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.
Owing to these difficulties the little learner is always drifting into misunderstanding of words. Such misapprehensions will arise in a passive way by the mere play of association in attaching the word especially to some striking feature or circumstance which is apt to present itself when the word is used in the child’s hearing. In this way, for example, general terms may become terribly restricted in range by the incorporation of accidentals into their meaning, as when a Sunday school scholar rendered the story of the good Samaritan by saying that a gentleman came by and poured some paraffin (i.e., oil) over the poor man. A word may have its meaning funnily transformed by such associative suggestions, as when a little girl, being told that a thing was a secret, remarked, ‘Well, mamma, ’ou (you) can whisper it in my ear’. As this example shows, a child in his ‘concreting’ fashion tries to get sensible realities out of our names. A mask was called by a boy of six a ‘grimace,’ this abstract name standing to his mind for the grinning face. A like tendency shows itself in the following quaint story. A boy and a girl, twins, had been dressed alike. Later on the boy was put into a ‘suit’. A lady asked the girl about this time whether they were not the twins, when she replied: ‘No, we used to be’. ‘Twin’ was inseparably associated in her mind with the similarity in dress. A somewhat similar effect of association of ideas is seen in the quaint request of the little girl M. that her mamma should ‘smell’ the pudding and make it cool. The action of bringing the face near an object yet so as not to touch it was associated with smelling, as in the little girl who, according to Mr. Punch, had her sense of propriety shocked by some irreverent person who did not “smell his hat” when he took his seat in church. Moral expressions get misunderstood in much the same manner. A little girl of three and a half years, pretending that her mother was her little girl, said: ‘You mustn’t do anything on purpose’. The usual verbal context of this highly-respectable phrase (e.g., ‘You did it on purpose’) had in the child’s mind given it a naughty meaning.
With these losings of the verbal road through associative by-paths may be taken the host of misapprehensions into which children are apt to fall through the ambiguities of our words and expressions, and our short and elliptical modes of speaking. Thus an American child, noting that children were ‘half price’ at a certain show, wanted his mother to get a baby now that they were cheap.116 With this may be compared the following: Jean Ingelow tells us she can well remember how sad she was made by her father telling her one day after dancing her on his knee that he must put her down as he ‘had a bone in his leg’.117 Much misapprehension arises, too, from our figurative use of language, which the little listener is apt to interpret in a very literal way. It would be worth knowing what odd renderings the child-brain has given to such expressions as ‘an upright man,’ ‘a fish out of water,’ and the like.
In addition to these comparatively passive misapprehensions there are others which are the outcome of an intellectual effort, the endeavour to penetrate into the mystery of some new and puzzling words or expression. Many of us have had our special horror, our bête noire among words, which tormented us for months and years. I remember how I was plagued by the word ‘wean,’ the explanation of which was very properly, no doubt, denied me by the authorities, and by what quaint fancies I tried to fill in a meaning.
As with words, so with whole expressions and sayings. It was a natural movement of childish thought when a little school-girl answered the question of the Inspector, ‘What is an average?’ by saying ‘What the hen lays eggs on’. She had heard her mother say, “The hen lays so many eggs ‘on the average’ every week,” and had no doubt imagined a little myth about this ‘average’. Again, most of us know what queer renderings the child-mind has given to Scripture language. Mr. James Payn tells us that he knew a boy who for years substituted for the words, ‘Hallowed be thy name,’ ‘Harold be thy name’.118 In this and similar cases it is not, as might be supposed, defective hearing—children hear words as a rule with great exactness—it is the impulse to give a familiar and significant rendering to what is strange and meaningless.119 A friend of mine when a boy was accustomed on hearing the passage, ‘If I say peradventure the darkness shall cover me,’ etc., to insert a pause after ‘peradventure,’ apprehending the passage in this wise: “If I say ‘Peradventure!’—the darkness,” etc. In this way he turned the mysterious ‘peradventure’ into a mystic ‘open sesame,’ and added a thrilling touch of magic to the passage. My friend’s daughter tells me that on hearing the passage, “I... visit the sins of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation,... and show mercy unto thousands,” she construed the strange word ‘generation’ to mean an immense number like ‘billion,’ and was thus led to trouble herself about God’s seeming to be more cruel than kind.120
In some cases, too, where the language is simple enough a child’s brain will find our meaning unsuitable and follow a line of interpretation of its own. Mr. Canton relates that his little heroine, who knew the lines in Strumpelpeter—
The doctor came and shook his head,
And gave him nasty physic too—
was told that she would catch a cold, and that she at once replied, “And will the doctor come and shook my head?”121 It was so much more natural to suppose that when the doctor came and did something this was carried out on the person of the patient.
