IX.—§ 1. Conflicting Views.
We all know that in historical times languages have been constantly changing, and we have much indirect evidence that in prehistoric times they did the same thing. But when it is asked if these changes, unavoidable as they seem to be, are to be ascribed primarily to children and their defective imitation of the speech of their elders, or if children’s language in general plays no part at all in the history of language, we find linguists expressing quite contrary views, without the question having ever been really thoroughly investigated.
Some hold that the child acquires its language with such perfection that it cannot be held responsible for the changes recorded in the history of languages: others, on the contrary, hold that the most important source of these changes is to be found in the transmission of the language to new generations. How undecided the attitude even of the foremost linguists may be towards the question is perhaps best seen in the views expressed at different times by Sweet. In 1882 he reproaches Paul with paying attention only to the shiftings going on in the pronunciation of the same individual, and not acknowledging “the much more potent cause of change which exists in the fact that one generation can learn the sounds of the preceding one by imitation only. It is an open question whether the modifications made by the individual in a sound he has once learnt, independently of imitation of those around him, are not too infinitesimal to have any appreciable effect” (CP 153). In the same spirit he asserted in 1899 that the process of learning our own language in childhood is a very slow one, “and the results are always imperfect.... If languages were learnt perfectly by the children of each generation, then languages would not change: English children would still speak a language as old at least as ‘Anglo-Saxon,’ and there would be no such languages as French and Italian. The changes in languages are simply slight mistakes, which in the course of generations completely alter the character of the language” (PS 75). But only one year later, in 1900, he maintains that the child’s imitation “is in most cases practically perfect”—“the main cause of sound-change must therefore be sought elsewhere. The real cause of sound-change seems to be organic shifting—failure to hit the mark, the result either of carelessness or sloth ... a slight deviation from the pronunciation learnt in infancy may easily pass unheeded, especially by those who make the same change in their own pronunciation” (H 19 f.). By the term “organic shifting” Sweet evidently, as seen from his preface, meant shifting in the pronunciation of the adult, thus a modification of the sound learnt ‘perfectly’ in childhood. Paul, who in the first edition (1880) of his Prinzipien der Sprachgeschichte did not mention the influence of children, in all the following editions (2nd, 1886, p. 58; 3rd, 1898, p. 58; 4th, 1909, p. 63) expressly says that “die hauptveranlassung zum lautwandel in der übertragung der laute auf neue individuen liegt,” while the shiftings within the same generation are very slight. Paul thus modified his view in the opposite direction of Sweet[32]—and did so under the influence of Sweet’s criticism of his own first view!
When one finds scholars expressing themselves in this manner and giving hardly any reasons for their views, one is tempted to believe that the question is perhaps insoluble, that it is a mere toss-up, or that in the sentence “children’s imitation is nearly perfect” the stress may be laid, according to taste, now on the word nearly, and now on the word perfect. I am, however, convinced that we can get a little farther, though only by breaking up the question, instead of treating it as one vague and indeterminate whole.
IX.—§ 2. Meringer. Analogy.
Among recent writers Meringer has gone furthest into the question, adhering in the main to the general view that, just as in other fields, social, economic, etc., it is grown-up men who take the lead in new developments, so it is grown-up men, and not women or children, who carry things forward in the field of language. In one place he justifies his standpoint by a reference to a special case, and I will take this as the starting-point of my own consideration of the question. He says: “It can be shown by various examples that they [changes in language] are decidedly not due to children. In Ionic, Attic and Lesbian Greek the words for ‘hundreds’ are formed in -kosioi (diakósioi, etc.), while elsewhere (in Doric and Bœotian) they appear as -kátioi. How does the o arise in -kósioi? It is generally said that it comes from o in the ‘tens’ in the termination -konta. Can it be children who have formed the words for hundreds on the model of the words for tens, children under six years old, who are just learning to talk? Such children generally have other things to attend to than to practise themselves in numerals above a hundred.” Similar formations are adduced from Latin, and it is stated that the personal pronouns are especially subject to change, but children do not use the personal pronouns till an age when they are already in firm possession of the language. Meringer then draws the conclusion that the share which children take in bringing about linguistic change is a very small one.
Now, I should like first to remark that even if it is possible to point to certain changes in language which cannot be ascribed to little children, this proves nothing with regard to the very numerous changes which lie outside these limits. And next, that all the cases here mentioned are examples of formation by analogy. But from the very nature of the case, the conditions requisite for the occurrence of such formations are exactly the same in the case of adults and in that of the children. For what are the conditions? Some one feels an impulse to express something, and at the moment has not got the traditional form at command, and so is driven to evolve a form of his own from the rest of the linguistic material. It makes no difference whether he has never heard a form used by other people which expresses what he wants, or whether he has heard the traditional form, but has not got it ready at hand at the moment. The method of procedure is exactly the same whether it takes place in a three-year-old or in an eighty-three-year-old brain: it is therefore senseless to put the question whether formations by analogy are or are not due to children. A formation by analogy is by definition a non-traditional form. It is therefore idle to ask if it is due to the fact that the language is transmitted from generation to generation and to the child’s imperfect repetition of what has been transmitted to it, and Meringer’s argument thus breaks down in every respect.
It must not, of course, be overlooked that children naturally come to invent more formations by analogy than grown-up people, because the latter in many cases have heard the older forms so often that they find a place in their speech without any effort being required to recall them. But that does not touch the problem under discussion; besides, formations by analogy are unavoidable and indispensable, in the talk of all, even of the most ‘grown-up’: one cannot, indeed, move in language without having recourse to forms and constructions that are not directly and fully transmitted to us: speech is not alone reproduction, but just as much new-production, because no situation and no impulse to communication is in every detail exactly the same as what has occurred on earlier occasions.
IX.—§ 3. Herzog’s Theory of Sound Changes.
If, leaving the field of analogical changes, we begin to inquire whether the purely phonetic changes can or must be ascribed to the fact that a new generation has to learn the mother-tongue by imitation, we shall first have to examine an interesting theory in which the question is answered in the affirmative, at least with regard to those phonetic changes which are gradual and not brought about all at once; thus, when in one particular language one vowel, say [e·], is pronounced more and more closely till finally it becomes [i·], as has happened in E. see, formerly pronounced [se·] with the same vowel as in G. see, now [si·]. E. Herzog maintains that such changes happen through transference to new generations, even granted that the children imitate the sound of the grown-up people perfectly. For, it is said, children with their little mouths cannot produce acoustically the same sound as adults, except by a different position of the speech-organs; this position they keep for the rest of their lives, so that when they are grown-up and their mouth is of full size they produce a rather different sound from that previously heard—which altered sound is again imitated by the next generation with yet another position of the organs, and so on. This continuous play of generation v. generation may be illustrated in this way: