Chapter XII: George Sand’s Childhood, 489 (7)

Along with the tendency to reduplicate syllabic masses, we see a disposition to use habitually certain favourite syllables as terminations, more particularly the pet ending ‘_ie_’. Thus ‘sugar’ becomes ‘sugie,’ ‘picture’ ‘pickie,’ and so forth. One child was so much in love with this syllable as to prefer it even to the common repetition of sound in onomatopoetic imitation, naming the hen not ‘tuck-tuck’ as one might expect, but ‘tuckie’.

What strikes one in these early modifications of our verbal sounds by the child is the care for metrical qualities and the comparative disregard for articulatory characteristics. The number of syllabic sounds, the distribution of stress, as well as the rise and fall of vocal pitch, are the first things to be attended to, and these are, on the whole, carefully rendered when the constituent sounds are changed into other and often very unlike ones, and the order of the sounds is reversed. Again, the comparative fidelity in rendering the vowel sounds illustrates the prominence of the metrical or musical quality in childish speech. The love of reduplication, of the effect of assonance and rhyme, illustrates the same point. This may be seen in some of the more playful sayings of the child M., as ‘Babba hiding, Ice (Alice) spiding (spying)’.

As I have dwelt at some length on the defective articulation of children, I should like to say that their early performances, so far from being a discredit to them, are very much to their credit. I, at least, have often been struck with the sudden bringing forth without any preparatory audible trial of difficult combinations, and with a wonderful degree of accuracy. A child can often articulate better than he is wont to do. The little girl M., when one year six months, being asked teasingly to say ‘mudder,’ said with a laugh ‘mother,’ quite correctly—but only on this one occasion. The precision which a child, even in the second year, will often give to our vocables is quite surprising, and reminds me of the admirable exactness which, as I have observed, other strangers to our language, and more especially perhaps Russians, introduce into their articulation, putting our own loose treatment of our language to the blush. This precision, acquired as it would seem without any tentative practice, points, I suspect, to a good deal of silent rehearsal, nascent groupings of muscular actions which are not carried far enough to produce sound.

The gradual development of the child’s articulatory powers, as indicated partly by the precision of the sounds formed, partly by their differentiation and multiplication, is a matter of great interest. At the beginning, when he is able to reproduce only a small portion of a vocable, there is of course but little differentiation. Thus it has been remarked by more than one observer, that one and the same sound (so far at least as our ears can judge) will represent different lingual signs, ‘ba’ standing in the case of one child for both ‘basket’ and ‘sheep’ (‘ba lamb’), and ‘bo’ for ‘box’ and ‘bottle’. Little by little the sound grows differentiated into a more definite and perfect form, and it is curious to note the process of gradual evolution by which the first rude attempt at articulate form gets improved and refined. Thus, writes a mother, “at eighteen to twenty months ‘milk’ was ‘gink,’ at twenty-one months it was ‘ming,’ and soon after two years it was a sound between ‘mik’ and ‘milk’.” The same child in learning to say ‘lion’ went through the stages ‘ŭn’ (one year eight months), ‘ion’ (two years), and ‘lion’ (two years and eight months). The little girl M., in learning the word ‘breakfast,’ advanced by the stages ‘bepper,’ ‘beffert,’ ‘beffust’. In an example given by Preyer, ‘grosspapa’ (grandpapa) began as ‘opapa,’ this passed into ‘gropapa,’ and this again into ‘grosspapa’. In another case given by Schultze the word ‘wasser’ (pronounced ‘vasser’) went through the following stages: (1) ‘vavaff,’ (2) ‘fafaff,’ (3) ‘vaffaff,’ (4) ‘vasse,’ and (5) ‘vasser’. In this last we have an interesting illustration of a struggle between the imitative impulse to reproduce the exact sound and the impulse to reduplicate or repeat the sound, this last being very apparent in the introduction of the second _v_ and the _ff_ in the first stage, and in the substitution of the _f_’s for _v_’s under the influence of the dominant final sound in the second stage. The student of the early stages of language growth might, one imagines, find many suggestive parallels in these developmental changes in children’s articulation.

The rapidity of articulatory progress might be measured by a careful noting of the increase in the number of vocables mastered from month to month. Although Preyer and others have given lists of vocables used at particular ages, and parents have sent me lists, I have met with no methodical record of the gradual extension of the articulate field. It is obvious that any observations under this head, save in the very early stages, can only be very rough. No observer of a talkative child, however attentive, can make sure of all the word-sounds used. It is to be noted, too, as we have seen above, that a child will sometimes show that he can master a sound and will even make a temporary use of it, without retaining it as a part of the permanent linguistic stock.[92]

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Footnote 92:

As samples of the observations the following may be taken. A friend
tells me his boy when one year old used just 50 vocables. The
performances vary greatly. One American girl of twenty-two months had
69, whereas another about the same age had 136, just twice the number.
A German girl eighteen months old is said by Preyer to have used 119
words, and to have raised this to 435 in the next six months. The
composition of these early vocabularies will occupy us presently.

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_Logical Side of Children’s Language._

It is now time to pass from the mechanical to the logical side of this early child-language, to the meanings which the small linguist gives to his articulate sounds and the ways in which he modifies these meanings. The growth of a child’s speech means a concurrent progress in the mastery of word-forms and in the acquisition of ideas. In this each of the two factors aids the other, the advance of ideas pushing the child to new uses of sounds, and the growing facility in word-formation reacting powerfully on the ideas, giving them definiteness of outline and fixity of structure. I shall not attempt here to give a complete account of the process, but content myself with touching on one or two of its more interesting aspects.

