CHAPTER VIII

SOME FUNDAMENTAL PROBLEMS

§ 1. Why is the Native Language learnt so well? § 2. Natural Ability and Sex. § 3. Mother-tongue and Other Tongue. § 4. Playing at Language. § 5. Secret Languages. § 6. Onomatopœia. § 7. Word-inventions. § 8. ‘Mamma’ and ‘Papa.’

VIII.--§ 1. Why is the Native Language learnt so well?

How does it happen that children in general learn their mother-tongue so well? That this is a problem becomes clear when we contrast a child’s first acquisition of its mother-tongue with the later acquisition of any foreign tongue. The contrast is indeed striking and manifold: _here_ we have a quite little child, without experience or prepossessions; _there_ a bigger child, or it may be a grown-up person with all sorts of knowledge and powers: _here_ a haphazard method of procedure; _there_ the whole task laid out in a system (for even in the schoolbooks that do not follow the old grammatical system there is a certain definite order of progress from more elementary to more difficult matters): _here_ no professional teachers, but chance parents, brothers and sisters, nursery-maids and playmates; _there_ teachers trained for many years specially to teach languages: _here_ only oral instruction; _there_ not only that, but reading-books, dictionaries and other assistance. And yet this is the result: _here_ complete and exact command of the language as a native speaks it, however stupid the children; _there_, in most cases, even with people otherwise highly gifted, a defective and inexact command of the language. On what does this difference depend?

The problem has never been elucidated or canvassed from all sides, but here and there one finds a partial answer, often given out to be a complete answer. Often one side of the question only is considered, that which relates to sounds, as if the whole problem had been solved when one had found a reason for children acquiring a better pronunciation of their mother-tongue than one generally gets in later life of a foreign speech.

Many people accordingly tell us that children’s organs of speech are especially flexible, but that this suppleness of the tongue and lips is lost in later life. This explanation, however, does not hold water, as is shown sufficiently by the countless mistakes in sound made by children. If their organs were as flexible as is pretended, they could learn sounds correctly at once, while as a matter of fact it takes a long time before all the sounds and groups of sounds are imitated with tolerable accuracy. Suppleness is not something which is original, but something acquired later, and acquired with no small difficulty, and then only with regard to the sounds of one’s own language, and not universally.

The same applies to the second answer (given by Bremer, _Deutsche Phonetik_, 2), namely, that the child’s ear is especially sensitive to impressions. The ear also requires development, since at first it can scarcely detect a number of _nuances_ which we grown-up people hear most distinctly.

Some people say that the reason why a child learns its native language so well is that it has no established habits to contend against. But that is not right either: as any good observer can see, the process by which the child acquires sounds is pursued through a continuous struggle against bad habits which it has acquired at an earlier stage and which may often have rooted themselves remarkably firmly.

Sweet (H 19) says among other things that the conditions of learning vernacular sounds are so favourable because the child has nothing else to do at the time. On the contrary, one may say that the child has an enormous deal to do while it is learning the language; it is at that time active beyond all belief: in a short time it subdues wider tracts than it ever does later in a much longer time. The more wonderful is it that along with those tasks it finds strength to learn its mother-tongue and its many refinements and crooked turns.

Some point to heredity and say that a child learns that language most easily which it is disposed beforehand to learn by its ancestry, or in other words that there are inherited convolutions of the brain which take in this language better than any other. Perhaps there is something in this, but we have no definite, carefully ascertained facts. Against the theory stands the fact that the children of immigrants acquire the language of their foster-country to all appearance just as surely and quickly as children of the same age whose forefathers have been in the country for ages. This may be observed in England, in Denmark, and still more in North America. Environment clearly has greater influence than descent.

The real answer in my opinion (which is not claimed to be absolutely new in every respect) lies partly in the child itself, partly in the behaviour towards it of the people around it. In the first place, the time of learning the mother-tongue is the most favourable of all, namely, the first years of life. If one assumes that mental endowment means the capacity for development, without doubt all children are best endowed in their first years: from birth onwards there is a steady decline in the power of grasping what is new and of accommodating oneself to it. With some this decline is a very rapid one--they quickly become fossilized and unable to make a change in their habits; with others one can notice a happy power of development even in old age; but no one keeps very long in its full range the adaptability of his first years.

Further, we must remember that the child has far more abundant opportunities of hearing his mother-tongue than one gets, as a rule, with any language one learns later. He hears it from morning to night, and, be it noted, in its genuine shape, with the right pronunciation, right intonation, right use of words and right syntax: the language comes to him as a fresh, ever-bubbling spring. Even before he begins to say anything himself, his first understanding of the language is made easier by the habit that mothers and nurses have of repeating the same phrases with slight alterations, and at the same time doing the thing which they are talking about. “Now we must wash the little face, now we must wash the little forehead, now we must wash the little nose, now we must wash the little chin, now we must wash the little ear,” etc. If _men_ had to attend to their children, they would never use so many words--but in that case the child would scarcely learn to understand and talk as soon as it does when it is cared for by women.[23]

Then the child has, as it were, private lessons in its mother-tongue all the year round. There is nothing of the kind in the learning of a language later, when at most one has six hours a week and generally shares them with others. The child has another priceless advantage: he hears the language in all possible situations and under such conditions that language and situation ever correspond exactly to one another and mutually illustrate one another. Gesture and facial expression harmonize with the words uttered and keep the child to a right understanding. Here there is nothing unnatural, such as is often the case in a language-lesson in later years, when one talks about ice and snow in June or excessive heat in January. And what the child hears is just what immediately concerns him and interests him, and again and again his own attempts at speech lead to the fulfilment of his dearest wishes, so that his command of language has great practical advantages for him.

