THE INFLUENCE OF THE CHILD--_continued_
§ 1. Confusion of Words. § 2. Metanalysis. § 3. Shiftings of
Meanings. § 4. Differentiations. § 5. Summary. § 6. Indirect
Influence. § 7. New Languages.
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 [mœl], and the latter in both [mø·l],
and the child thus came to distinguish [mœl] ‘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 Doct_or_ and Doct_er_.’” 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 _nī-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 [fə·] 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,
Scorn not the little ones! You oft will find
They reach the goal, when great ones lag behind.
FOOTNOTES:
[38] See my MEG ii. 5. 6, and my paper on “Subtraktionsdannelser,” in
_Festskrift til Vilh. Thomsen_, 1894, p. 1 ff.
[39] Semantic changes through ambiguous syntactic combinations
have recently been studied especially by Carl Collin; see his
_Semasiologiska studier_, 1906, and _Le Développement de Sens du
Suffixe -ATA_, Lund, 1918, ch. iii and iv. Collin there treats
especially of the transition from abstract to concrete nouns; he does
not, as I have done above, speak of the rôle of the younger generation
in such changes.
[40] I know perfectly well that in these and in other similar words
there were reasons for the original word disappearing as unfit
(shortness, possibility of mistakes through similarity with other
words, etc.). What interests me here is the fact that the substitute is
a word of the nursery.
[41] “Einige namentlich in der ältern litteratur vorkommende angaben
über kinder, die sich zusammen aufwachsend eine eigene sprache gebildet
haben sollen, sind wohl ein für allemal in das gebiet der fabel zu
verweisen” (S 1. 286).
_BOOK III_
THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE WORLD