A child acquires the proper use or application of a word by associating the sound heard with the object, situation or action in connexion with which others are observed to use it. But the first imitation of words does not show that the little mind has seized their full and precise meaning. A clear and exact apprehension of meaning comes but slowly, and only as the result of many hard thought-processes, comparisons and discriminations.

In these first attempts to use our speech, the child’s mind is innocent of grammatical distinctions. These arise out of the particular uses of words in sentence-structure, and of this structure the child has as yet no inkling. If, then, following a common practice, I speak of a child of twelve or fifteen months as _naming_ an object, the reader must not suppose that I am ascribing to the baby-mind a clear grasp of the function of what grammarians call nouns (substantives). All that is implied in this way of speaking, is that the infant’s first words are used mainly as recognition-signs. There is from the first, I conceive, even in the gesture of pointing and saying ‘da!’ a germ of this naming process.

The progress of this rude naming or articulate recognition is very interesting. The names first learnt are either those of individuals, what we call proper names, as ‘mamma,’ ‘nurse,’ or those which, like ‘bath,’ ‘bow-wow,’ are at first applied to one particular object. It is often supposed that a child uses these as true singular names, recognising individual objects as such. But this is pretty certainly an error. He cannot note differences well enough or grasp a sufficient number of differential marks to know an individual as such, and he will, as occasion arises, quite spontaneously extend his names to other things which happen to have some interesting and notable points in common with the first. Thus ‘bow-wow,’ though first applied to one particular dog, is, as we know, at once extended to other dogs, pictures of dogs, and not infrequently other things as well. If then we speak of the child as generalising or widening the application of his terms, we must not be taken to mean that he goes through a process of comparing things which he perceives to be distinct, and discovering a likeness in these, but that he merely assimilates or recognises something like that which he has seen before without troubling to note the differences.

This extension of names or generalising process proceeds primarily and mainly by the feeling for the likenesses or the common aspects of things, though as we shall see presently their connexions of time and place afford a second and subordinate means of extension. The transference of a name from object to object through this apprehension of a likeness or assimilation has already been touched upon. It moves along thoroughly childish lines, and constitutes one of the most striking and interesting of the manifestations of precocious originality. Yet if unconventional in its mode of operation it is essentially thought-activity, a connecting of like with like, and a rudimentary grouping of things in classes.

This tendency to comprehend like things or situations under a single articulate sign is seen already in the use of the early indicative sign ‘atta’ (all gone). It was used by Preyer’s child to mark not only the departure of a thing but the putting out of a flame, later on, an empty glass or other vessel. By another child it was extended to the ending of music, the closing of a drawer and so on. Here, however, the various applications probably answer more to a common feeling of ending or missing than to an apprehension of a common objective situation.

Coming to words which we call names we find that the child will often extend a recognition-sign from one object to a second, and to our thinking widely dissimilar object through the discovery of some analogy. Such extension, moving rather along poetic lines than those of our logical classifications, is apt, as we have seen, to wear a quaint metaphorical aspect. A star, for example, looked at, I suppose, as a small bright spot, was called by one child an eye. The child M. called the opal globe of a lighted lamp a ‘moon’. ‘Pin’ was extended by another child to a crumb just picked up, a fly, and a caterpillar, and seemed to mean something little to be taken between the fingers. The same child used the sound ‘’at’ (hat) for anything put on the head, including a hair-brush. Another child used the word ‘key’ for other bright metal things, as money. Romanes’ child extended the word ‘star,’ the first vocable learned after ‘Mamma’ and ‘Papa,’ to bright objects generally, candles, gas-flames, etc. Taine speaks of a child of one year who after first applying the word “fafer” (from “chemin de fer”) to railway engines went on to transfer it to a steaming coffee-pot and everything that hissed or smoked or made a noise. In these last illustrations we have plainly a rudimentary process of classification. Any point of likeness, provided it is of sufficient interest to strike the attention, may thus serve as a basis of childish classification.

As with names of things so with those of actions. The crackling noise of the fire was called by one child ‘barking,’ and the barking of a dog was named by another ‘coughing’. We see from this that the particular line of analogical extension followed by a child will depend on the nature of the first impressions or experiences which serve as his starting point.

A like originality is apt to show itself in the first crude attempt to seize and name the relations of things. The child C. called dipping bread in gravy ‘ba’ (bath). Another child extended the word ‘door’ to “everything that stopped up an opening or prevented an exit, including the cork of a bottle, and the little table that fastened him in his high chair”.

In these extensions we see the tendency of child-thought towards ‘concretism,’ or the use of a simple concrete idea in order to express a more abstract idea. Children frequently express the contrast big, little, by the pretty figurative language ‘Mamma’ and ‘baby’. Thus a small coin was called by an American child a ‘baby dollar’. Romanes’ daughter, named Ilda, pointed out the sheep in a picture as ‘Mamma-ba’ and the lambs as ‘Ilda-ba’. It is somewhat the same process when the child extends an idea obtained from the most impressive experience of childish difficulty, _viz._, ‘too big,’ so as to make it do duty for the abstract notion ‘too difficult’ in general.

In this extension of language by the child we may discern, along with this play of the feeling for similarity, the working of association. This is illustrated by the case of Darwin’s grandchild, who when just beginning to speak used the common sign ‘quack’ for duck, then extended this to water, then, following up this associative transference by a double process of generalisation, made the sound serve as the name of all birds and insects on the one hand, and all fluid substances on the other.[93]

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Footnote 93:

Quoted by Romanes, _Mental Evolution in Man_, p. 283.

