[BOOK II]
THE CHILD
[CHAPTER V]
SOUNDS
§ 1. From Screaming to Talking. § 2. First Sounds. § 3. Sound-laws of the Next Stage. § 4. Groups of Sounds. § 5. Mutilations and Reduplications. § 6. Correction. § 7. Tone.
V.—§ 1. From Screaming to Talking.
A Danish philosopher has said: “In his whole life man achieves nothing so great and so wonderful as what he achieved when he learnt to talk.” When Darwin was asked in which three years of his life a man learnt most, he said: “The first three.”
A child’s linguistic development covers three periods—the screaming time, the crowing or babbling time, and the talking time. But the last is a long one, and must again be divided into two periods—that of the “little language,” the child’s own language, and that of the common language or language of the community. In the former the child is linguistically an individualist, in the latter he is more and more socialized.
Of the screaming time little need be said. A child’s scream is not uttered primarily as a means of conveying anything to others, and so far is not properly to be called speech. But if from the child’s side a scream is not a way of telling anything, its elders may still read something in it and hurry to relieve the trouble. And if the child comes to remark—as it soon will—that whenever it cries someone comes and brings it something pleasant, if only company, it will not be long till it makes use of this instrument whenever it is uneasy or wants something. The scream, which was at first a reflex action, is now a voluntary action. And many parents have discovered that the child has learnt to use its power of screaming to exercise a tyrannical power over them—so that they have had to walk up and down all night with a screaming child that prefers this way of spending the night to lying quietly in its cradle. The only course is brutally to let the baby scream till it is tired, and persist in never letting it get its desire because it screams for it, but only because what it desires is good for it. The child learns its lesson, and a scream is once more what it was at first, an involuntary, irresistible result of the fact that something is wrong.