There is nothing more instructive in this connexion than the talk of children among themselves about words. They build up quaint speculations about meanings, and try their hand bravely at definitions. Here is an example: A boy of five was instructing his comrade as to the puzzling word ‘home-sick’. He did it in quite a scientific fashion. “It’s like sea-sick, you know: you are sea-sick when you are sick at sea, and so you’re home-sick when you’re sick at home”.
There is something of this same desire to get behind words in children’s word-play, as we call it, their discovery of odd affinities in verbal sounds, and their punning. Though no doubt this contains a genuine element of childish fun, it betokens a more serious trait also, an interest in word-sounds as such, and a curiosity about their origin and purpose. It is difficult for grown-up people to go back in thought to the attitude of the child-mind towards verbal sounds. Just as children show ‘the innocence of the eye’ in seeing the colours of objects as they are and not as our habits of interpretation tend to make them, so they show an innocence of the ear, catching the intrinsic sensuous qualities of a word or a group of words, in a way which has become impossible for us.
This half-playful, half-serious scrutiny of word-sounds leads to the attempt to find by analysis and analogy a familiar meaning in strange words. For example, a little boy about four years old heard his mother speak of nurse’s neuralgia, from which she had been suffering for some time. He thereupon exclaimed, ‘I don’t think it’s new ralgia, I call it old ralgia’. A child called his doll ‘Shakespeare’[‘Shakespeare’] because its spear-like legs could be shaken. Another boy of three explained ‘gaiters’ as things ‘to go out of the gate with’. Another said that the ‘Master’ which he prefixed to his name meant that he was master of his dog. A little girl in her third year called ‘anchovies’ ‘ham-chovies’[‘ham-chovies’] ‘mermaid’ ‘worm-maid,’ ‘whirlwind’ ‘world-wind,’ ‘gnomes’ ‘no-mans’ (un-menschen), taking pleasure apparently in bringing some familiar element—even when this seems to other ears at least not very explanatory—into the strange jumble of word-sound that surrounded her. A child may know that he is ‘fooling’ in such cases, yet the word-play brings a certain satisfaction, which is at least akin to the pleasure of the older linguist.
This quasi-punning transformation of words is curiously like what may be called folk-etymology, where a foreign word is altered by a people so as to be made to appear significant and suitable for its purpose, as in the oft-quoted forms ‘sparrow grass’ (asparagus) and ‘cray-fish’ (from the French écrevisse, cf. the O. H. German Krebiz), where the attempt to suit the form to the thing is still more apparent.[[122]] When, for example, a boy calls a holiday a ‘hollorday,’ because it is a day ‘to holloa in,’ we may say that he is reflecting the process by which adults try to put meaning into strange words, as when a cabman I overheard a few days ago spoke about putting down ashphalt (for ‘asphalt’). Some children carry out such transformation and invention of derivation on a large scale, often resorting to pretty myths, as when the butterflies are said to make butter, or to eat butter, grasshoppers to give grass, honeysuckles to yield all the honey, and so forth.[[123]]
A child will even go further, and, prying into the forms of gender, invent explanatory myths in which words are personified and sexualised. Thus a little boy of five years and three months who had learned German and Italian as well as English was much troubled about the gender of the sun and moon. So he set about myth-making on this wise: “I suppose people[[124]] think the sun is the husband, the moon is the wife, and all the stars the little children, and Jupiter the maid”. A German girl of six was thus addressed by her teacher: “‘Der’ ist männlich; Was sind ‘Die’ und ‘Das’?” To which she replied prettily: "Die ist dämlich (i.e., ‘ladyish’) und das ist kindlich". The tendency to attribute differences of sex and age to names observable in this last is seen in other ways. An Italian child asked why ‘barba’ (beard) was not called ‘barbo’. With this may be compared the pretty myth of another Italian child that ‘barca’ (boat) was the little girl of ‘barcainolo’ (boatman).[[125]]
One other characteristic feature in the child’s attitude towards words must be touched on, because it looks like the opposite of the impulse to tamper with words just dealt with. A child is a great stickler for accuracy in the repetition of all familiar word-forms. The zeal of a child in correcting others’ language, and the comical errors he will now and again fall into in exercising his pedagogic function, are well known to parents. Sometimes he shows himself the most absurd of pedants. ‘Shall I read to you out of this book, baby?’ asked a mother of her boy, about two and a half years old. ‘No,’ replied the infant, ‘not out of dot book, but somepy inside of it.’ The same little stickler for verbal accuracy, when his nurse asked him, ‘Are you going to build your bricks, baby?’ replied solemnly, ‘We don’t build bricks, we make them and then build with them’. In the notes on the boy C. we find an example of how jealously the child-mind insists on the ipsissima verba in the recounting of his familiar stories.
Are these little sticklers for verbal correctness, who object to everything figurative in our language, who, when they learn that a person or an animal has ‘lost his head,’ take the expression literally, and who love nothing better than tying us down to literal exactness, themselves given to ‘word-play’ and verbal myth-making, or have we here to do with two varieties of childish mind? My observations do not enable me to pronounce on this point.
I have in this essay confined myself to some of the more common and elementary features of the child’s linguistic experience. Others present themselves when the reading stage is reached, and the new strange stupid-looking word-symbol on the printed page has to do duty for the living sound, which for the child, as we have seen, seems to belong to the object and to share in its life. But this subject, tempting as it is, must be left. And the same must be said of those special difficulties and problems which arise for the child-mind when two or more languages are spoken. This is a branch of child-linguistics which, so far as I know, has never been explored.
[60]. See Preyer, op. cit., Cap. 20; cf. the account given by De la Calle, Perez, First Three Years, p. 248. Stanley Hall observes that the first vocalisation of the infant could hardly be classified even with the help of Bell’s phonic notation or with a phonograph (Pedagogical Seminary, i., p. 132).