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The transference of the name ‘quack’ from the animal to the water is a striking example of the tendency of the young mind to view things which are presented together as belonging one to another and in a manner identical. Another curious instance is given by Professor Minto, in which a child, who applied the word ‘mambro’ to her nurse, went on to extend it by associative transference to the nurse’s sewing machine, then by analogy applied it to a hand-organ in the street, later on, through an association of hand-organ with monkey, to his india-rubber monkey. Here we have a whole history of change of word-meaning illustrating in curiously equal measure the play of assimilation and of association, and falling within a period of two years.[94]

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Footnote 94:

_Logic_ (University Extension Manuals), pp. 83-84.

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There is another way in which children are said to ‘extend’ names somewhat analogous to the processes of assimilation and associate transference. They are very fond of using the same word for opposed or other correlative ideas. In some cases we can see that this is due merely to confusion or want of discrimination. When, for example, Preyer’s boy confused ‘too little’ with ‘too much,’ and ‘yesterday’ with ‘to-morrow,’ going so far as to make a compound ‘heitgestern’ (_i.e._, heutegestern) to include both,[95] it is easy to see that the child’s mind had reached merely the vague idea unsuitable in quantity in the one case, and time not present in the other; and that he failed to differentiate these ideas. In other cases where correlatives are confused, as when a child extended the sign of asking for an eatable (‘bit-ye’) to the act of offering anything to another, or when as in C.’s case ‘spend’ was made to do duty for ‘cost,’ ‘borrow’ for ‘lend,’ and ‘learn’ for ‘teach,’ the explanation is slightly different. A child can only acquire an idea of abstract relations slowly and by stages. Such words as _lend_, _teach_, call up first a pictorial idea of an action in which two persons are seen to be concerned. But the exact nature of the relation, and the difference in its aspect as we start from the one or the other term, are not perceived. Thus in thinking of a purchase over the counter, a child may be supposed to image the action but not clearly to distinguish the part taken by the person who buys and gives out money (‘spends’) and the part taken by the person who demands a price or fixes the cost. Perhaps we get near this vague awareness of a relation when we are aiding a violinist to tune his instrument. We may know that his note and our piano note do not accord, and yet be quite unable to determine their exact relation, and to fix the one as higher, the other as lower.

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Footnote 95:

See _op. cit._, p. 420, also pp. 414 and 418.

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An interesting variety of this extension of names to correlatives is the transference of the attributes of causal agent to passive object, and _vice versâ_. Thus a little girl of four called her parasol when blown by the wind ‘a windy parasol,’ and a stone that made her hand sore ‘a very sore stone’. A little Italian girl that had taken some nasty medicines expressed the fact by calling herself nasty (‘bimba cattiva’).[96]

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Footnote 96:

Paola Lombroso, _Saggi di Psicologia del Bambino_, p. 16.

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There is much in the whole of these changes introduced by the child into the uses or meanings of words which may remind one of the changes which go on in the growth of languages in communities. Thus the child’s metaphorical use of words, his setting forth of an abstract idea by some analogous concrete image, has its counterpart, as we know, in the early stages of human language. Tribes which have no abstract signs employ a metaphor exactly as the child does. Our own language preserves the traces of this early figurative use of words; as in ‘imbecile,’ weak, which originally meant leaning on a staff, and so forth.[97]

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Footnote 97:

See Trench’s account of poetry in words, _On the Study of Words_,
lect. vi.

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Again, we may trace in the development of languages the counterpart of those processes by which children spontaneously expand what logicians call the denotation of their names. The word ‘sun’ has only quite recently undergone this kind of extension by being applied to other centres of systems besides our familiar sun. The multiplicity of meanings of certain words, as ‘post,’ ‘stock’ and so forth, points to the double process of assimilative and associative extension which we saw illustrated in the use of the child’s word ‘mambro’.

Once more, the child’s extension of a word from an idea to its correlative has its parallel in the adult’s use of language. As the vulgar expression ‘I’ll larn you’ shows (_cf._ the Anglo-Saxon _leornian_), a word may come to mean both to teach and to become taught. A like embracing of agent and object acted upon by the same word is seen in the ‘active’ and ‘passive’ meanings of words like the Latin _penetrabilis_ (‘piercing’ and ‘pierceable’), and in the ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ meanings of ‘pleasant’ and similar words. We are beginning, like the little girl quoted above, to speak of a ‘sore’ topic. Lastly, the movement of thought underlying the saying of the little Italian girl, ‘nasty baby,’ seems to be akin to that of the savage when he supposes that he appropriates the qualities of that which he eats.

The changes here touched upon have to do with what philologists call generalisation. As supplementary to these there is in the case of the growth of a community-language a process of specialisation, as when ‘physician’ from meaning a student of nature has come to mean one who has acquired and can practically apply one branch of nature-knowledge. In the case of the child we have an analogue of this in the gradual limitation of names to narrower classes or to individuals as the result of carrying out certain processes of comparison and discrimination. Thus ‘ba-ba,’ which is used at first for a miscellaneous crowd of woolly or hairy quadrupeds, gets specialised as a name for a sheep, and the much-abused ‘papa’ becomes restricted to its rightful owner.

This process of differentiation and specialisation assumes an interesting form in a characteristic feature of the language-invention of both children and savages, _viz._, the formation of compound words. These compounds are often true metaphors. Thus in the case already quoted where an eye-lid was called an eye-curtain the child may be said to have resorted to a metaphorical way of describing the lid. It is much the same when M. at the age of one year nine months invented the expression ‘bwite (bright) penny’ for silver pieces. A slightly different example is the compound ‘foot-wing’ invented by the child C. to describe the limb of a seal. As a further variety of this metaphoric formation I may quote the pretty name ‘tell-wind’ which a boy of four years and eight months hit upon as a name for the weather-vane.

