As is the case with other practices in collegiate life, these "yells" seem to be making their way down into the high and grammar schools, as well as into the private secondary schools, the popularity and excitement of field-sports and games, baseball, foot-ball, etc., giving occasion enough for their frequent employment.
Here fall also the spontaneous shouts and cries of children at work and at play, the Ki-yah! and others of a like nature whose number is almost infinite.
Mr. Charles Ledyard Norton, in his Political Americanisms (New York, 1890), informs us that "the peculiar staccato cheer, 'rah, rah, rah!'" was probably invented at Harvard in 1864. In the Blaine campaign of 1884 it was introduced into political meetings and processions together with "the custom, also borrowed from the colleges, of spelling some temporarily significant catch-word in unison, as, for instance, 'S-o-a-p!' the separate letters being pronounced in perfect time by several hundred voices at once." The same authority thinks that the idea of calling out "Blaine—Blaine—James G. Blaine!" in cadenced measure after the manner of the drill-sergeants, "Left—left—left—right—left!" an idea which had many imitations and elaborations among the members of both the great political parties, can be traced back to the Columbia College students (p. 120).
The Child as an Innovator in Language.
But the role of the child in the development of language is concerned with other things than physonyms and onomatopes. In his work on Brazilian ethnography and philology, Dr. von Martius writes (522. 43): "A language is often confined to a few individuals connected by relationship, forming thus, as it were, a family institute, which isolates those who use it from all neighbouring or distant tribes so completely that an understanding becomes impossible." This intimate connection of language with the family, this preservation and growth of language, as a family institution, has, as Dr. von Martius points out, an interesting result (522. 44):—
"The Brazilians frequently live in small detachments, being kept apart by the chase; sometimes only a few families wander together; often it is one family alone. Within the family the language suffers a constant remodelling. One of the children will fail to catch precisely the radical sound of a word; and the weak parents, instead of accustoming it to pronounce the word correctly, will yield, perhaps, themselves, and adopt the language of the child. We often were accompanied by persons of the same band; yet we noticed in each of them slight differences in accentuation and change of sound. His comrades, however, understood him, and they were understood by him. As a consequence, their language never can become stationary, but will constantly break off into new dialects." Upon these words of von Martius (reported by Dr. Oscar Peschel), Dr. Charles Rau comments as follows (522. 44): "Thus it would seem that, among savages, children are to a great extent the originators of idiomatic diversities. Dr. Peschel places particular stress on this circumstance, and alludes to the habit of over-indulgent parents among refined nations of conforming to the humours of their children by conversing with them in a kind of infantine language, until they are several years old. Afterward, of course, the rules of civilized life compel these children to adopt the proper language; but no such necessity exists among a hunter family in the primeval forests of South America; here the deviating form of speech remains, and the foundation of a new dialect is laid."
Children's Languages.
But little attention has been paid to the study of the language of children among primitive people. In connection with a brief investigation of child-words in the aboriginal tongues of America, Mr. Horatio Hale communicated to the present writer the following observation of M. l'Abbé Cuoq, of Montreal, the distinguished missionary and linguist: "As far as the Iroquois in particular are concerned, it is certain that this language [langage enfantin] is current in every family, and that the child's relatives, especially the mothers, teach it to their children, and that the latter consequently merely repeat the words of which it is composed" (201. 322). That these "child-words" were invented by children, the Abbé does not seem to hint.
The prominence of the mother-influence in the child's linguistic development is also accentuated by Professor Mason, who devotes a chapter of his recent work on woman's part in the origin and growth of civilization to woman as a linguist. The author points out how "women have helped to the selection and preservation of language through onomatopoeia," their vocal apparatus being "singularly adapted to the imitation of many natural sounds," and their ears "quick to catch the sounds within the compass of the voice" (113. 188-204). To the female child, then, we owe a good deal of that which is now embodied in our modern speech, and the debt of primitive races is still greater. Many a traveller has found, indeed, a child the best available source of linguistic information, when the idling warriors in their pride, and the hard-working women in their shyness, or taboo-caused fear, failed to respond at all to his requests for talk or song.
Canon Farrar, in his Chapters on Language, makes the statement: "It is a well-known fact that the neglected children, in some of the Canadian and Indian villages, who are left alone for days, can and do invent for themselves a sort of lingua franca, partially or wholly unintelligible to all except themselves" (200. 237). Mr. W. W. Newell speaks of the linguistic inventiveness of children in these terms (313. 24):—