THE CHILD AS LINGUIST.
But what am I?
An infant crying in the night:
An infant crying for the light,
And with no language but a cry.—Tennyson.
Yet she carried a doll as she toddled alone,
And she talked to that doll in a tongue her own.—Joaquin Miller.
Among savages, children are, to a great extent, the originators
of idiomatic diversities.—Charles Rau.
It was as impossible for the first child endowed with this faculty not to speak in the presence of a companion similarly endowed, as it would be for a nightingale or a thrush not to carol to its mate. The same faculty creates the same necessity in our days, and its exercise by young children, when accidentally isolated from the teachings and influence of grown companions, will readily account for the existence of all the diversities of speech on our globe.—Horatio Hale.
Some scientists have held that mankind began with the Homo Alalus, speechless, dumb man, an hypothesis now looked npon by the best authorities as untenable; and the folk have imagined that, were not certain procedures gone through with upon the new-born child, it would remain dumb through life, and, if it were allowed to do certain things, a like result would follow. Ploss informs us that the child, and the mother, while she is still suckling it, must not, in Bohemia, eat fish, else, since fish are mute, the child would be so also; in Servia, the child is not permitted to eat any fowl that has not already crowed, or it would remain dumb for a very long time; in Germany two little children, not yet able to speak, must not kiss each other, or both will be dumb.
The Frenum.
Our English phrase, "an unbridled tongue," has an interesting history and entourage of folk-lore. The subject has been quite recently discussed by Dr. Chervin, of the Institute for Stammerers at Paris (205). Citing the lines of Boileau:—
"Tout charme en un enfant dont la langue sans fard,
A peine du filet encore debarrassee
Sait d'un air innocent begayer sa pensee,"
he notes the wide extension of the belief that the cutting of the filet, or frein, the frenum, or "bridle" of the tongue of the newborn infant facilitates, or makes possible, articulate speech. According to M. Sebillot, the cutting of the sublet, as it is called, is quite general in parts of Brittany (Haute Bretagne), and M. Moisset states that in the Yonne it is the universal opinion that neglect to do so would cause the new-born child to remain dumb for life; M. Desaivre cites the belief in Poitou that, unless the lignoux were cut in the child at birth, it would prevent its sucking, and, later on, its speaking. The operation is usually performed by nurses and midwives, with the nail of the little finger, which is allowed to grow excessively long for the purpose (205. 6). Dr. Chervin discusses the scientific aspects of the subject, and concludes that the statistics of stammering and the custom of cutting the frenum of the tongue do not stand in any sort of correlation with each other, and that this ancient custom, noted by Celsus, has no real scientific raison d'etre (205. 9). We say that a child is "tongue-tied," and that one "makes too free with his tongue"; in French we find: Il a le filet bien coupe, "he is a great talker," and in the eighteenth century Il n'a pas de filet was in use; a curious German expression for "tongue-tied" is mundfaul, "mouth-lazy."