In these and similar cases, there is at once an analogical transference of meaning (_e.g._, from curtain to lid) or process of generalisation, and a limitation of meaning by the appended or qualifying word ‘eye’ and so a process of specialisation.

In certain cases the analogical extension gives place to what we should call a classification. One child for example, knowing the word steam-ship and wanting the name sailing-ship, invented the form ‘wind-ship’. The little girl M., when one year and nine months old, showed quite a passion for classing by help of compounds, arranging the rooms into ‘morner-room,’ ‘dinner-room’ (she was fond of adding ‘er’ at this time) and ‘nursery-room’.

It might be supposed from a logical point of view that in these inventions the qualifying or determining word would come more naturally after the generic name, as in the French _moulin à vent, cygne noir_. I have heard of one English child who used the form ‘mill-wind’ in preference to ‘wind-mill,’ and the order ‘dog black’ in preference to ‘black dog’. It would be worth while to note any similar instances.

In these inventions, again, we may detect a close resemblance between children’s language and that of savages. In presence of a new object a savage behaves very much as a child, he shapes a new name out of familiar ones, a name that commonly has much of the metaphorical character. Thus the Aztecs called a boat a ‘water-house’; and the Vancouver islanders when they saw a screw-steamer called it the ‘kick-kicket’.[98]

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Footnote 98:

Tylor, _Anthropology_, chap. v.

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A somewhat different class of word-inventions is that in which a child frames a new word on the analogy of known words. A common case is the invention of new substantives from verbs after the pattern of other substantives. The results are often quaint enough. Sometimes it is the agent who is named by the new word, as when the boy C. talked of the ‘Rainer,’ the fairy who makes rain, or when another little boy dubbed a teacher the ‘lessoner’. Sometimes it is the product of the action that is named, as when the same child C. and the deaf-mute Laura Bridgman both invented the form ‘thinks’ for ‘thoughts’. In much the same way a boy of three called the holes which he dug in his garden his ‘digs’. The reverse process, the formation of a verb from a substantive, also occurs. Thus one child invented the form ‘dag’ for striking with a dagger; and Preyer’s boy when two years and two months old formed the verb ‘messen’ to express cut from the substantive ‘messer’ (a knife). It was probably a similar process when the child M. at one year ten months, after seeing a motionless worm and being told that it was dead, asked to see another worm ‘deading’. The same child coined the neat verb-form ‘unparcel’. This readiness to form verbs from substantives and _vice versâ_, which is abundantly illustrated in the development of language, is without doubt connected with the primitive and natural mode of thinking. The object is of greatest interest both to the child and to primitive man as an agent, or as the last stage or result of an action.

In certain of these original formations we may detect a fine feeling for verbal analogy. Thus a French boy, after killing the ‘limaces’ (snails) which were eating the plants in the garden, dignified his office by styling himself a ‘limarcier’; where the inventive faculty was no doubt led by the analogy of ‘voiturier’ formed from ‘voiture’.[99]

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Footnote 99:

Compayré, _op. cit._, p. 249, where other examples are given.

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In other verbal formations it is difficult to determine the model which is followed. Signorina Lombroso gives a good example. A little girl of two and a half years had observed that when her mother allowed her to take, eat, or drink something, she would say ‘prendilo’ (take it), ‘bevilo’ (drink it), or ‘mangialo’ (eat it). She proceeded to make a kind of adjective or substantive out of each of these, asking ‘é prendilo?’ ‘é bevilo?’ ‘é mangialo?’ _i.e._, ‘Is it takable or a case of taking?’ etc., when she wanted to take, drink, or eat something.[100] By such skilful artifices does the little word-builder find his way to the names which he has need of.

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Footnote 100:

_Op. cit._, p. 12.

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In certain cases these original constructions are of a more clumsy order and due to a partial forgetfulness of a word and an effort to complete it. Thus a boy of four spoke of being ‘sorrified,’ where he was evidently led out of the right track by the analogy of ‘horrified’. The same little boy who talked of his ‘digs’ used the word ‘magnicious’ for ‘magnificent’. This is a choice example of word-transformation. No doubt the child was led by the feeling for the sound of this termination in other grand words, as ‘ambitious’. Possible, too, he might have heard the form ‘magnesia’ and been influenced by a reminiscence of this sound-complex. The talk of ‘Jeames’ with which Mr. Punch makes us acquainted is full of just such delightful missings of the mark in trying to reproduce big words.

_Sentence-building._

We may now follow the child in his later and more ambitious linguistic efforts. The transition to this higher plane is marked by the use of the completed form of thought, the sentence.

At first, as already pointed out, there is no sentence-structure. The child begins to talk by using single words. These words consist of what we call substantives, as ‘Mamma,’ ‘nurse,’ ‘milk,’ a few adjectives, as ‘hot,’ ‘nice,’ ‘good,’ a still smaller number of adverbial signs, as ‘ta-ta,’ or ‘away,’ ‘over,’ ‘down,’ ‘up,’ and one or two verb-forms, apparently imperatives, as ‘go’. The exact order in which these appear, and the proportion between the different classes of constituents at a particular age, say two and a half or three, appear to vary greatly. Words descriptive of actions, though very few at first, appear to grow numerous in a later stage.[101]

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Footnote 101:

For lists of vocabularies and an analysis of their composition see
Preyer, _op. cit._ (4th ed.), p. 372 ff.; Tracy, _Psychology of
Childhood_, p. 76 ff.

