CHAPTER VI

WORDS

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

VI.--§ 1. Introductory.

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

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

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

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

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

VI.--§ 2. First Period.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

VI.--§ 3. Father and Mother.

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

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

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

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

VI.--§ 4. The Delimitation of Meaning.

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

Hilary M. (2.0) and Murdoch D. (2.6) used _dinner_, _breakfast_ and _tea_ interchangeably--the words might be translated ‘meal.’ Other more or less similar confusions may be mentioned here. Tony F. (2.8) used the term _sing_ for (1) reading, (2) singing, (3) any game in which his elders amused him. Hilary said indifferently, ‘Daddy, _sing_ a story three bears,’ and ‘Daddy, _tell_ a story three bears.’ She cannot remember which is _knife_ and which is _fork_. Beth M. (2.6) always used _can’t_ when she meant _won’t_. It meant simply refusal to do what she did not want to.

VI.--§ 5. Numerals. Time.

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

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

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

VI.--§ 6. Various Difficulties.

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

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

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

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

Teach me to live that I may dread The grave as little as my bed--

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

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

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

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

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

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

Words of similar sound are apt to be confused. Some children have had trouble till mature years with _soldier_ and _shoulder_, _hassock_ and _cassock_, _diary_ and _dairy_. Lady Glenconner writes: “They almost invariably say ‘lemon’ [for melon], and if they make an effort to be more correct they still mispronounce it. ‘Don’t say melling.’ ‘Very well, then, mellum.’” Among other confusions mentioned in her