Sometimes a child will make up a new word through ‘blending’ two, as when Hilary M. (1.8 to 2) spoke of rubbish = the rubber to polish the boots, or of the backet, from bat and racquet. Beth M. (2.0) used breakolate, from breakfast and chocolate, and Chally as a child’s name, a compound of two sisters, Charity and Sally.
VII.—§ 6. Word-division.
We are so accustomed to see sentences in writing or print with a little space left after each word, that we have got altogether wrong conceptions of language as it is spoken. Here words follow one another without the least pause till the speaker hesitates for a word or has come to the end of what he has to say. ‘Not at all’ sounds like ‘not a tall.’ It therefore requires in many cases a great deal of comparison and analysis on the part of the child to find out what is one and what two or three words. We have seen before that the question ‘How big is the boy?’ is to the child a single expression, beyond his powers of analysis, and to a much later age it is the same with other phrases. The child, then, may make false divisions, and either treat a group of words as one word or one word as a group of words. A girl (2.6) used the term ‘Tanobijeu’ whenever she wished her younger brother to get out of her way. Her parents finally discovered that she had caught up and shortened a phrase that some older children had used—‘’Tend to your own business’ (O’Shea).
A child, addressing her cousin as ‘Aunt Katie,’ was told “I am not Aunt Katie, I am merely Katie.” Next day she said: “Good-morning, Aunt merely-Katie” (translated). A child who had been praised with the words, ‘You are a good boy,’ said to his mother, “You’re a good boy, mother” (2.8).
Cecil H. (4.0) came back from a party and said that she had been given something very nice to eat. “What was it?” “Rats.” “No, no.” “Well, it was mice then.” She had been asked if she would have ‘some-ice,’ and had taken it to be ‘some mice.’ S. L. (2.6) constantly used ‘ababana’ for ‘banana’; the form seems to have come from the question “Will you have a banana?” but was used in such a sentence as “May I have an ababana?” Children will often say napple for apple through a misdivision of an-apple, and normous for enormous; cf. Ch. X § [2].
A few examples may be added from children’s speech in other countries. Ronjat’s child said nésey for ‘échelle,’ starting from u'ne‿échelle; Grammont’s child said un tarbre, starting from cet arbre, and ce nos for ‘cet os,’ from un os; a German child said motel for ‘hotel,’ starting from the combination ‘im‿(h)‿otel’ (Stern). Many German children say arrhöe, because they take the first syllable of ‘diarrhöe’ as the feminine article. A Dutch child heard the phrase ‘’k weet ’t niet’ (‘I don’t know’), and said “Papa, hij kweet ’t niet” (Van Ginneken). A Danish child heard his father say, “Jeg skal op i ministeriet” (“I’m going to the Government office”), and took the first syllable as min (my); consequently he asked, “Skal du i dinisteriet?” A French child was told that they expected Munkácsy (the celebrated painter, in French pronounced as Mon-), and asked his aunt: “Est-ce que ton Kácsy ne viendra pas?” Antoinette K. (7.), in reply to “C’est bien, je te félicite,” said, “Eh bien, moi je ne te fais pas licite.”
The German ‘Ich habe antgewortet’ is obviously on the analogy of angenommen, etc. (Meringer). Danish children not unfrequently take the verb telefonere as two words, and in the interrogative form will place the personal pronoun in the middle of it, ‘Tele hun fonerer?’ (‘Does she telephone?’) A girl asked to see ele mer fant (as if in English she had said ‘ele more phant’). Cf. ‘Give me more handier-cap’ for ‘Give me a greater handicap’—in a foot-race (O’Shea 108).
VII.—§ 7. Sentences.
In the first period the child knows nothing of grammar: it does not connect words together, far less form sentences, but each word stands by itself. ‘Up’ means what we should express by a whole sentence, ‘I want to get up,’ or ‘Lift me up’; ‘Hat’ means ‘Put on my hat,’ or ‘I want to put my hat on,’ or ‘I have my hat on,’ or ‘Mamma has a new hat on’; ‘Father’ can be either ‘Here comes Father,’ or ‘This is Father,’ or ‘He is called Father,’ or ‘I want Father to come to me,’ or ‘I want this or that from Father.’ This particular group of sounds is vaguely associated with the mental picture of the person in question, and is uttered at the sight of him or at the mere wish to see him or something else in connexion with him.
When we say that such a word means what we should express by a whole sentence, this does not amount to saying that the child’s ‘Up’ is a sentence, or a sentence-word, as many of those who have written about these questions have said. We might just as well assert that clapping our hands is a sentence, because it expresses the same idea (or the same frame of mind) that is otherwise expressed by the whole sentence ‘This is splendid.’ The word ‘sentence’ presupposes a certain grammatical structure, which is wanting in the child’s utterance.