Along with what he himself sees the use of, he hears a great deal which does not directly concern him, but goes into the little brain and is stored up there to turn up again later. Nothing is heard but leaves its traces, and at times one is astonished to discover what has been preserved, and with what exactness. One day, when Frans was 4.11 old, he suddenly said: “Yesterday--isn’t there some who say yesterday?” (giving _yesterday_ with the correct English pronunciation), and when I said that it was an English word, he went on: “Yes, it is Mrs. B.: she often says like that, yesterday.” Now, it was three weeks since that lady had called at the house and talked English. It is a well-known fact that hypnotized persons can sometimes say whole sentences in a language which they do not know, but have merely heard in childhood. In books about children’s language there are many remarkable accounts of such linguistic memories which had lain buried for long stretches of time. A child who had spent the first eighteen months of its life in Silesia and then came to Berlin, where it had no opportunity of hearing the Silesian pronunciation, at the age of five suddenly came out with a number of Silesian expressions, which could not after the most careful investigation be traced to any other source than to the time before it could talk (Stern, 257 ff.). Grammont has a story of a little French girl, whose nurse had talked French with a strong Italian accent; the child did not begin to speak till a month after this nurse had left, but pronounced many words with Italian sounds, and some of these peculiarities stuck to the child till the age of three.

We may also remark that the baby’s teachers, though, regarded as teachers of language, they may not be absolutely ideal, still have some advantages over those one encounters as a rule later in life. The relation between them and the child is far more cordial and personal, just because they are not teachers first and foremost. They are immensely interested in every little advance the child makes. The most awkward attempt meets with sympathy, often with admiration, while its defects and imperfections never expose it to a breath of unkind criticism. There is a Slavonic proverb, “If you wish to talk well, you must murder the language first.” But this is very often overlooked by teachers of language, who demand faultless accuracy from the beginning, and often keep their pupils grinding so long at some little part of the subject that their desire to learn the language is weakened or gone for good. There is nothing of this sort in the child’s first learning of his language.

It is here that our distinction between the two periods comes in, that of the child’s own separate ‘little language’ and that of the common or social language. In the first period the little one is the centre of a narrow circle of his own, which waits for each little syllable that falls from his lips as though it were a grain of gold. What teachers of languages in later years would rejoice at hearing such forms as we saw before used in the time of the child’s ‘little language,’ _fant_ or _vat_ or _ham_ for ‘elephant’? But the mother really does rejoice: she laughs and exults when he can use these syllables about his toy-elephant, she throws the cloak of her love over the defects and mistakes in the little one’s imitations of words, she remembers again and again what his strange sounds stand for, and her eager sympathy transforms the first and most difficult steps on the path of language to the merriest game.

It would not do, however, for the child’s ‘little language’ and its dreadful mistakes to become fixed. This might easily happen, if the child were never out of the narrow circle of its own family, which knows and recognizes its ‘little language.’ But this is stopped because it comes more and more into contact with others--uncles and aunts, and especially little cousins and playmates: more and more often it happens that the mutilated words are not understood, and are corrected and made fun of, and the child is incited in this way to steady improvement: the ‘little language’ gradually gives place to the ‘common language,’ as the child becomes a member of a social group larger than that of his own little home.

We have now probably found the chief reasons why a child learns his mother-tongue better than even a grown-up person who has been for a long time in a foreign country learns the language of his environment. But it is also a contributory reason that the child’s linguistic needs, to begin with, are far more limited than those of the man who wishes to be able to talk about anything, or at any rate about something. Much more is also linguistically required of the latter, and he must have recourse to language to get all his needs satisfied, while the baby is well looked after even if it says nothing but _wawawawa_. So the baby has longer time to store up his impressions and continue his experiments, until by trying again and again he at length gets his lesson learnt in all its tiny details, while the man in the foreign country, who _must_ make himself understood, as a rule goes on trying only till he has acquired a form of speech which he finds natives understand: at this point he will generally stop, at any rate as far as pronunciation and the construction of sentences are concerned (while his vocabulary may be largely increased). But this ‘just recognizable’ language is incorrect in thousands of small details, and, inasmuch as bad little habits quickly become fixed, the kind of language is produced which we know so well in the case of resident foreigners--who need hardly open their lips before everyone knows they are not natives, and before a practised ear can detect the country they hail from.[24]

VIII.--§ 2. Natural Ability and Sex.

An important factor in the acquisition of language which we have not considered is naturally the individuality of the child. Parents are apt to draw conclusions as to the abilities of their young hopeful from the rapidity with which he learns to talk; but those who are in despair because their Tommy cannot say a single word when their neighbours’ Harry can say a great deal may take comfort. Slowness in talking _may_ of course mean deficiency of ability, or even idiocy, but not necessarily. A child who chatters early may remain a chatterer all his life, and children whose motto is ‘Slow and sure’ may turn out the deepest, most independent and most trustworthy characters in the end. There are some children who cannot be made to say a single word for a long time, and then suddenly come out with a whole sentence, which shows how much has been quietly fructifying in their brain. Carlyle was one of these: after eleven months of taciturnity he heard a child cry, and astonished all by saying, “What ails wee Jock?” Edmund Gosse has a similar story of his own childhood, and other examples have been recorded elsewhere (Meringer, 194; Stern, 257).

The linguistic development of an individual child is not always in a steady rising line, but in a series of waves. A child who seems to have a boundless power of acquiring language suddenly stands still or even goes back for a short time. The cause may be sickness, cutting teeth, learning to walk, or often a removal to new surroundings or an open-air life in summer. Under such circumstances even the word ‘I’ may be lost for a time.

Some children develop very rapidly for some years until they have reached a certain point, where they stop altogether, while others retain the power to develop steadily to a much later age. It is the same with some races: negro children in American schools may, while they are little, be up to the standard of their white schoolfellows, whom they cannot cope with in later life.

The two sexes differ very greatly in regard to speech--as in regard to most other things. Little girls, on the average, learn to talk earlier and more quickly than boys; they outstrip them in talking correctly; their pronunciation is not spoilt by the many bad habits and awkwardnesses so often found in boys. It has been proved by statistics in many countries that there are far more stammerers and bad speakers among boys and men than among girls and women. The general receptivity of women, their great power of, and pleasure in, imitation, their histrionic talent, if one may so say--all this is a help to them at an early age, so that they can get into other people’s way of talking with greater agility than boys of the same age.

