: the parents were punctual in church observances; gar odo, ‘horse out, to send for the horse,’ came to mean ‘pencil and paper,’ as the father used, when the carriage was wanted, to write an order and send it to the stable. In the remaining three cases of ‘invented’ languages no specimens are given, except shindikik, ‘cat.’ In all cases the children seem to have talked together fluently when by themselves in their own gibberish.

But there exists on record a case better elucidated than Hale’s five cases, namely that of the Icelandic girl SÆunn. (See Jonasson and Eschricht in Dansk Maanedsskrift, Copenhagen, 1858.) She was born in the beginning of the last century on a farm in HÚnavatns-syssel in the northern part of Iceland, and began early to converse with her twin brother in a language that was entirely unintelligible to their surroundings. Her parents were disquieted, and therefore resolved to send away the brother, who died soon afterwards. They now tried to teach the girl Icelandic, but soon (too soon, evidently!) came to the conclusion that she could not learn it, and then they were foolish enough to learn her language, as did also her brothers and sisters and even some of their friends. In order that she might be confirmed, her elder brother translated the catechism and acted as interpreter between the parson and the girl. She is described as intelligent—she even composed poetry in her own language—but shy and distrustful. Jonasson gives a few specimens of her language, some of which Eschricht succeeds in interpreting as based on Icelandic words, though strangely disfigured. The language to Jonasson, who had heard it, seemed totally dissimilar to Icelandic in sounds and construction; it had no flexions, and lacked pronouns. The vocabulary was so limited that she very often had to supplement a phrase by means of nods or gestures; and it was difficult to carry on a conversation with her in the dark. The ingenuity of some of the compounds and metaphors is greatly admired by Jonasson, though to the more sober mind of Eschricht they appear rather childish or primitive, as when a ‘wether’ is called mepok-ill from me (imitation of the sound) + pok, ‘a little bag’ (Icel. poki) + ill, ‘to cut.’ The only complete sentence recorded is ‘Dirfa offo nonona uhuh,’ which means: ‘Sigurdur gets up extremely late.’ In his analysis of the whole case Eschricht succeeds in stripping it of the mystical glamour in which it evidently appeared to Jonasson as well as to the girl’s relatives; he is undoubtedly right in maintaining that if the parents had persisted in only talking Icelandic to her, she would soon have forgotten her own language; he compares her words with some strange disfigurements of Danish which he had observed among children in his own family and acquaintanceship.

I read this report a good many years ago, and afterwards I tried on two occasions to obtain precise information about similar cases I had seen mentioned, one in Halland (Sweden) and the other in Finland, but without success. But in 1903, when I was lecturing on the language of children in the University of Copenhagen, I had the good fortune to hear of a case not far from Copenhagen of two children speaking a language of their own. I investigated the case as well as I could, by seeing and hearing them several times and thus checking the words and sentences which their teacher, who was constantly with them, kindly took down in accordance with my directions. I am thus enabled to give a fairly full account of their language, though unfortunately my investigation was interrupted by a long voyage in 1904.

The boys were twins, about five and a half years old when I saw them, and so alike that even the people who were about them every day had difficulty in distinguishing them from each other. Their mother (a single woman) neglected them shamefully when they were quite small, and they were left very much to shift for themselves. For a long time, while their mother was ill in a hospital, they lived in an out-of-the-way place with an old woman, who is said to have been very deaf, and who at any rate troubled herself very little about them. When they were four years old, the parish authorities discovered how sadly neglected they were and that they spoke quite unintelligibly, and therefore sent them to a ‘children’s home’ in Seeland, where they were properly taken care of. At first they were extremely shy and reticent, and it was a long time before they felt at home with the other children. When I first saw them, they had in so far learnt the ordinary language that they were able to understand many everyday sentences spoken to them, and could do what they were told (e.g. ‘Take the footstool and put it in my room near the stove’), but they could not speak Danish and said very little in the presence of anybody else. When they were by themselves they conversed pretty freely and in a completely unintelligible gibberish, as I had the opportunity to convince myself when standing behind a door one day when they thought they were not observed. Afterwards I got to be in a way good friends with them—they called me py-ma, py being their word for ‘smoke, smoking, pipe, cigar,’ so that I got my name from the chocolate cigars which I used to ingratiate myself with them—and then I got them to repeat words and phrases which their teacher had written out for me, and thus was enabled to write down everything phonetically.