There is nothing more instructive in this connexion than the talk of children among themselves about words. They build up quaint speculations about meanings, and try their hand bravely at definitions. Here is an example: A boy of five was instructing his comrade as to the puzzling word ‘home-sick’. He did it in quite a scientific fashion. “It’s like sea-sick, you know: you are sea-sick when you are sick at sea, and so you’re home-sick when you’re sick at home”.
There is something of this same desire to get behind words in children’s word-play, as we call it, their discovery of odd affinities in verbal sounds, and their punning. Though no doubt this contains a genuine element of childish fun, it betokens a more serious trait also, an interest in word-sounds as such, and a curiosity about their origin and purpose. It is difficult for grown-up people to go back in thought to the attitude of the child-mind towards verbal sounds. Just as children show ‘the innocence of the eye’ in seeing the colours of objects as they are and not as our habits of interpretation tend to make them, so they show an innocence of the ear, catching the intrinsic sensuous qualities of a word or a group of words, in a way which has become impossible for us.
This half-playful, half-serious scrutiny of word-sounds leads to the attempt to find by analysis and analogy a familiar meaning in strange words. For example, a little boy about four years old heard his mother speak of nurse’s neuralgia, from which she had been suffering for some time. He thereupon exclaimed, ‘I don’t think it’s new ralgia, I call it old ralgia’. A child called his doll ‘Shakespeare’ because its spear-like legs could be shaken. Another boy of three explained ‘gaiters’ as things ‘to go out of the gate with’. Another said that the ‘Master’ which he prefixed to his name meant that he was master of his dog. A little girl in her third year called ‘anchovies’ ‘ham-chovies’ ‘mermaid’ ‘worm-maid,’ ‘whirlwind’ ‘world-wind,’ ‘gnomes’ ‘no-mans’ (un-menschen), taking pleasure apparently in bringing some familiar element—even when this seems to other ears at least not very explanatory—into the strange jumble of word-sound that surrounded her. A child may know that he is ‘fooling’ in such cases, yet the word-play brings a certain satisfaction, which is at least akin to the pleasure of the older linguist.
This quasi-punning transformation of words is curiously like what may be called folk-etymology, where a foreign word is altered by a people so as to be made to appear significant and suitable for its purpose, as in the oft-quoted forms ‘sparrow grass’ (asparagus) and ‘cray-fish’ (from the French écrevisse, cf. the O. H. German Krebiz), where the attempt to suit the form to the thing is still more apparent.122 When, for example, a boy calls a holiday a ‘hollorday,’ because it is a day ‘to holloa in,’ we may say that he is reflecting the process by which adults try to put meaning into strange words, as when a cabman I overheard a few days ago spoke about putting down ashphalt (for ‘asphalt’). Some children carry out such transformation and invention of derivation on a large scale, often resorting to pretty myths, as when the butterflies are said to make butter, or to eat butter, grasshoppers to give grass, honeysuckles to yield all the honey, and so forth.123
A child will even go further, and, prying into the forms of gender, invent explanatory myths in which words are personified and sexualised. Thus a little boy of five years and three months who had learned German and Italian as well as English was much troubled about the gender of the sun and moon. So he set about myth-making on this wise: “I suppose people124 think the sun is the husband, the moon is the wife, and all the stars the little children, and Jupiter the maid”. A German girl of six was thus addressed by her teacher: “‘Der’ ist männlich; Was sind ‘Die’ und ‘Das’?” To which she replied prettily: “Die ist dämlich (i.e., ‘ladyish’) und das ist kindlich”. The tendency to attribute differences of sex and age to names observable in this last is seen in other ways. An Italian child asked why ‘barba’ (beard) was not called ‘barbo’. With this may be compared the pretty myth of another Italian child that ‘barca’ (boat) was the little girl of ‘barcainolo’ (boatman).125
One other characteristic feature in the child’s attitude towards words must be touched on, because it looks like the opposite of the impulse to tamper with words just dealt with. A child is a great stickler for accuracy in the repetition of all familiar word-forms. The zeal of a child in correcting others’ language, and the comical errors he will now and again fall into in exercising his pedagogic function, are well known to parents. Sometimes he shows himself the most absurd of pedants. ‘Shall I read to you out of this book, baby?’ asked a mother of her boy, about two and a half years old. ‘No,’ replied the infant, ‘not out of dot book, but somepy inside of it.’ The same little stickler for verbal accuracy, when his nurse asked him, ‘Are you going to build your bricks, baby?’ replied solemnly, ‘We don’t build bricks, we make them and then build with them’. In the notes on the boy C. we find an example of how jealously the child-mind insists on the ipsissima verba in the recounting of his familiar stories.