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In speaking of these words as substantives, adjectives, and so forth, I am merely adopting a convenient mode of description. We must not suppose that the words as used in this simple disjointed talk have their full grammatical value. It is not generally recognised that the single-worded utterance of the child is an abbreviated sentence or ‘sentence-word’ analogous to the sentence-words found in the simplest known stage of adult language. As with the race so with the child, the sentence precedes the word. Moreover, each of the child’s so-called words in his single-worded talk stands for a considerable variety of sentence-forms. Thus the words in the child’s vocabulary which we call substantives do duty for verbs and so forth. As Preyer remarks, ‘chair’ (stuhl) means ‘There is no chair,’ ‘I want to be put in the chair,’ ‘The chair is broken,’ and so forth. In like manner ‘dow’ (down) may mean ‘The spoon has fallen down,’ ‘I am down,’ ‘I want to go down,’ etc.[102] The particular shade of meaning intended is indicated by intonation and gesture.

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Footnote 102:

See Preyer, _op. cit._, p. 361; Romanes, _op. cit._, p. 296 ff.

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This sentence-construction begins with a certain timidity. The age at which it is first observed varies greatly. It seems in most cases to be somewhere about the twenty-first month, yet I find good observers among my correspondents giving as dates eighteen and a half and nineteen months; and a friend of mine, a Professor of Literature, tells me that his boy formed simple sentences as early as fifteen months. We commonly have at first quite short sentences formed by two words in apposition. These may consist of what we should call an adjective added to and qualifying a substantive, as in the simple utterance of the child C., ‘Big bir’ (bird), or the exclamation, ‘Papa no’ (Papa’s nose); or they may arise by a combination of substantives, as in the sentence given by Tracy, ‘Papa cacker,’ _i.e._, ‘Papa has crackers,’ and one quoted by Preyer, ‘Auntie cake’ (German, ‘Danna Kuha,’ _i.e._, ‘Tante Kuche’) for ‘Auntie has given me cake’; and in a somewhat different example of a compound sentence also given by Preyer, ‘Home milk’ (German, ‘Haim Mimi’), interpreted as ‘I want to go home and have milk’. In the case of one child about the age of twenty-three months most of the sentences were composed of two words, one of which was a verb in the imperative. The love of commanding, so strong in the child, makes the use of the imperative, as is seen in this case, very common. M.’s first performance in sentence-building (at eighteen and a half months) was, ‘Mamma, tie,’ _i.e._, ‘tie gloves’.

Little by little the learner manages longer sentences, economising his resources to the utmost, troubling nothing about inflections or the insertion of prepositions so as to indicate precise relations, but leaving his hearer to discover his meaning as best he may; and it is truly wonderful how much the child manages to express in this rude fashion. A boy nineteen and a half months old gave this elaborate order to his father: ‘Dada toe toe ba,’ that is, ‘Dada is to go and put his toes in the bath’. Pollock’s little girl in the first essay at sentence-building, recorded at the age of twenty-one and a half months, actually managed a neat antithesis: ‘Cabs dati, clam clin,’ that is to say, ‘Cabs are dirty, and the perambulator is clean’. Preyer’s boy in the beginning of the third year brought out the following, ‘Mimi atta teppa papa oi,’ that is to say, ‘Milch atta Teppich Papa fui,’ which appears to have signified, “The milk is gone, it is on the carpet, and papa said ‘Fie’”. It may be added that the difficulties of deciphering these early sentences is aggravated by the frequent resort to slurs, as when a child says, ‘m’ out’ for ‘take me out,’ ‘’t on’ for ‘put it on’.

The order of words in these first tentative sentences is noticeable. Sometimes the subject is placed after the predicate, as in an example given by Pollock, ‘Run away man,’ _i.e._, ‘The man runs (or has run) away,’ and in the still quainter example given by the same writer, ‘Out-pull-baby ’pecs (spectacles),’ _i.e._, ‘Baby pulls or will pull out the spectacles’. In like manner the adjective used as predicate may precede the subject, as in the examples given by Maillet, ‘Jolie la fleur,’ etc.[103] Sometimes, again, the object comes before the verb, as apparently in the following example given by Miss Shinn: a little girl delighted at the prospect of going out to see the moon exclaimed, “Moo-ky (sky), baby shee (see)”.[104] Here is a delightful example of a transposition of subject and object. A boy two years and three months asked, ‘Did Ack (Alec) chocke an apple?’ _i.e._, ‘Did an apple choke Alec?’ though in this case we very probably have to do with a misunderstanding of the action choke. Other kinds of inversion occur when more complex experiments are attempted, as in connecting ‘my’ with an adjective. Thus one child said prettily, ‘Poor my friends’;[105] which archaic form may be compared with the following Gallic-looking idiom used by M. at the age of one year ten months: ‘How Babba (baby, _i.e._, herself) does feed nicely!’ The same little girl put the auxiliary out of its place, saying, ‘Tan (can) Babba wite’ for ‘Baby can write,’ though this was probably a reminiscence of the question-form.

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Footnote 103:

See Compayré, _op. cit._, p. 206.

Footnote 104:

_Notes on the Development of a Child_, p. 84.

Footnote 105:

Canton, _The Invisible Playmate_, p. 32, who adds that this exactly
answers to the form, “Good my lord!”

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These inversions of our familiar order are suggestive. They have some resemblance to the curious order which appears in the spontaneous sign-making of deaf-mutes. Thus a deaf-mute answered the question, ‘Who made God?’ by saying, “God made nothing,” _i.e._, “nothing made God”. Similarly the deaf-mute Laura Bridgman expressed the petition, ‘Give Laura bread,’ by the form, ‘Laura bread give.’[106] Such inversions, as we know, are allowable and common in certain languages, _e.g._, Latin. The study of the syntax of child-language and of the sign-making of deaf-mutes might suggest that our English order is not in certain cases the most natural one.

