Children may use verbs with an object which require a preposition (‘Will you wait me?’), or which are only used intransitively (‘Will you jump me?’), or they may mix up an infinitival with a direct construction (‘Could you hear me sneezed?’). But it is surely needless to multiply examples.
When many years ago, in my Progress in Language, I spoke of the advantages, even to natives, of simplicity in linguistic structure, Professor Herman Möller, in a learned review, objected to me that to the adult learning a foreign tongue the chief difficulty consists in “the countless chicaneries due to the tyrannical and capricious usage, whose tricks there is no calculating; but these offer to the native child no such difficulty as morphology may,” and again, in speaking of the choice of various prepositions, which is far from easy to the foreigner, he says: “But any considerable mental exertion on the part of the native child learning its mother-tongue is here, of course, out of the question.” Such assertions as these cannot be founded on actual observation; at any rate, it is my experience in listening to children’s talk that long after they have reached the point where they make hardly any mistake in pronunciation and verbal forms, etc., they are still capable of using many turns of speech which are utterly opposed to the spirit of the language, and which are in the main of the same kind as those which foreigners are apt to fall into. Many of the child’s mistakes are due to mixtures or blendings of two turns of expression, and not a few of them may be logically justified. But learning a language implies among other things learning what you may not say in the language, even though no reasonable ground can be given for the prohibition.
[CHAPTER VIII]
SOME FUNDAMENTAL PROBLEMS
§ 1. Why is the Native Language learnt so well? § 2. Natural Ability and Sex. § 3. Mother-tongue and Other Tongue. § 4. Playing at Language. § 5. Secret Languages. § 6. Onomatopœia. § 7. Word-inventions. § 8. ‘Mamma’ and ‘Papa.’
VIII.—§ 1. Why is the Native Language learnt so well?
How does it happen that children in general learn their mother-tongue so well? That this is a problem becomes clear when we contrast a child’s first acquisition of its mother-tongue with the later acquisition of any foreign tongue. The contrast is indeed striking and manifold: here we have a quite little child, without experience or prepossessions; there a bigger child, or it may be a grown-up person with all sorts of knowledge and powers: here a haphazard method of procedure; there the whole task laid out in a system (for even in the schoolbooks that do not follow the old grammatical system there is a certain definite order of progress from more elementary to more difficult matters): here no professional teachers, but chance parents, brothers and sisters, nursery-maids and playmates; there teachers trained for many years specially to teach languages: here only oral instruction; there not only that, but reading-books, dictionaries and other assistance. And yet this is the result: here complete and exact command of the language as a native speaks it, however stupid the children; there, in most cases, even with people otherwise highly gifted, a defective and inexact command of the language. On what does this difference depend?
The problem has never been elucidated or canvassed from all sides, but here and there one finds a partial answer, often given out to be a complete answer. Often one side of the question only is considered, that which relates to sounds, as if the whole problem had been solved when one had found a reason for children acquiring a better pronunciation of their mother-tongue than one generally gets in later life of a foreign speech.
Many people accordingly tell us that children’s organs of speech are especially flexible, but that this suppleness of the tongue and lips is lost in later life. This explanation, however, does not hold water, as is shown sufficiently by the countless mistakes in sound made by children. If their organs were as flexible as is pretended, they could learn sounds correctly at once, while as a matter of fact it takes a long time before all the sounds and groups of sounds are imitated with tolerable accuracy. Suppleness is not something which is original, but something acquired later, and acquired with no small difficulty, and then only with regard to the sounds of one’s own language, and not universally.