Are these little sticklers for verbal correctness, who object to everything figurative in our language, who, when they learn that a person or an animal has ‘lost his head,’ take the expression literally, and who love nothing better than tying us down to literal exactness, themselves given to ‘word-play’ and verbal myth-making, or have we here to do with two varieties of childish mind? My observations do not enable me to pronounce on this point.
I have in this essay confined myself to some of the more common and elementary features of the child’s linguistic experience. Others present themselves when the reading stage is reached, and the new strange stupid-looking word-symbol on the printed page has to do duty for the living sound, which for the child, as we have seen, seems to belong to the object and to share in its life. But this subject, tempting as it is, must be left. And the same must be said of those special difficulties and problems which arise for the child-mind when two or more languages are spoken. This is a branch of child-linguistics which, so far as I know, has never been explored.
Notes
60. See Preyer, op. cit., Cap. 20; cf. the account given by De la Calle, Perez, First Three Years, p. 248. Stanley Hall observes that the first vocalisation of the infant could hardly be classified even with the help of Bell’s phonic notation or with a phonograph (Pedagogical Seminary, i., p. 132).
61. Preyer’s boy first used consonants in the combinations tahu, gö, (rööö = the French eu), op. cit., p. 366; cf. Cap. 21.
62. The nature of gesture, its relation to language proper, and its prevalence in infancy, among imbecile children, deaf-mutes, etc., are discussed by Romanes, Mental Evolution in Man, chap. vi.
63. A charming example of pantomimic gesture on the part of a little girl in describing to her father her first bath in the sea is given by Romanes, op. cit., p. 220.
64. See Preyer, op. cit., pp. 353, 390, 391.
65. See the quotation from Lieber, in Taine’s On Intelligence, part ii., book iv., chap. i. The sign for ‘I want to eat’ is in some cases formed by a generalising process out of a sound supplied by another, as the name of a particular edible. See the example given by Preyer, op. cit., p. 362.
66. See Mind, vol. ii., p. 293.
67. See Mind, vol. ii., p. 255.
68. Op. cit., p. 358.
69. A fact that appears to tell against imitation here is that one little boy of seventeen months used the sound ‘did’n’ for anything to eat.
70. Quoted by Romanes, Mental Evolution in Man, p. 143.
71. The concerted cries during co-operative work to which Noirée ascribes the origin of language-sounds would seem, while having a special physiological cause as concomitant and probably auxiliary motor processes, to be analogous at least to emotional cries, in so far as they spring out of a peculiar condition of feeling, that of effort. On the other hand, as concerted they came under the head of imitative movements. So far as I can learn the nursery supplies no analogies to these utterances.
72. His brother when one year old called his nurse, whose real name was Maud, Bur, which was probably a rough rendering of ‘nurse’.
73. For a summary of Professor Hale’s researches see Romanes, Mental Evolution in Man, p. 138 ff.
74. Of course, as Max Müller says (The Science of Language, i., p. 481 f.), the facts ascertained do not prove that ‘infants left to themselves would invent a language’. The influence of example, the appeal to the imitative impulse, has been at work before the inventions appear. Yet they do, I think, show that they have the sign-making instinct, and might develop this to some extent even were the educative influence of others’ language removed.
75. Preyer’s boy gave the first distinct imitative response to articulate sound in the eleventh month. This is, so far as I can ascertain, behind the average attainment.
