In all accounts of children’s talk you find words which cannot be referred back to the normal language, but which have cropped up from some unsounded depth of the child’s soul. I give a few from notes sent to me by Danish friends: goi ‘comb,’ putput ‘stocking, or any other piece of garment,’ i-a-a ‘chocolate,’ gön ‘water to drink, milk’ (kept apart from the usual word vand for water, which she used only for water to wash in), hesh ‘newspaper, book.’ Some such words have become famous in psychological literature because they were observed by Darwin and Taine. Among less famous instances from other books I may mention tibu ‘bird’ (Strümpel), adi ‘cake’ (Ament), be’lum-be’lum ‘toy with two men turning about,’ wakaka ‘soldier,’ nda ‘jar,’ pamma ‘pencil,’ bium ‘stocking’ (Meringer).
An American correspondent writes that his boy was fond of pushing a stick over the carpet after the manner of a carpet-sweeper and called the operation jazing. He coined the word borkens as a name for a particular sort of blocks with which he was accustomed to play. He was a nervous child and his imagination created objects of terror that haunted him in the dark, and to these he gave the name of Boons. This name may, however, be derived from baboons. Mr. Harold Palmer tells me that his daughter (whose native language was French) at an early age used ['fu'wɛ] for ‘soap’ and [dɛ'dɛtʃ] for ‘horse, wooden horse, merry-go-round.’
Dr. F. Poulsen, in his book Rejser og rids (Copenhagen, 1920), says about his two-year-old daughter that when she gets hold of her mother’s fur-collar she will pet it and lavish on it all kinds of tender self-invented names, such as apu or a-fo-me-me. The latter word, “which has all the melodious euphony and vague signification of primitive language,” is applied to anything that is rare and funny and worth rejoicing at. On a summer day’s excursion there was one new a-fo-me-me after the other.
In spite of all this, a point on which all the most distinguished investigators of children’s language of late years are agreed is that children never invent words. Wundt goes so far as to say that “the child’s language is the result of the child’s environment, the child being essentially a passive instrument in the matter” (S 1. 196)—one of the most wrong-headed sentences I have ever read in the works of a great scientist. Meumann says: “Preyer and after him almost every careful observer among child-psychologists have strongly held the view that it is impossible to speak of a child inventing a word.” Similarly Meringer, L 220, Stern, 126, 273, 337 ff., Bloomfield, SL 12.
These investigators seem to have been led astray by expressions such as ‘shape out of nothing,’ ‘invent,’ ‘original creation’ (Urschöpfung), and to have taken this doctrinaire attitude in partial defiance of the facts they have themselves advanced. Expressions like those adduced occur over and over again in their discussions, and Meumann says openly: “Invention demands a methodical proceeding with intention, a conception of an end to be realized.” Of course, if that is necessary it is clear that we can speak of invention of words in the case of a chemist seeking a word for a new substance, and not in the case of a tiny child. But are there not many inventions in the technical world, which we do not hesitate to call inventions, which have come about more or less by chance? Wasn’t it so probably with gunpowder? According to the story it certainly was so with blotting-paper: the foreman who had forgotten to add size to a portion of writing-paper was dismissed, but the manufacturer who saw that the paper thus spoilt could be turned to account instead of the sand hitherto used made a fortune. So according to Meumann blotting-paper has never been ‘invented.’ If in order to acknowledge a child’s creation of a word we are to postulate that it has been produced out of nothing, what about bicycles, fountain-pens, typewriters—each of which was something existing before, carried just a little further? Are they on that account not inventions? One would think not, when one reads these writers on children’s language, for as soon as the least approximation to a word in the normal language is discovered, the child is denied both ‘invention’ and ‘the speech-forming faculty’! Thus Stern (p. 338) says that his daughter in her second year used some words which might be taken as proof of the power to create words, but for the fact that it was here possible to show how these ‘new’ words had grown out of normal words. Eischei, for instance, was used as a verb meaning ‘go, walk,’ but it originated in the words eins, zwei (one, two) which were said when the child was taught to walk. Other examples are given comparable to those mentioned above (106, 115) as mutilations of the first period. Now, even if all those words given by myself and others as original inventions of children could be proved to be similar perversions of ‘real’ words (which is not likely), I should not hesitate to speak of a word-creating faculty, for eischei, ‘to walk,’ is both in form and still more in meaning far enough from eins, zwei to be reckoned a totally new word.
We can divide words ‘invented’ by children into three classes:
A. The child gives both sound and meaning.
B. The grown-up people give the sound, and the child the meaning.
C. The child gives the sound, grown-up people the meaning.