Everything that is conventional in language, everything in which the only thing of importance is to be in agreement with those around you, is the girls’ strong point. Boys may often show a certain reluctance to do exactly as others do: the peculiarities of their ‘little language’ are retained by them longer than by girls, and they will sometimes steadily refuse to correct their own abnormalities, which is very seldom the case with girls. Gaucherie and originality thus are two points between which the speech of boys is constantly oscillating. Cf. below, Ch. XIII.

VIII.--§ 3. Mother-tongue and Other Tongue.

The expression “mother-tongue” should not be understood too literally: the language which the child acquires naturally is not, or not always, his mother’s language. When a mother speaks with a foreign accent or in a pronounced dialect, her children as a rule speak their language as correctly as other children, or keep only the slightest tinge of their mother’s peculiarities. I have seen this very distinctly in many Danish families, in which the mother has kept up her Norwegian language all her life, and in which the children have spoken pure Danish. Thus also in two families I know, in which a strong Swedish accent in one mother, and an unmistakable American pronunciation in the other, have not prevented the children from speaking Danish exactly as if their mothers had been born and bred in Denmark. I cannot, therefore, agree with Passy, who says that the child learns his mother’s sound system (Ch § 32), or with Dauzat’s dictum to the same effect (V 20). The father, as a rule, has still less influence; but what is decisive is the speech of those with whom the child comes in closest contact from the age of three or so, thus frequently servants, but even more effectually playfellows of his own age or rather slightly older than himself, with whom he is constantly thrown together for hours at a time and whose prattle is constantly in his ears at the most impressionable age, while he may not see and hear his father and mother except for a short time every day, at meals and on such occasions. It is also a well-known fact that the children of Danish parents in Greenland often learn the Eskimo language before Danish; and Meinhof says that German children in the African colonies will often learn the language of the natives earlier than German (MSA 139).

This is by no means depreciating the mother’s influence, which is strong indeed, but chiefly in the first period, that of the child’s ‘little language.’ But that is the time when the child’s imitative power is weakest. His exact attention to the minutiæ of language dates from the time when he is thrown into a wider circle and has to make himself understood by many, so that his language becomes really identical with that of the community, where formerly he and his mother would rest contented with what _they_, but hardly anyone else, could understand.

The influence of children on children cannot be overestimated.[25] Boys at school make fun of any peculiarities of speech noticed in schoolfellows who come from some other part of the country. Kipling tells us in _Stalky and Co._ how Stalky and Beetle carefully _kicked_ McTurk out of his Irish dialect. When I read this, I was vividly reminded of the identical method my new friends applied to me when at the age of ten I was transplanted from Jutland to a school in Seeland and excited their merriment through some Jutlandish expressions and intonations. And so we may say that the most important factor in spreading the common or standard language is children themselves.

It often happens that children who are compelled at home to talk without any admixture of dialect talk pure dialect when playing with their schoolfellows out of doors. They can keep the two forms of speech distinct. In the same way they can learn two languages less closely connected. At times this results in very strange blendings, at least for a time; but many children will easily pass from one language to the other without mixing them up, especially if they come in contact with the two languages in different surroundings or on the lips of different people.

It is, of course, an advantage for a child to be familiar with two languages: but without doubt the advantage may be, and generally is, purchased too dear. First of all the child in question hardly learns either of the two languages as perfectly as he would have done if he had limited himself to one. It may seem, on the surface, as if he talked just like a native, but he does not really command the fine points of the language. Has any bilingual child ever developed into a great artist in speech, a poet or orator?

Secondly, the brain effort required to master two languages instead of one certainly diminishes the child’s power of learning other things which might and ought to be learnt. Schuchardt rightly remarks that if a bilingual man has two strings to his bow, both are rather slack, and that the three souls which the ancient Roman said he possessed, owing to his being able to talk three different languages, were probably very indifferent souls after all. A native of Luxemburg, where it is usual for children to talk both French and German, says that few Luxemburgers talk both languages perfectly. “Germans often say to us: ‘You speak German remarkably well for a Frenchman,’ and French people will say, ‘They are Germans who speak our language excellently.’ Nevertheless, we never speak either language as fluently as the natives. The worst of the system is, that instead of learning things necessary to us we must spend our time and energy in learning to express the same thought in two or three languages at the same time.”[26]

VIII.--§ 4. Playing at Language.

The child takes delight in making meaningless sounds long after it has learnt to talk the language of its elders. At 2.2 Frans amused himself with long series of such sounds, uttered with the most confiding look and proper intonation, and it was a joy to him when I replied with similar sounds. He kept up this game for years. Once (4.11) after such a performance he asked me: “Is that English?”--“No.”--“Why not?”--“Because I understand English, but I do not understand what you say.” An hour later he came back and asked: “Father, do you know all languages?”--“No, there are many I don’t know.”--“Do you know German?”--“Yes.” (Frans looked rather crestfallen: the servants had often said of his invented language that he was talking German. So he went on) “Do you know Japanese?”--“No.”--(Delighted) “So remember when I say something you don’t understand, it’s Japanese.”

It is the same everywhere. Hawthorne writes: “Pearl mumbled something into his ear, that sounded, indeed, like human language, but was only such gibberish as children may be heard amusing themselves with, by the hour together” (_The Scarlet Letter_, 173). And R. L. Stevenson: “Children prefer the shadow to the substance. When they might be speaking intelligibly together, they chatter senseless gibberish by the hour, and are quite happy because they are making believe to speak French” (_Virginibus P._, 236; cf. Glenconner, p. 40; Stern, pp. 76, 91, 103). Meringer’s boy (2.1) took the music-book and sang a tune of his own making with incomprehensible words.