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Footnote 106:

See Romanes, _op. cit._, p. 116 f., where other examples may be found.

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A somewhat similar inversion of what seems to us the proper order appears in the child’s first attempts at negation. The child C. early in his third year expressed the idea that he was not going into the sea thus: ‘N. (his own name) go in water, no’. Similarly Pollock’s child expressed acquiescence in a prohibition in this manner, ‘Baby have papa (pepper) no,’ where the ‘no’ followed without a pause. The same order appears in the case of French children, _e.g._, ‘Papa non,’ _i.e._, ‘It is not Papa,’ and seems to be a common, if not a universal form of the first half-spontaneous sentence-building. Here again we see an analogy to the syntax of deaf-mutes, who appear to append the sign of negation in a similar way, _e.g._, ‘Teacher I beat, deceive, scold no,’ _i.e._, ‘I must not beat, deceive, scold my teacher’. We see something like it, too, in the formations of savage-languages, as when ‘fool no’ comes to be the sign of ‘not fool,’ that is of wise.[107] When ‘not’ comes into use it is apt to be put in a wrong place, as when the little girl M. said, ‘No Babba look’ (_i.e._, ‘Babba will not look’), and ‘Mr. Dill not did tum’ for ‘Mr. Gill did not come’.[108]

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Footnote 107:

_Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology_, 1879-80, p. 391 ff.

Footnote 108:

It may be added that this child regularly used ‘not’ or ‘n’t’ as a
negating or cancelling sign for the whole sentence, saying, for
example, ‘Babba mus’n’t go in,’ for ‘Babba may stay out’.

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Another closely related characteristic of this early childish sentence-building is the love of antithesis under the form of two balancing statements. Thus a child will often oppose an affirmative to a negative statement as a means of bringing out the full meaning of the former. The boy C., for example, would say, ‘This a nice bow-wow, not nasty bow-wow’. The little girl M. said, ‘Boo (the name of her cat) dot (got) tail; poor Babba dot no tail,’ proceeding to search for a tail under her skirts. This use of a negative statement by way of contrast or opposition to an affirmative grew in the case of one child aged two years and two months into a habit of description by negations. Thus an orange was described by the saying, ‘No, ’tisn’t apple,’ porridge by ‘No, ’tisn’t bread and milk’. It is interesting to note that deaf-mutes proceed in a similar fashion by way of antithetic negative statement. Thus one of these expressed the thought, ‘I must love and honour my teacher,’ by the order, ‘Teacher I beat, deceive, scold no!—I love honour yes!’[109]

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Footnote 109:

A curious example of negative antithesis is given by Perez, _op.
cit._, p. 196. On other analogies between the syntax of children and
of deaf-mutes, see Compayré, _op. cit._, p. 251 f.

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These first essays in the construction of sentences illustrate the skill of the child in eking out his scanty vocabulary by help of a metaphorical transference of meaning. Taine gives a charming example of this device. A little girl of eighteen months had acquired the word ‘Coucou’ as used by her mother or nurse when playfully hiding behind a door or chair, and the expression ‘ça brûle’ as employed to warn her that her dinner was too hot, or that she must put on her hat in the garden to keep off the hot sun. One day on seeing the sun disappear behind a hill she exclaimed, ‘A bûle coucou’.[110]

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Footnote 110:

_On Intelligence_, pt. i., bk. i., chap. ii., sect. vi.

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It is a fearful moment when the child first tries his hand at inflections, and, more especially in our language, those of verbs. Pollock’s child made the attempt, and successfully, at the age of twenty-two months. Such first essays are probably examples of pure imitation, the precise forms used having been previously heard from others. Hence while they show a growing power of thought, of a differencing of the relations of number and time, they do not involve verbal construction properly so called. This last appears as soon as the child carries over his knowledge of particular cases of verbal inflection and applies it to new words. This involves a nascent appreciation of the reason or rule according to which words are modified. The development of this feeling for the general mode of verbal change underlies all the later advance in correct speaking.

While the little explorer in the _terra incognita_ of language can proceed safely in this direction up to a certain point he is apt, as we all know, to stumble now and again; nor is this to be wondered at when we remember the intricacies, the irregularities, which characterise a language like ours. In trying, for example, to manage the preterite of an English verb he is certain, as, indeed, is the foreigner, to go wrong. The direction of the error is often in the transformation of the weak to the strong form; as when ‘screamed’ becomes ‘scram,’ ‘split’ (preterite) ‘splat’ or ‘splut,’ and so forth. In other cases the child wall convert a strong into a weak form, as when Laura Bridgman, like many another child, would say, ‘I eated,’ ‘I seed,’ and so forth.[111] Sometimes, again, delightful doublings of the past tense occur, as ‘sawed’ for ‘saw,’ ‘eatened’ for ‘eaten,’ ‘didn’t saw’ for ‘didn’t see,’ ‘did you gave me?’ for ‘did you give me?’ Active and passive forms are sometimes confused, as when M. said ‘not yike being picking up’ for ‘not like being picked up,’ etc. It is curious to note the different lines of imitative construction followed out in these cases.

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Footnote 111:

The same double tendency from weak to strong forms and _vice versâ_ is
seen in the list of transformed past participles given by Preyer, _op.
cit._, p. 360.

