[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.
[32] The same inconsistency is found in Dauzat, who in 1910 thought that nothing, and in 1912 that nearly everything, was due to imperfect imitation by the child (V 22 ff., Ph 53, cf. 3). Wechssler (L p. 86) quotes passages from Bremer, Passy, Rousselot and Wallensköld, in which the chief cause of sound changes is attributed to the child; to these might be added Storm (Phonetische Studien, 5. 200) and A. Thomson (IF 24, 1909, p. 9), probably also Grammont (Mél. linguist. 61). Many writers seem to imagine that the question is settled when they are able to adduce a certain number of parallel changes in the pronunciation of some child and in the historical evolution of languages.
[33] See E. Herzog, Streitfragen der roman. philologie, i. (1904), p. 57—I modify his symbols a little.
[34] In Russian Marfa, Fyodor, etc., we also have f corresponding to original þ, but in this case it is not a transition within one and the same language, but an imperfect imitation on the part of the (adult!) Russians of a sound in a foreign language (Greek th) which was not found in their own language.
[35] Reduplications and assimilations at a distance, as in Fr. tante from the older ante (whence E. aunt, from Lat. amita) and porpentine (frequent in this and analogous forms in Elizabethan writers) for porcupine (porkepine, porkespine) are different from the ordinary assimilations of neighbouring sounds in occurring much less frequently in the speech of adults than in children; cf., however, below, Ch. XV [4].
[36] Karl Sundén, in his diligent and painstaking book on Elliptical Words in Modern English (Upsala, 1904) [i.e. clipped proper names, for common names are not treated in the long lists given], mentions only two examples of surnames in which the final part is kept (Bart for Islebart, Piggy for Guineapig, from obscure novels), though he has scores of examples in which the beginning is preserved.
[37] It is often said that stress is decisive of what part is left out in word-clippings, and from an a priori point of view this is what we should expect. But as a matter of fact we find in many instances that syllables with weak stress are preserved, e.g. in Mac(donald), Pen(dennis), the Cri, Vic, Nap, Nat for Nathaniel (orig. pronounced with [t], not [þ]), Val for Percival, Trix, etc. The middle is never kept as such with omission of the beginning and the ending; Liz (whence Lizzy) has not arisen at one stroke from Elizabeth, but mediately through Eliz. Some of the adults’ clippings originate through abbreviations in writing, thus probably most of the college terms (exam, trig, etc.), thus also journalists’ clippings like ad for advertisement, par for paragraph; cf. also caps for capitals. On stump-words see also below, Ch. XIV, §§ [8] and [9].
[38] See my MEG ii. 5. 6, and my paper on “Subtraktionsdannelser,” in Festskrift til Vilh. Thomsen, 1894, p. 1 ff.
[39] Semantic changes through ambiguous syntactic combinations have recently been studied especially by Carl Collin; see his Semasiologiska studier, 1906, and Le Développement de Sens du Suffixe -ATA, Lund, 1918, ch. iii and iv. Collin there treats especially of the transition from abstract to concrete nouns; he does not, as I have done above, speak of the rôle of the younger generation in such changes.