Children also take delight in varying the sounds of real words, introducing, for instance, alliterations, as “Sing a song of sixpence, A socket full of sye,” etc. Frans at 2.3 amused himself by rounding all his vowels (_o_ for _a_, _y_ for _i_), and at 3.1 by making all words of a verse line he had learnt begin with _d_, then the same words begin with _t_. O’Shea (p. 32) says that “most children find pleasure in the production of variations upon some of their familiar words. Their purpose seems to be to test their ability to be original. The performance of an unusual act affords pleasure in linguistics as in other matters. H., learning the word _dessert_, to illustrate, plays with it for a time and exhibits it in a dozen or more variations--_dĭssert_, _dishert_, _dĕsot_, _des'sert_, and so on.”

Rhythm and rime appeal strongly to the children’s minds. One English observer says that “a child in its third year will copy the rhythm of songs and verses it has heard in nonsense words.” The same thing is noted by Meringer (p. 116) and Stern (p. 103). Tony E. (2.10) suddenly made up the rime “My mover, I lov-er,” and Gordon M. (2.6) never tired of repeating a phrase of his own composition, “Custard over mustard.” A Danish girl of 3.1 is reported as having a “curious knack of twisting all words into rimes: bestemor hestemor prestemor, Gudrun sludrun pludrun, etc.”

VIII.--§ 5. Secret Languages.

Children, as we have seen, at first employ play-language for its own sake, with no _arrière-pensée_, but as they get older they may see that such language has the advantage of not being understood by their elders, and so they may develop a ‘secret language’ consciously. Some such languages are confined to one school, others may be in common use among children of a certain age all over a country. ‘M-gibberish’ and ‘S-gibberish’ consist in inserting _m_ and _s_, as in _goming mout tomdaym_ or _gosings outs tosdays_ for ‘going out to-day’; ‘Marrowskying’ or ‘Hospital Greek’ transfers the initial letters of words, as _renty of plain_ for ‘plenty of rain,’ _flutterby_ for ‘butterfly’; ‘Ziph’ or ‘Hypernese’ (at Winchester) substitutes _wa_ for the first of two initial consonants and inserts _p_ or _g_, making ‘breeches’ into _wareechepes_ and ‘penny’ into _pegennepy_. From my own boyhood in Denmark I remember two languages of this sort, in which a sentence like ‘du er et lille asen’ became _dupu erper etpet lilpillepe apasenpen_ and _durbe erbe erbe lirbelerbe arbeserbe_ respectively. Closely corresponding languages, with insertion of _p_ and addition of _-erbse_, are found in Germany; in Holland we find ‘de schoone Mei’ made into _depé schoopóonepé Meipéi_, besides an _-erwi-taal_ with a variation in which the ending is _-erf_. In France such a language is called _javanais_; ‘je vais bien’ is made into _je-de-que vais-dai-qai bien-den-qen_. In Savoy the cowherds put _deg_ after each syllable and thus make ‘a-te kogneu se vaçhi’ (‘as-tu connu ce vacher?’ in the local dialect) into _a-degá te-dege ko-dego gnu-degu sé-degé va-dega chi-degi?_ Nay, even among the Maoris of New Zealand there is a similar secret language, in which instead of ‘kei te, haere au ki reira’ is said _te-kei te-i-te te-haere-te-re te-a te-u te-ki te-re-te-i-te-ra_. Human nature is pretty much the same everywhere.[27]

VIII.--§ 6. Onomatopœia.

Do children really create new words? This question has been much discussed, but even those who are most skeptical in that respect incline to allow them this power in the case of words which imitate sounds. Nevertheless, it should be remembered that the majority of onomatopœic words heard from children are not their own invention, but are acquired by them in the same way as other words. Hence it is that such words have different forms in different languages. Thus to English _cockadoodledoo_ corresponds French _coquerico_, German _kikeriki_ and Danish _kykeliky_, to E. _quack-quack_, F. _cancan_, Dan. _raprap_, etc. These words are an imperfect representation of the birds’ natural cry, but from their likeness to it they are easier for the child to seize than an entirely arbitrary name such as _duck_.

But, side by side with these, children do invent forms of their own, though the latter generally disappear quickly in favour of the traditional forms. Thus Frans (2.3) had coined the word _vakvak_, which his mother had heard sometimes without understanding what he meant, when one day he pointed at some crows while repeating the same word; but when his mother told him that these birds were called _krager_, he took hold of this word with eagerness and repeated it several times, evidently recognizing it as a better name than his own. A little boy of 2.1 called soda-water _ft_, another boy said _ging_ or _gingging_ for a clock, also for the railway train, while his brother said _dann_ for a bell or clock; a little girl (1.9) said _pooh_ (whispered) for ‘match, cigar, pipe,’ and _gagag_ for ‘hen,’ etc.

When once formed, such words may be transferred to other things, where the sound plays no longer any rôle. This may be illustrated through two extensions of the same word _bŏom_ or _bom_, used by two children first to express the sound of something falling on the floor; then Ellen K. (1.9) used it for a ‘blow,’ and finally for anything disagreeable, e.g. soap in the eyes, while Kaare G. (1.8), after seeing a plate smashed, used the word for a broken plate and afterwards for anything broken, a hole in a dress, etc., also when a button had come off or when anything else was defective in any way.

VIII.--§ 7. Word-inventions.

Do children themselves create words--apart from onomatopœic words? To me there is no doubt that they do. Frans invented many words at his games that had no connexion, or very little connexion, with existing words. He was playing with a little twig when I suddenly heard him exclaim: “This is called _lampetine_,” but a little while afterwards he said _lanketine_, and then again _lampetine_, and then he said, varying the play, “Now it is _kluatine_ and _traniklualalilua_” (3.6). A month later I write: “He is never at a loss for a self-invented word; for instance, when he has made a figure with his bricks which resembles nothing whatever, he will say, ‘That shall be _lindam_.’” When he played at trains in the garden, there were many stations with fanciful names, and at one time he and two cousins had a word _kukukounen_ which they repeated constantly and thought great fun, but whose inner meaning I never succeeded in discovering. An English friend writes about his daughter: “When she was about two and a quarter she would often use some nonsense word in the middle of a perfectly intelligible sentence. When you asked her its meaning she would explain it by another equally unintelligible, and so on through a series as long as you cared to make it.” At 2.10 she pretended she had lost her bricks, and when you showed her that they were just by her, she insisted that they were not ‘bricks’ at all, but _mums_.