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One thing seems clear here: the child’s instinct is to simplify our forms, to get rid of irregularities. This is strikingly illustrated in the use of the heterogeneous assemblage of forms known as the verb ‘to be’. It is really hard on a child to expect him to answer the question, ‘Are you good now?’ by saying, ‘Yes, I am’. He says, of course, ‘Yes, I are’. Perhaps the poor verb ‘to be’ has suffered every kind of violence at the hands of children.[112] Thus the child M. used the form ‘bēd’ for ‘was’. Professor Max Müller somewhere says that children are the purifiers of language. Would it not be well if they could become its simplifiers also, and give us in place of this congeries of unrelated sounds one good decent verb-form?

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Footnote 112:

_Cf._ Preyer’s account of a German child’s liberties with the same
verb, where we find ‘gebisst,’ ‘binnst,’ and other odd forms, _op.
cit._, p. 438.

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Other quaint transformations occur when the child begins to combine words, as when M. joining adverb to verb invented the form of past tense ‘fall downed’ for ‘fell down’. Another queer form is ‘Am’t I?’ used for ‘am I not?’ after the pattern of ‘aren’t we?’ An even finer linguistic stroke than this, is ‘Bettern’t you?’ for ‘Had you not better?’ where the child was evidently trying to get in the form ‘hadn’t you,’ along with the awkward ‘better,’ which seemed to belong to the ‘had,’ and solved the problem by treating ‘better’ as the verb, and dropping ‘had’ altogether.

A study of these solecisms, which are nearly always amusing, and sometimes daintily pretty, is useful to mothers and young teachers by way of showing how much hard work, how much of real conjectural inference, enters into children’s essays in talking. We ought not to wonder that they now and again slip; rather ought we to wonder that, with all the intricacies and pitfalls of our language—this applies of course with especial force to the motley irregular English tongue—they slip so rarely. As a matter of fact, the latter and more ‘correct’ talk—which is correct just because the child has stored up a good stock of particular word-forms, and consequently has a much wider range of pure uninventive imitation—is less admirable than the early inventive imitation; for this last not only has the quality of originality, but shows the germ of a truly grammatical feeling for the general types or norms of the language.

The English child is not much troubled by inflections of substantives. The pronouns, however, as intelligent mothers know, are apt to cause much heart-burning to the little linguist. The mastery of ‘I’ and ‘you,’ ‘me,’ ‘mine,’ etc., forms an epoch in the development of the linguistic faculty and of the power of thought which is so closely correlated with this. Hence it will repay a brief inspection.

As is well known, children begin by speaking of themselves and of those whom they address by names, as when they say, ‘Baby good,’ ‘Mamma come’. This is sometimes described as speaking “in the third person,” yet this is not quite accurate, seeing that there is as yet no distinction of person at all in the child’s language.

The first use of ‘I’ and ‘you’ between two and three years is apt to be erroneous. The child proceeds imitatively to use ‘I,’ ‘me,’ ‘my’ for ‘you’ and ‘your’. Thus one child said, ‘What I’m going to do,’ for, ‘What are you going to do?’ In this case, it is plain, there is no clear grasp of what we mean by subject, or of the exact relation of this subject to the person he is addressing.

Yet along with this mechanical repetition of the pronominal forms we see the beginnings of an intelligent use of them. So far as I can ascertain most children begin to say ‘me’ or ‘my’ before they say ‘you’. Yet I have met with one or two apparent exceptions to this rule. Thus the boy C. certainly seemed to get hold of the form of the second person before that of the first, and the priority of ‘you’ is attested in another case sent to me. It is desirable to get more observations on this point.

To determine the exact date at which an intelligent use of the first person appears, is much less easy than it looks. The ‘I’ is apt to appear momentarily and then disappear, as when M. at the age of nineteen months three weeks was observed to say ‘I did’ once, though she did not use ‘I’ again until some time afterwards. Allowing for these difficulties it may be said with some degree of confidence that the great transition from ‘baby’ to ‘I’ is wont to take place in favourable cases early in the first half of the third year. Thus among the dates assigned by different observers I find, twenty-four months, twenty-five months (cases given by Preyer), between twenty-five and twenty-six (Pollock), twenty-seven months (the boy C.). A lady friend tells me that her boy began to use ‘I’ at twenty-four months. In the case of a certain number of precocious children this point is attained at an earlier date. Thus Preyer quotes a case of a child speaking in the first person at twenty months. Schultze gives a case at nineteen months. A friend of mine, a Professor of English Literature, whose boy showed great precocity in sentence-building, reports that he used the forms ‘me’ and ‘I’ within the sixteenth month. Preyer’s boy, on the other hand, who was evidently somewhat slow in lingual development, first used the form of the first person ‘to me’ (mir) at the age of twenty-nine months.

The precise way in which these pronominal forms first appear is very curious. Many children use ‘me’ before ‘I’. Preyer’s boy appears to have first used the form ‘to me’ (mir). ‘My’ too is apt to appear among the earliest forms. In such different ways does the child pass to the new and difficult region of pronominal speech.

The meaning of this transition has given rise to much discussion. It is plain, to begin with, that a child cannot acquire these forms as he acquires the name ‘papa,’ ‘nurse,’ by a direct and comparatively mechanical mode of imitation. When he does imitate in this fashion he produces, as we have seen, the absurdity of speaking of himself as ‘you’. Hence during the first year or so of speech he makes no use of these forms. He speaks of himself as ‘baby’ or some equivalent name, others coming down to his level and setting him the example.

The transition seems to be due in part, as I have elsewhere pointed out, to a growing self-consciousness, to a clearer singling out of the _ego_ or self as the centre of thought and activity, and the understanding of the other ‘persons’ in relation to this centre. Not that self-consciousness _begins_ with the use of ‘I’. The child has no doubt a rudimentary self-consciousness when he talks about himself as about another object: yet the use of the forms ‘I,’ ‘me,’ may be taken to mark the greater precision of the idea of ‘self’ as not merely a bodily object and nameable just like other sensible things, but as something distinct from and opposed to all objects of sense, as what we call the ‘subject’ or _ego_.

