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.
FOOTNOTES:
[19] Cf. Beach-la-Mar, below, Ch. XII § 1.
[20] Cf. below on the disappearance of the word _son_ because it sounds
like _sun_ (Ch. XV. § 7).
[21] Cf. the fuller treatment of this question in GS ch. ix.