In all accounts of children’s talk you find words which cannot be referred back to the normal language, but which have cropped up from some unsounded depth of the child’s soul. I give a few from notes sent to me by Danish friends: _goi_ ‘comb,’ _putput_ ‘stocking, or any other piece of garment,’ _i-a-a_ ‘chocolate,’ _gön_ ‘water to drink, milk’ (kept apart from the usual word _vand_ for water, which she used only for water to wash in), _hesh_ ‘newspaper, book.’ Some such words have become famous in psychological literature because they were observed by Darwin and Taine. Among less famous instances from other books I may mention _tibu_ ‘bird’ (Strümpel), _adi_ ‘cake’ (Ament), _be’lum-be’lum_ ‘toy with two men turning about,’ _wakaka_ ‘soldier,’ _nda_ ‘jar,’ _pamma_ ‘pencil,’ _bium_ ‘stocking’ (Meringer).

An American correspondent writes that his boy was fond of pushing a stick over the carpet after the manner of a carpet-sweeper and called the operation _jazing_. He coined the word _borkens_ as a name for a particular sort of blocks with which he was accustomed to play. He was a nervous child and his imagination created objects of terror that haunted him in the dark, and to these he gave the name of _Boons_. This name may, however, be derived from _baboons_. Mr. Harold Palmer tells me that his daughter (whose native language was French) at an early age used ['fu'wɛ] for ‘soap’ and [dɛ'dɛtʃ] for ‘horse, wooden horse, merry-go-round.’

Dr. F. Poulsen, in his book _Rejser og rids_ (Copenhagen, 1920), says about his two-year-old daughter that when she gets hold of her mother’s fur-collar she will pet it and lavish on it all kinds of tender self-invented names, such as _apu_ or _a-fo-me-me_. The latter word, “which has all the melodious euphony and vague signification of primitive language,” is applied to anything that is rare and funny and worth rejoicing at. On a summer day’s excursion there was one new _a-fo-me-me_ after the other.

In spite of all this, a point on which all the most distinguished investigators of children’s language of late years are agreed is that children never invent words. Wundt goes so far as to say that “the child’s language is the result of the child’s environment, the child being essentially a passive instrument in the matter” (S 1. 196)--one of the most wrong-headed sentences I have ever read in the works of a great scientist. Meumann says: “Preyer and after him almost every careful observer among child-psychologists have strongly held the view that it is impossible to speak of a child inventing a word.” Similarly Meringer, L 220, Stern, 126, 273, 337 ff., Bloomfield, SL 12.

These investigators seem to have been led astray by expressions such as ‘shape out of nothing,’ ‘invent,’ ‘original creation’ (Urschöpfung), and to have taken this doctrinaire attitude in partial defiance of the facts they have themselves advanced. Expressions like those adduced occur over and over again in their discussions, and Meumann says openly: “Invention demands a methodical proceeding with intention, a conception of an end to be realized.” Of course, if that is necessary it is clear that we can speak of invention of words in the case of a chemist seeking a word for a new substance, and not in the case of a tiny child. But are there not many inventions in the technical world, which we do not hesitate to call inventions, which have come about more or less by chance? Wasn’t it so probably with gunpowder? According to the story it certainly was so with blotting-paper: the foreman who had forgotten to add size to a portion of writing-paper was dismissed, but the manufacturer who saw that the paper thus spoilt could be turned to account instead of the sand hitherto used made a fortune. So according to Meumann blotting-paper has never been ‘invented.’ If in order to acknowledge a child’s creation of a word we are to postulate that it has been produced out of nothing, what about bicycles, fountain-pens, typewriters--each of which was something existing before, carried just a little further? Are they on that account not inventions? One would think not, when one reads these writers on children’s language, for as soon as the least approximation to a word in the normal language is discovered, the child is denied both ‘invention’ and ‘the speech-forming faculty’! Thus Stern (p. 338) says that his daughter in her second year used some words which might be taken as proof of the power to create words, but for the fact that it was here possible to show how these ‘new’ words had grown out of normal words. _Eischei_, for instance, was used as a verb meaning ‘go, walk,’ but it originated in the words _eins, zwei_ (one, two) which were said when the child was taught to walk. Other examples are given comparable to those mentioned above (106, 115) as mutilations of the first period. Now, even if all those words given by myself and others as original inventions of children could be proved to be similar perversions of ‘real’ words (which is not likely), I should not hesitate to speak of a word-creating faculty, for _eischei_, ‘to walk,’ is both in form and still more in meaning far enough from _eins, zwei_ to be reckoned a totally new word.

We can divide words ‘invented’ by children into three classes:

A. The child gives both sound and meaning.

B. The grown-up people give the sound, and the child the meaning.

C. The child gives the sound, grown-up people the meaning.

But the three classes cannot always be kept apart, especially when the child imitates the grown-up person’s sound so badly or seizes the meaning so imperfectly that very little is left of what the grown-up person gives. As a rule, the self-created words will be very short-lived; still, there are exceptions.

O’Shea’s account of one of these words is very instructive. “She had also a few words of her own coining which were attached spontaneously to objects, and these her elders took up, and they became fixed in her vocabulary for a considerable period. A word resembling _Ndobbin_ was employed for every sort of thing which she used for food. The word came originally from an accidental combination of sounds made while she was eating. By the aid of the people about her in responding to this term and repeating it, she ‘selected’ it and for a time used it purposefully. She employed it at the outset for a specific article of food; then her elders extended it to other articles, and this aided her in making the extension herself. Once started in this process, she extended the term to many objects associated with her food, even objects as remote from her original experience as dining-room, high-chair, kitchen, and even apple and plum trees” (O’Shea, 27).

