These conditions he finds among the hunting tribes of America, in which it is common for single families to wander off from the main band. “In modern times, when the whole country is occupied, their flight would merely carry them into the territory of another tribe, among whom, if well received, they would quickly be absorbed. But in the primitive period, when a vast uninhabited region stretched before them, it would be easy for them to find some sheltered nook or fruitful valley.... If under such circumstances disease or the casualties of a hunter’s life should carry off the parents, the survival of the children would, it is evident, depend mainly upon the nature of the climate and the ease with which food could be procured at all seasons of the year. In ancient Europe, after the present climatal conditions were established, it is doubtful if a family of children under ten years of age could have lived through a single winter. We are not, therefore, surprised to find that no more than four or five language stocks are represented in Europe.... Of Northern America, east of the Rocky Mountains and north of the tropics, the same may be said.... But there is one region where Nature seems to offer herself as the willing nurse and bountiful stepmother of the feeble and unprotected ... California. Its wonderful climate (follows a long description).... Need we wonder that, in such a mild and fruitful region, a great number of separate tribes were found, speaking languages which a careful investigation has classed in nineteen distinct linguistic stocks?” In Oregon, and in the interior of Brazil, Hale finds similar climatic conditions with the same result, a great number of totally dissimilar languages, while in Australia, whose climate is as mild as that of any of these regions, we find hundreds, perhaps thousands, of petty tribes, as completely isolated as those of South America, but all speaking languages of the same stock—because “the other conditions are such as would make it impossible for an isolated group of young children to survive. The whole of Australia is subject to severe droughts, and is so scantily provided with edible products that the aborigines are often reduced to the greatest straits.”
This, then, is Hale’s theory. Let us now look a little closer into the proofs adduced. They are, as it will be seen, of a twofold order. He invokes the language-creating tendencies of young children on the one hand, and on the other the geographical distribution of linguistic stocks or genera.
As to the first, it is true that so competent a psychologist as Wundt denies the possibility in very strong terms.[41] But facts certainly do not justify this foregone conclusion. I must first refer the reader to Hale’s own report of the five instances known to him. Unfortunately, the linguistic material collected by him is so scanty that we can form only a very imperfect idea of the languages which he says children have developed and of the relation between them and the language of the parents. But otherwise his report is very instructive, and I shall call special attention to the fact that in most cases the children seem to have been ‘spoilt’ by their parents; this is also the case with regard to one of the families, though it does not appear from Hale’s own extracts from the book in which he found his facts (G. Watson, Universe of Language, N.Y., 1878).
The only word recorded in this case is nī-si-boo-a for ‘carriage’; how that came into existence, I dare not conjecture; but when it is said that the syllables of it were sometimes so repeated that they made a much longer word, this agrees very well with what I have myself observed with regard to ordinary children’s playful word-coinages. In the next case, described by E. R. Hun, M.D., of Albany, more words are given. Some of these bear a strong resemblance to French, although neither the parents nor servants spoke that language; and Hale thinks that some person may have “amused herself, innocently enough, by teaching the child a few words of that tongue.” This, however, does not seem necessary to explain the words recorded. Feu, pronounced, we are told, like the French word, signified ‘fire, light, cigar, sun’: it may be either E. fire or else an imitation of the sound fff without a vowel, or [fə·] used in blowing out a candle or a match or in smoking, so as to amuse the child, exactly as in the case of one of my little Danish friends, who used fff as the name for ‘smoke, steam,’ and later for ‘funnel, chimney,’ and finally anything standing upright against the sky, for instance, a flagstaff. Petee-petee, the name which the Albany girl gave to her brother, and which Dr. Hun derived from F. petit, may be just as well from E. pet or petty; and to explain her word for ‘I,’ ma, we need not go to F. moi, as E. me or my may obviously be thus distorted by any child. Her word for ‘not’ is said to have been ne-pas, though the exact pronunciation is not given. This cannot have been taken from the French, at any rate not from real French, as ne and pas are here separated, and ne is more often than not pronounced without the vowel or omitted altogether; the girl’s word, if pronounced something like ['nepa·] may be nothing else than an imperfect childish pronunciation of never, cf. the negroes’ form nebber. Too, ‘all, everything,’ of course resembles Fr. tout, but how should anyone have been able to teach this girl, who did not speak any intelligible language, a French word of this abstract character? Some of the other words admit of a natural explanation from English: go-go, ‘delicacy, as sugar, candy or dessert,’ is probably goody-goody, or a reduplicated form of good; deer, ‘money,’ may be from dear, ‘expensive’; odo, ‘to send for, to go out, to take away,’ is evidently out, as in ma odo, ‘I want to go out’; gaän, ‘God,’ must be the English word, in spite of the difference in pronunciation, for the child would never think of inventing this idea on its own accord; pa-ma, ‘to go to sleep, pillow, bed,’ is from by-bye or an independent word of the mamma-class; mea, ‘cat, fur,’ of course is imitative of the sound of the cat. For the rest of the words I have no conjectures to offer. Some of the derived meanings are curious, though perhaps not more startling than many found in the speech of ordinary children; papa and mamma separately had their usual signification, but papa-mamma meant ‘church, prayer-book, cross, priest’: the parents were punctual in church observances; gar odo, ‘horse out, to send for the horse,’ came to mean ‘pencil and paper,’ as the father used, when the carriage was wanted, to write an order and send it to the stable. In the remaining three cases of ‘invented’ languages no specimens are given, except shindikik, ‘cat.’ In all cases the children seem to have talked together fluently when by themselves in their own gibberish.
