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.