To Class A I assign most of the words already given as the child’s creations, whether the child be great or small.

Class B is that which is most sparsely represented. A child in Finland often heard the well-known line about King Karl (Charles XII), “Han stod i rök och damm” (“He stood in smoke and dust”), and taking _rö_ to be the adjective meaning ‘red,’ imagined the remaining syllables, which he heard as _kordamm_, to be the name of some piece of garment. This amused his parents so much that _kordamm_ became the name of a dressing-gown in that family.

To Class C, where the child contributes only the sound and the older people give a meaning to what on the child’s side was meaningless--a process that reminds one of the invention of blotting-paper--belong some of the best-known words, which require a separate section.

VIII.--§ 8. ‘Mamma’ and ‘Papa.’

In the nurseries of all countries a little comedy has in all ages been played--the baby lies and babbles his ‘mamama’ or ‘amama’ or ‘papapa’ or ‘apapa’ or ‘bababa’ or ‘ababab’ without associating the slightest meaning with his mouth-games, and his grown-up friends, in their joy over the precocious child, assign to these syllables a rational sense, accustomed as they are themselves to the fact of an uttered sound having a content, a thought, an idea, corresponding to it. So we get a whole class of words, distinguished by a simplicity of sound-formation--never two consonants together, generally the same consonant repeated with an _a_ between, frequently also with an _a_ at the end--words found in many languages, often in different forms, but with essentially the same meaning.

First we have words for ‘mother.’ It is very natural that the mother who is greeted by her happy child with the sound ‘mama’ should take it as though the child were _calling_ her ‘mama,’ and since she frequently comes to the cradle when she hears the sound, the child himself does learn to use these syllables when he wants to call her. In this way they become a recognized word for the idea ‘mother’--now with the stress on the first syllable, now on the second. In French we get a nasal vowel either in the last syllable only or in both syllables. At times we have only one syllable, _ma_. When once these syllables have become a regular word they follow the speech laws which govern other words; thus among other forms we get the German _muhme_, the meaning of which (‘aunt’) is explained as in the words mentioned, p. 118. In very early times _ma_ in our group of languages was supplied with a termination, so that we get the form underlying Greek _mētēr_, Lat. _mater_ (whence Fr. _mère_, etc.), our own _mother_, G. _mutter_, etc. These words became the recognized grown-up words, while _mama_ itself was only used in the intimacy of the family. It depends on fashion, however, how ‘high up’ _mama_ can be used: in some countries and in some periods children are allowed to use it longer than in others.

The forms _mama_ and _ma_ are not the only ones for ‘mother.’ The child’s _am_ has also been seized and maintained by the grown-ups. The Albanian word for ‘mother’ is _ama_, the Old Norse word for ‘grandmother’ is _amma_. The Latin _am-ita_, formed from _am_ with a termination added, came to mean ‘aunt’ and became in OFr. _ante_, whence E. _aunt_ and Modern Fr. _tante_. In Semitic languages the words for ‘mother’ also have a vowel before _m_: Assyrian _ummu_, Hebrew _’êm_, etc.

_Baba_, too, is found in the sense ‘mother,’ especially in Slavonic languages, though it has here developed various derivative meanings, ‘old woman,’ ‘grandmother,’ or ‘midwife.’ In Tonga we have _bama_ ‘mother.’

Forms with _n_ are also found for ‘mother’; so Sanskrit _naná_, Albanian _nane_. Here we have also Gr. _nannē_ ‘aunt’ and Lat. _nonna_; the latter ceased in the early Middle Ages to mean ‘grandmother’ and became a respectful way of addressing women of a certain age, whence we know it as _nun_, the feminine counterpart of ‘monk.’ From less known languages I may mention Greenlandic _a'na·na_ ‘mother,’ _'a·na_ ‘grandmother.’

Now we come to words meaning ‘father,’ and quite naturally, where the sound-groups containing _m_ have already been interpreted in the sense ‘mother,’ a word for ‘father’ will be sought in the syllables with _p_. It is no doubt frequently noticed in the nursery that the baby says _mama_ where one expected _papa_, and vice versa; but at last he learns to deal out the syllables ‘rightly,’ as we say. The history of the forms _papa_, _pappa_ and _pa_ is analogous to the history of the _m_ syllables already traced. We have the same extension of the sound by _tr_ in the word _pater_, which according to recognized laws of sound-change is found in the French _père_, the English _father_, the Danish _fader_, the German _vater_, etc. Philologists no longer, fortunately, derive these words from a root _pa_ ‘to protect,’ and see therein a proof of the ‘highly moral spirit’ of our aboriginal ancestors, as Fick and others did. _Papa_, as we know, also became an honourable title for a reverend ecclesiastic, and hence comes the name which we have in the form _Pope_.

Side by side with the p forms we have forms in _b_--Italian _babbo_, Bulgarian _babá_, Serbian _bába_, Turkish _baba_. Beginning with the vowel we have the Semitic forms _ab_, _abu_ and finally _abba_, which is well known, since through Greek _abbas_ it has become the name for a spiritual father in all European languages, our form being _Abbot_.

Again, we have some names for ‘father’ with dental sounds: Sanskrit _tatá_, Russian _tata_, _tyatya_, Welsh _tat_, etc. The English _dad_, now so universal, is sometimes considered to have been borrowed from this Welsh word, which in certain connexions has an initial _d_, but no doubt it had an independent origin. In Slavonic languages _déd_ is extensively used for ‘grandfather’ or ‘old man.’ Thus also _deite_, _teite_ in German dialects. _Tata_ ‘father’ is found in Congo and other African languages, also (_tatta_) in Negro-English (Surinam). And just as words for ‘mother’ change their meaning from ‘mother’ to ‘aunt,’ so these forms in some languages come to mean ‘uncle’: Gr. _theios_ (whence Italian _zio_), Lithuanian _dede_, Russian _dyadya_.

