It is more interesting perhaps to determine what words at a given age a child does not know, or rather does not understand when he hears them or when they occur in his reading. I have myself collected such lists, and others have been given me by teachers, who have been astonished at words which their classes did not understand. A teacher can never be too cautious about assuming linguistic knowledge in his pupils—and this applies not only to foreign words, about which all teachers are on the alert, but also to what seem to be quite everyday words of the language of the country.
In connexion with the growth of vocabulary one may ask how many words are possessed by the average grown-up man? Max Müller in his Lectures stated on the authority of an English clergyman that an English farm labourer has only about three hundred words at command. This is the most utter balderdash, but nevertheless it has often been repeated, even by such an authority on psychology as Wundt. A Danish boy can easily learn seven hundred English words in the first year of his study of the language—and are we to believe that a grown Englishman, even of the lowest class, has no greater stock than such a beginner? If you go through the list of 2,000 to 3,000 words used by the American boy of six referred to above, you will easily convince yourself that they would far from suffice for the rudest labourer. A Swedish dialectologist, after a minute investigation, found that the vocabulary of Swedish peasants amounted to at least 26,000 words, and his view has been confirmed by other investigators. This conclusion is not invalidated by the fact that Shakespeare in his works uses only about 20,000 words and Milton in his poems only about 8,000. It is easy to see what a vast number of words of daily life are seldom or never required by a poet, especially a poet like Milton, whose works are on elevated subjects. The words used by Zola or Kipling or Jack London would no doubt far exceed those used by Shakespeare and Milton.[21]
VI.—§ 9. Summary.
To sum up, then. There are only very few words that are explained to the child, and so long as it is quite small it will not even understand the explanations that might be given. Some it learns because, when the word is used, the object is at the same time pointed at, but most words it can only learn by drawing conclusions about their meaning from the situation in which they arise or from the context in which they are used. These conclusions, however, are very uncertain, or they may be correct for the particular occasion and not hold good on some other, to the child’s mind quite similar, occasion. Grown-up people are in the same position with regard to words they do not know, but which they come across in a book or newspaper, e.g. demise. The meanings of many words are at the same time extraordinarily vague and yet so strictly limited (at least in some respects) that the least deviation is felt as a mistake. Moreover, the child often learns a secondary or figurative meaning of a word before its simple meaning. But gradually a high degree of accuracy is obtained, the fittest meanings surviving—that is (in this connexion) those that agree best with those of the surrounding society. And thus the individual is merged in society, and the social character of language asserts itself through the elimination of everything that is the exclusive property of one person only.
[CHAPTER VII]
GRAMMAR
§ 1. Introductory. § 2. Substantives and Adjectives. § 3. Verbs. § 4. Degrees of Consciousness. § 5. Word-formation. § 6. Word-division. § 7. Sentences. § 8. Negation and Question. § 9. Prepositions and Idioms.
VII.—§ 1. Introductory.
To learn a language it is not enough to know so many words. They must be connected according to the particular laws of the particular language. No one tells the child that the plural of ‘hand’ is hands, of ‘foot’ feet, of ‘man’ men, or that the past of ‘am’ is was, of ‘love’ loved; it is not informed when to say he and when him, or in what order words must stand. How can the little fellow learn all this, which when set forth in a grammar fills many pages and can only be explained by help of many learned words?
Many people will say it comes by ‘instinct,’ as if ‘instinct’ were not one of those fine words which are chiefly used to cover over what is not understood, because it says so precious little and seems to say so precious much. But when other people, using a more everyday expression, say that it all ‘comes quite of itself,’ I must strongly demur: so far is it from ‘coming of itself’ that it demands extraordinary labour on the child’s part. The countless grammatical mistakes made by a child in its early years are a tell-tale proof of the difficulty which this side of language presents to him—especially, of course, on account of the unsystematic character of our flexions and the irregularity of its so-called ‘rules’ of syntax.