An analysis of the sounds occurring in their words showed me that their vocal organs were perfectly normal. Most of the words were evidently Danish words, however much distorted and shortened; a voiceless l, which does not occur in Danish, and which I write here lh, was a very frequent sound. This, combined with an inclination to make many words end in -p, was enough to disguise words very effectually, as when sort (black) was made lhop. I shall give the children’s pronunciations of the names of some of their new playfellows, adding in brackets the Danish substratum: lhep (Svend), lhip (Vilhelm), lip (Elisabeth), lop (Charlotte), bap (Mandse); similarly the doctor was called dop. In many cases there was phonetic assimilation at a distance, as when milk (mÆlk) was called bep, flower (blomst) bop, light (lys) lhylh, sugar (sukker) lholh, cold (kulde) lhulh, sometimes also ulh, bed (seng) sÆjs, fish (fisk) se-is.

I subjoin a few complete sentences: nina enaj una enaj hÆna mad enaj, ‘we shall not fetch food for the young rabbits’: nina rabbit (kanin), enaj negation (nej, no), repeated several times in each negative sentence, as in Old English and in Bantu languages, una young (unge). Bap ep dop, ‘Mandse has broken the hobby-horse,’ literally ‘Mandse horse piece.’ Hos ia bov lhalh, ‘brother’s trousers are wet, Maria,’ literally ‘trousers Maria brother water.’ The words are put together without any flexions, and the word order is totally different from that of Danish.

Only in one case was I unable to identify words that I understood either as ‘little language’ forms of Danish words or else as sound-imitations; but then it must be remembered that they spoke a good deal that neither I nor any of the people about them could make anything of. And then, unfortunately, when I began to study it, their language was already to a great extent ‘humanized’ in comparison to what it was when they first came to the children’s home. In fact, I noticed a constant progress during the short time I observed the boys, and in some of the last sentences I have noted, I even find the genitive case employed.

The idiom of these twins cannot, of course, be called an independent, still less a complete or fully developed language; but if they were able to produce something so different from the language spoken around them at the beginning of the twentieth century and in a civilized country, there can to my mind be no doubt that Hale is right in his contention that children left to themselves even more than these were, in an uninhabited region where they were still not liable to die from hunger or cold, would be able to develop a language for their mutual understanding that might become so different from that of their parents as really to constitute a new stock of language. So that we can now pass to the other—geographical—side of what Hale advances in favour of his theory.

So far as I can see, the facts here tally very well with the theory. Take, on the one hand, the Eskimo languages, spoken with astonishingly little variation from the east coast of Greenland to Alaska, an immense stretch of territory in which small children if left to themselves would be sure to die very soon indeed. Or take the Finnish-Ugrian languages in the other hemisphere, exhibiting a similar close relationship, though spread over wide areas. And then, on the other hand, the American languages already adduced by Hale. I do not pretend to any deeper knowledge of these languages; but from the most recent works of very able specialists I gather an impression of the utmost variety in phonetics, in grammatical structure and in vocabulary; see especially Roland B. Dixon and Alfred L. Kroeber, “The Native Languages of California,” in the American Anthropologist, 1903. Even where recent research seems to establish some kind of kinship between families hitherto considered as distinguished stocks (as in Dixon’s interesting paper, “Linguistic Relationships within the Shasta-Achomawi Stock,” XV CongrÈs des AmÉricanistes, 1906) the similarities are still so incomplete, so capricious and generally so remote that they seem to support Hale’s explanation rather than a gradual splitting of the usual kind.

As for Brazil, I shall quote some interesting remarks from C. F. P. v. Martius, BeitrÄge zur Ethnographie u. Sprachenkunde Amerika’s, 1867, i. p. 46: “In Brazil we see a scant and unevenly distributed native population, uniform in bodily structure, temperament, customs and manner of living generally, but presenting a really astonishing diversity in language. A language is often confined to a few mutually related individuals; it is in truth a family heirloom and isolates its speakers from all other people so as to render any attempt at understanding impossible. On the vessel in which we travelled up the rivers in the interior of Brazil, we often, among twenty Indian rowers, could count only three or four that were at all able to speak together ... they sat there side by side dumb and stupid.”

Hale’s theory is worthy, then, of consideration, and now, at the close of our voyage round the world of children’s language, we have gained a post of vantage from which we can overlook the whole globe and see that the peculiar word-forms which children use in their ‘little language’ period can actually throw light on the distribution of languages and groups of languages over the great continents. Yes,