With an initial vowel we get the form _atta_, in Greek used in addressing old people, in Gothic the ordinary word for ‘father,’ which with a termination added gives the proper name _Attila_, originally ‘little father’; with another ending we have Russian _otec_. Outside our own family of languages we find, for instance, Magyar _atya_, Turkish _ata_, Basque _aita_, Greenlandic _a'ta·ta_ ‘father,’ while in the last-mentioned language _a·ta_ means ‘grandfather.’[28]

The nurse, too, comes in for her share in these names, as she too is greeted by the child’s babbling and is tempted to take it as the child’s name for her; thus we get the German and Scandinavian _amme_, Polish _niania_, Russian _nyanya_, cf. our _Nanny_. These words cannot be kept distinct from names for ‘aunt,’ cf. _amita_ above, and in Sanskrit we find _mama_ for ‘uncle.’

It is perhaps more doubtful if we can find a name for the child itself which has arisen in the same way; the nearest example is the Engl. _babe_, _baby_, German _bube_ (with _u_ as in _muhme_ above); but _babe_ has also been explained as a word derived normally from OFr. _baube_, from Lat. _balbus_ ‘stammering.’ When the name _Bab_ or _Babs_ (_Babbe_ in a Danish family) becomes the pet-name for a little girl, this has no doubt come from an interpretation put on her own meaningless sounds. Ital. _bambo_ (_bambino_) certainly belongs here. We may here mention also some terms for ‘doll,’ Lat. _pupa_ or _puppa_, G. _puppe_; with a derivative ending we have Fr. _poupée_, E. _puppet_ (Chaucer, A 3254, _popelote_). These words have a rich semantic development, cf. _pupa_ (Dan. _puppe_, etc.) ‘chrysalis,’ and the diminutive Lat. _pupillus_, _pupilla_, which was used for ‘a little child, minor,’ whence E. _pupil_ ‘disciple,’ but also for the little child seen in the eye, whence E. (and other languages) _pupil_, ‘central opening of the eye.’

A child has another main interest--that is, in its food, the breast, the bottle, etc. In many countries it has been observed that very early a child uses a long _m_ (without a vowel) as a sign that it wants something, but we can hardly be right in supposing that the sound is originally meant by children in this sense. They do not use it consciously till they see that grown-up people on hearing the sound come up and find out what the child wants. And it is the same with the developed forms which are uttered by the child in its joy at getting something to eat, and which are therefore interpreted as the child’s expression for food: _am_, _mam_, _mammam_, or the same words with a final _a_--that is, really the same groups of sounds which came to stand for ‘mother.’ The determination of a particular form to a particular meaning is always due to the adults, who, however, can subsequently _teach_ it to the child. Under this heading comes the sound _ham_, which Taine observed to be one child’s expression for hunger or thirst (_h_ mute?), and similarly the word _mum_, meaning ‘something to eat,’ invented, as we are told, by Darwin’s son and often uttered with a rising intonation, as in a question, ‘Will you give me something to eat?’ Lindner’s child (1.5) is said to have used _papp_ for everything eatable and _mem_ or _möm_ for anything drinkable. In normal language we have forms like Sanskrit _māmsa_ (Gothic _mimz_) and _mās_ ‘flesh,’ our own _meat_ (which formerly, like Dan. _mad_, meant any kind of food), German _mus_ ‘jam’ (whence also _gemüse_), and finally Lat. _mandere_ and _manducare_, ‘to chew’ (whence Fr. _manger_)--all developments of this childish _ma(m)_.

As the child’s first nourishment is its mother’s breast, its joyous _mamama_ can also be taken to mean the breast. So we have the Latin _mamma_ (with a diminutive ending _mammilla_, whence Fr. _mamelle_), and with the other labial sound Engl. _pap_, Norwegian and Swed. dial. _pappe_, Lat. _papilla_; with a different vowel, It. _poppa_, Fr. _poupe_, ‘teat of an animal, formerly also of a woman’; with _b_, G. _bübbi_, obsolete E. _bubby_; with a dental, E. _teat_ (G. _zitze_), Ital. _tetta_, Dan. _titte_, Swed. dial. _tatte_. Further we have words like E. _pap_ ‘soft food,’ Latin _papare_ ‘to eat,’ orig. ‘to suck,’ and some G. forms for the same, _pappen_, _pampen_, _pampfen_. Perhaps the beginning of the word _milk_ goes back to the baby’s _ma_ applied to the mother’s breast or milk; the latter half may then be connected with Lat. _lac_. In Greenlandic we have _ama·ma_ ‘suckle.’

Inseparable from these words is the sound, a long _m_ or _am_, which expresses the child’s delight over something that tastes good; it has by-forms in the Scotch _nyam_ or _nyamnyam_, the English seaman’s term _yam_ ‘to eat,’ and with two dentals the French _nanan_ ‘sweetmeats.’ Some linguists will have it that the Latin _amo_ ‘I love’ is derived from this _am_, which expresses pleasurable satisfaction. When a father tells me that his son (1.10) uses the wonderful words _nananæi_ for ‘chocolate’ and _jajajaja_ for picture-book, we have no doubt here also a case of a grown person’s interpretation of the originally meaningless sounds of a child.

Another meaning that grown-up people may attach to syllables uttered by the child is that of ‘good-bye,’ as in English _tata_, which has now been incorporated in the ordinary language.[29] Stern probably is right when he thinks that the French _adieu_ would not have been accepted so commonly in Germany and other countries if it had not accommodated itself so easily, especially in the form commonly used in German, _ade_, to the child’s natural word.

There are some words for ‘bed, sleep’ which clearly belong to this class: Tuscan _nanna_ ‘cradle,’ Sp. _hacer la nana_ ‘go to sleep,’ E. _bye-bye_ (possibly associated with _good-bye_, instead of which is also said _byebye_); Stern mentions _baba_ (Berlin), _beibei_ (Russian), _bobo_ (Malay), but _bischbisch_, which he also gives here, is evidently (like the Danish _visse_) imitative of the sound used for hushing.