But there exists on record a case better elucidated than Hale’s five cases, namely that of the Icelandic girl Sæunn. (See Jonasson and Eschricht in Dansk Maanedsskrift, Copenhagen, 1858.) She was born in the beginning of the last century on a farm in Húnavatns-syssel in the northern part of Iceland, and began early to converse with her twin brother in a language that was entirely unintelligible to their surroundings. Her parents were disquieted, and therefore resolved to send away the brother, who died soon afterwards. They now tried to teach the girl Icelandic, but soon (too soon, evidently!) came to the conclusion that she could not learn it, and then they were foolish enough to learn her language, as did also her brothers and sisters and even some of their friends. In order that she might be confirmed, her elder brother translated the catechism and acted as interpreter between the parson and the girl. She is described as intelligent—she even composed poetry in her own language—but shy and distrustful. Jonasson gives a few specimens of her language, some of which Eschricht succeeds in interpreting as based on Icelandic words, though strangely disfigured. The language to Jonasson, who had heard it, seemed totally dissimilar to Icelandic in sounds and construction; it had no flexions, and lacked pronouns. The vocabulary was so limited that she very often had to supplement a phrase by means of nods or gestures; and it was difficult to carry on a conversation with her in the dark. The ingenuity of some of the compounds and metaphors is greatly admired by Jonasson, though to the more sober mind of Eschricht they appear rather childish or primitive, as when a ‘wether’ is called mepok-ill from me (imitation of the sound) + pok, ‘a little bag’ (Icel. poki) + ill, ‘to cut.’ The only complete sentence recorded is ‘Dirfa offo nonona uhuh,’ which means: ‘Sigurdur gets up extremely late.’ In his analysis of the whole case Eschricht succeeds in stripping it of the mystical glamour in which it evidently appeared to Jonasson as well as to the girl’s relatives; he is undoubtedly right in maintaining that if the parents had persisted in only talking Icelandic to her, she would soon have forgotten her own language; he compares her words with some strange disfigurements of Danish which he had observed among children in his own family and acquaintanceship.
I read this report a good many years ago, and afterwards I tried on two occasions to obtain precise information about similar cases I had seen mentioned, one in Halland (Sweden) and the other in Finland, but without success. But in 1903, when I was lecturing on the language of children in the University of Copenhagen, I had the good fortune to hear of a case not far from Copenhagen of two children speaking a language of their own. I investigated the case as well as I could, by seeing and hearing them several times and thus checking the words and sentences which their teacher, who was constantly with them, kindly took down in accordance with my directions. I am thus enabled to give a fairly full account of their language, though unfortunately my investigation was interrupted by a long voyage in 1904.
The boys were twins, about five and a half years old when I saw them, and so alike that even the people who were about them every day had difficulty in distinguishing them from each other. Their mother (a single woman) neglected them shamefully when they were quite small, and they were left very much to shift for themselves. For a long time, while their mother was ill in a hospital, they lived in an out-of-the-way place with an old woman, who is said to have been very deaf, and who at any rate troubled herself very little about them. When they were four years old, the parish authorities discovered how sadly neglected they were and that they spoke quite unintelligibly, and therefore sent them to a ‘children’s home’ in Seeland, where they were properly taken care of. At first they were extremely shy and reticent, and it was a long time before they felt at home with the other children. When I first saw them, they had in so far learnt the ordinary language that they were able to understand many everyday sentences spoken to them, and could do what they were told (e.g. ‘Take the footstool and put it in my room near the stove’), but they could not speak Danish and said very little in the presence of anybody else. When they were by themselves they conversed pretty freely and in a completely unintelligible gibberish, as I had the opportunity to convince myself when standing behind a door one day when they thought they were not observed. Afterwards I got to be in a way good friends with them—they called me py-ma, py being their word for ‘smoke, smoking, pipe, cigar,’ so that I got my name from the chocolate cigars which I used to ingratiate myself with them—and then I got them to repeat words and phrases which their teacher had written out for me, and thus was enabled to write down everything phonetically.
An analysis of the sounds occurring in their words showed me that their vocal organs were perfectly normal. Most of the words were evidently Danish words, however much distorted and shortened; a voiceless l, which does not occur in Danish, and which I write here lh, was a very frequent sound. This, combined with an inclination to make many words end in -p, was enough to disguise words very effectually, as when sort (black) was made lhop. I shall give the children’s pronunciations of the names of some of their new playfellows, adding in brackets the Danish substratum: lhep (Svend), lhip (Vilhelm), lip (Elisabeth), lop (Charlotte), bap (Mandse); similarly the doctor was called dop. In many cases there was phonetic assimilation at a distance, as when milk (mælk) was called bep, flower (blomst) bop, light (lys) lhylh, sugar (sukker) lholh, cold (kulde) lhulh, sometimes also ulh, bed (seng) sæjs, fish (fisk) se-is.
I subjoin a few complete sentences: nina enaj una enaj hæna mad enaj, ‘we shall not fetch food for the young rabbits’: nina rabbit (kanin), enaj negation (nej, no), repeated several times in each negative sentence, as in Old English and in Bantu languages, una young (unge). Bap ep dop, ‘Mandse has broken the hobby-horse,’ literally ‘Mandse horse piece.’ Hos ia bov lhalh, ‘brother’s trousers are wet, Maria,’ literally ‘trousers Maria brother water.’ The words are put together without any flexions, and the word order is totally different from that of Danish.
Only in one case was I unable to identify words that I understood either as ‘little language’ forms of Danish words or else as sound-imitations; but then it must be remembered that they spoke a good deal that neither I nor any of the people about them could make anything of. And then, unfortunately, when I began to study it, their language was already to a great extent ‘humanized’ in comparison to what it was when they first came to the children’s home. In fact, I noticed a constant progress during the short time I observed the boys, and in some of the last sentences I have noted, I even find the genitive case employed.