76. Tracy, The Psychology of Childhood, p. 71.
77. In the reduction of ‘Constance’ to ‘tun’ the same thing is seen, for this child uniformly turned k’s into t’s. Cf. Preyer, op. cit., p. 397.
78. It has been pointed out to me by Dr. Postgate that the secondary stress on the first syllable of English words over four syllables (and some four-syllabled words) may assist in impressing the first syllable.
79. Recent psychological experiments show that similar influences are at work when a person attempts to repeat a long series of verbal sounds, say ten or twelve nonsense syllables. Initial or final position or accent may favour the reproduction of a member of such a series.
80. Here again we see a similarity between a child’s repetition of a name heard, and an adult’s attempt to repeat a long series of syllabic sounds. In the latter case also there is a general tendency to preserve the length and rhythmic form of the whole series.
81. With the diphthong or glide ī may be taken oi, which was first mastered by the child M. at the age of two years three months.
82. I find according to the notes sent me that the sounds s and sh develop unequally in the cases of different children. Some acquire s, others sh before the other.
83. See Sweet, History of English Sounds, p. 15.
84. See Sievers, Phonetik, p. 230.
85. Cf. Pollock, Mind, vi., p. 436, and Preyer, op. cit., p. 434.
86. The same child, capriciously as it might look, would sometimes avoid y, as in saying ‘esh’ for ‘yes,’ though she regularly used this sound as a substitute for l, saying ‘yook’ for ‘look,’ and so on.
87. See Sweet, History of English Sounds, p. 33; cf. also the change of ‘frith’ to ‘firth’.
88. Op. cit., p. 397.
89. See Tylor, Primitive Culture, i., 198. On the taking up of baby reduplications into language see the same work, i., 204. Cf. the same writer’s Anthropology, p. 129.
90. See above, p. 137; cf. Sievers, Phonetik, p. 236.
91. Dr. Postgate suggests that the current terms ‘progressive’ and ‘regressive’ would be better rendered by ‘retrospective’ and ‘prospective’.
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.
93. Quoted by Romanes, Mental Evolution in Man, p. 283.
94. Logic (University Extension Manuals), pp. 83-84.
95. See op. cit., p. 420, also pp. 414 and 418.
96. Paola Lombroso, Saggi di Psicologia del Bambino, p. 16.
97. See Trench’s account of poetry in words, On the Study of Words, lect. vi.
98. Tylor, Anthropology, chap. v.
99. Compayré, op. cit., p. 249, where other examples are given.
100. Op. cit., p. 12.
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.
102. See Preyer, op. cit., p. 361; Romanes, op. cit., p. 296 ff.
103. See Compayré, op. cit., p. 206.
104. Notes on the Development of a Child, p. 84.
105. Canton, The Invisible Playmate, p. 32, who adds that this exactly answers to the form, “Good my lord!”
106. See Romanes, op. cit., p. 116 f., where other examples may be found.
107. Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology, 1879-80, p. 391 ff.
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’.
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.
110. On Intelligence, pt. i., bk. i., chap. ii., sect. vi.
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.
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.
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.
114. Compare above, p. 43.
115. For a fuller account of this progress, the reader cannot do better than consult Preyer, op. cit., Cap. 20 and 21.
116. Worcester Collection, p. 21.
117. Cf. the account Goltz gives of the anxiety he felt as a child on hearing that his uvula (zapfen) had ‘fallen down,’ op. cit., p. 261.
118. In the Illustrated London News, 30th June, 1894.
119. Of course defective auditory apprehension may assist in these cases. Goltz gives an example from his own childhood. He took the words “Namen nennen Dich nicht” to be “Namen nenne Dich nicht,” and was sorely puzzled at the idea of bidding a name not to name itself.
120. Psalm cxxxix. and Second Commandment, Prayer-book version.
121. The Invisible Playmate, p. 35.
122. The other form of the word, ‘craw-fish,’ seems a still more ingenious example of folk-etymology.
123. These last are taken from a good list of children’s punnings in Dr. Stanley Hall’s article, “The Contents of Children’s Minds”.
124. That is, I take it, the majority, viz., Italians and English.
125. Both of these are given by Paola Lombroso in the work already quoted.