Words of this class stand in a way outside the common words of a language, owing to their origin and their being continually new-created. One cannot therefore deduce laws of sound-change from them in their original shape; and it is equally wrong to use them as evidence for an original kinship between different families of language and to count them as loan-words, as is frequently done (for example, when the Slavonic _baba_ is said to be borrowed from Turkish). The English _papa_ and _mam(m)a_, and the same words in German and Danish, Italian, etc., are almost always regarded as borrowed from French; but Cauer rightly points out that Nausikaa (_Odyssey_ 6. 57) addresses her father as _pappa fil_, and Homer cannot be suspected of borrowing from French. Still, it is true that fashion may play a part in deciding how long children may be permitted to say _papa_ and _mamma_, and a French fashion may in this respect have spread to other European countries, especially in the seventeenth century. We may not find these words in early use in the _literatures_ of the different countries, but this is no proof that the words were not used in the nursery. As soon as a word of this class has somewhere got a special application, this can very well pass as a loan-word from land to land--as we saw in the case of the words _abbot_ and _pope_. And it may be granted with respect to the primary use of the words that there are certain national or quasi-national customs which determine what grown people expect to hear from babies, so that one nation expects and recognizes _papa_, another _dad_, a third _atta_, for the meaning ‘father.’

When the child hands something to somebody or reaches out for something he will generally say something, and if, as often happens, this is _ta_ or _da_, it will be taken by its parents and others as a real word, different according to the language they speak; in England as _there_ or _thanks_, in Denmark as _tak_ ‘thanks’[30] or _tag_ ‘take,’ in Germany as _da_ ‘there,’ in France as _tiens_ ‘hold,’ in Russia as _day_ ‘give,’ in Italy as _to_, (= _togli_) ‘take.’ The form _tê_ in Homer is interpreted by some as an imperative of _teinō_ ‘stretch.’ These instances, however, are slightly different in character from those discussed in the main part of this chapter.[31]

FOOTNOTES:

[23]

Women know The way to rear up children, (to be just) They know a simple, merry, tender knack Of stringing pretty words that make no sense, And kissing full sense into empty words, Which things are corals to cut life upon, Although such trifles: children learn by such Love’s holy earnest in a pretty play And get not over-early solemnized ... Such good do mothers. Fathers love as well --Mine did, I know--but still with heavier brains, And wills more consciously responsible, And not as wisely, since less foolishly.

ELIZABETH BROWNING: _Aurora Leigh_, 10.

[24] This is not the place to speak of the way in which prevalent methods of teaching foreign languages can be improved. A slavish copying of the manner in which English children learn English is impracticable, and if it were practicable it would demand more time than anyone can devote to the purpose. One has to make the most of the advantages which the pupils possess over babies, thus, their being able to read, their power of more sustained attention, etc. Phonetic explanation of the new sounds and phonetic transcription have done wonders to overcome difficulties of pronunciation. But in other respects it is possible to some extent to assimilate the teaching of a foreign language to the method pursued by the child in its first years: one should not merely sprinkle the pupil, but plunge him right down into the sea of language and enable him to swim by himself as soon as possible, relying on the fact that a great deal will arrange itself in the brain without the inculcation of too many special rules and explanations. For details I may refer to my book, _How to Teach a Foreign Language_ (London, George Allen and Unwin).

[25] Hence, also, the second or third child in a family will, as a rule, learn to speak more rapidly than the eldest.

[26] I translate this from Ido, see _The International Language_, May 1912.

[27] I have collected a bibliographical list of such ‘secret languages’ in _Nord. Tidsskrift f. Filologi_, 4r. vol. 5.

[28] I subjoin a few additional examples. Basque _aita_ ‘father,’ _ama_ ‘mother,’ _anaya_ ‘brother’ (_Zeitsch. f. rom. Phil._ 17, 146). Manchu _ama_ ‘father,’ _eme_ ‘mother’ (the vowel relation as in _haha_ ‘man,’ _hehe_ ‘woman,’ Gabelentz, S 389). Kutenai _pa·_ ‘brother’s daughter,’ _papa_ ‘grandmother (said by male), grandfather, grandson,’ _pat!_ ‘nephew,’ _ma_ ‘mother,’ _nana_ ‘younger sister’ (of girl), _alnana_ ‘sisters,’ _tite_ ‘mother-in-law,’ _titu_ ‘father’ (of male)--(Boas, _Kutenai Tales_, Bureau of Am. Ethnol. 59, 1918). Cf. also Sapir, “Kinship Terms of the Kootenay Indians” (_Amer. Anthropologist_, vol. 20). In the same writer’s _Yana Terms of Relationship_ (Univ. of California, 1918) there seems to be very little from this source.

[29] _Tata_ is also used for ‘a walk’ (to go out for a ta-ta, or to go out ta-tas) and for ‘a hat’--meanings that may very well have developed from the child’s saying these syllables when going out or preparing to go out.

[30] The Swede Bolin says that his child said _tatt-tatt_, which he interprets as _tack_, even when handing something to others.

[31] The views advanced in § 8 have some points in contact with the remarks found in Stern’s ch. xix, p. 300, only that I lay more stress on the arbitrary interpretation of the child’s meaningless syllables on the part of the grown-ups, and that I cannot approve his theory of the _m_ syllables as ‘centripetal’ and the _p_ syllables as ‘centrifugal affective-volitional natural sounds.’ Paul (P § 127) says that the nursery-language with its _bowwow_, _papa_, _mama_, etc., “is not the invention of the children; it is handed over to them just as any other language”; he overlooks the share children have themselves in these words, or in some of them; nor are they, as he says, formed by the grown-ups with a purely pedagogical purpose. Nor can I find that Wundt’s chapter “Angebliche worterfindung des kindes” (S 1. 273-287) contains decisive arguments. Curtius (K 88) thinks that Gr. _patēr_ was first shortened into _pâ_ and this then extended into _páppa_--but certainly it is rather the other way round.