While, however, we may set down this exchange of the proper name for the forms ‘I’ and ‘me’ as due to the spontaneous growth of the child’s intelligence, it is possible that education exerts its influence too. It is conjecturable that as a child’s intelligence grows, others in speaking to him tend unknowingly to introduce the forms ‘I’ and ‘you’ more frequently. Yet I am disposed to think that the child commonly takes the lead here. However this be, it is clear that growing intelligence, involving greater interest in others’ words, will lead to a closer attention to these pronominal forms as employed by others. In this way the environment works on the growing mind of the child, stimulating it to direct its thoughts to these subtle relations of the ‘me and not me,’ ‘mine and thine’. The more intelligent the environment the greater will be the stimulating influence: hence, in part at least, the difference of age when the new style of speech is attained.[113]

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Footnote 113:

Preyer (_op. cit._, Cap. 22) seems to argue that children have a clear
self-consciousness before they attempt to use the forms ‘I,’ etc.; and
that the acquisition of the latter is due to imitation. But he does
not show why this imitation should begin to work so powerfully at a
particular period of linguistic development.

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The acquirement of these pronominal forms is a slow and irksome business. At first they are introduced hesitatingly, and alongside of the proper name; the child, for example, saying sometimes, ‘Baby’ or ‘Ilda,’ sometimes ‘I’ or ‘me’. In some cases, again, the two forms are used at the same time in apposition, as in the delightful form not unknown in older folk’s language, ‘Hilda, my book’. The forms ‘I’ and ‘me’ are, moreover, confined at first to a few expressions, as ‘I am,’ ‘I went,’ and so forth. The dropping of the old forms, as may be seen by a glance at the notes on the child C., and at Preyer’s methodical diary, is a gradual process.

Quaint solecisms mark the first stages of the use of these pronouns. As in the case of the earlier use of substantives, one and the same form will be used economically for a variety of meanings, as when ‘me’ was by the boy C. used to do duty for ‘mine’ also, and ‘us’ for ‘ours’. Here it is probable there is a lack of perfect discrimination. The connexion between the self and its belongings is for all of us of the closest. When a child of two, who was about to be deprived of her doll, shouted, ‘Me, me!’ may we not suppose that the doll was taken up into the inner circle of the self?[114] Sometimes in this enrichment of the vocabulary by pronouns new and delightful forms are struck off, as when the little experimenter invents the possessive form ‘she’s’.

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Footnote 114:

Compare above, p. 43.

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The perfect unfettered use of these puzzling forms comes much later. Preyer quotes a case in which a child Olga, aged four years, would say, ‘She has made me wet,’ meaning that she herself had done it. But this perhaps points to that tendency to split up the self into a number of personalities, to which reference was made in an earlier essay.

The third year, which witnesses the important addition of the pronouns, sees other refinements introduced. Thus the definite article was introduced in the case of Preyer’s boy in the twenty-eighth month, in that of an English boy at the age of two years eight months. Prepositions are introduced about the same time. In this way childish talk begins to lose its primitive disjointed character, and to grow into an articulated structure.[115] Yet the perfect mastery of these takes time. A feeling for analogy easily leads the little explorer astray at first, as when the child M. said ‘far to’ after the model ‘near to’.

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Footnote 115:

For a fuller account of this progress, the reader cannot do better
than consult Preyer, _op. cit._, Cap. 20 and 21.

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Through this whole period of language-learning the child continues to show his originality, his inventiveness. He is rarely at a loss, and though the gaps in his verbal acquisitions are great he is very skilful in filling them up. If, for example, our bright little linguist M., at the age of one year eight and a half months, after being jumped by her father, wants him to jump her mother also, she says, in default of the word ‘jump,’ “Make mamma high”. A boy of twenty-seven months ingeniously said, ‘It rains off,’ for ‘The rain has left off’. Forms are sometimes combined, as when a boy of three years three months used ‘my lone,’ ‘your lone,’ for ‘me alone’ or ‘by myself,’ ‘you alone’ or ‘by yourself’. Another girl, two years ten months, said, ‘No two ’tatoes left,’ meaning ‘only one potato is left’. Pleonasms occur in abundance, as when a boy of two would say, ‘Another one bicca (biscuit),’ and, better still, ‘another more’.

_Getting at our Meanings._

There is one part of this child’s work of learning our language of which I have said hardly anything, _viz._, the divining of the verbal content, of the meaning we put or try to put into our words. A brief reference to this may well bring this study of childish linguistics to a close.

The least attention to a child in the act of language-learning will show how much of downright hard work goes to the understanding of language. If we are to judge by the effort required we might say that the child does as much in deciphering his mother-tongue as an Oriental scholar in deciphering a system of hieroglyphics. Just think, for example, how many careful comparisons the small child-brain has to carry out, comparisons of the several uses of the word by others in varying circumstances, before he can get anything approaching to a clear idea, answering even to such seemingly simple words as ‘clean,’ ‘old’ or ‘clever’. The way in which inquiring children plague us with questions of the form, ‘What does such and such a word mean?’ sufficiently shows how much thought-activity goes in the trying to get at meanings. This difficulty, moreover, persists, reappearing in new forms as the child pushes his way onwards into the more tangled tracts of the lingual terrain. It is felt, and felt keenly, too, when most of the torments of articulation are over and forgotten. Many of us can remember how certain words haunted us as uncanny forms into the nature of which we tried hard, but in vain, to penetrate.