The idiom of these twins cannot, of course, be called an independent, still less a complete or fully developed language; but if they were able to produce something so different from the language spoken around them at the beginning of the twentieth century and in a civilized country, there can to my mind be no doubt that Hale is right in his contention that children left to themselves even more than these were, in an uninhabited region where they were still not liable to die from hunger or cold, would be able to develop a language for their mutual understanding that might become so different from that of their parents as really to constitute a new stock of language. So that we can now pass to the other—geographical—side of what Hale advances in favour of his theory.
So far as I can see, the facts here tally very well with the theory. Take, on the one hand, the Eskimo languages, spoken with astonishingly little variation from the east coast of Greenland to Alaska, an immense stretch of territory in which small children if left to themselves would be sure to die very soon indeed. Or take the Finnish-Ugrian languages in the other hemisphere, exhibiting a similar close relationship, though spread over wide areas. And then, on the other hand, the American languages already adduced by Hale. I do not pretend to any deeper knowledge of these languages; but from the most recent works of very able specialists I gather an impression of the utmost variety in phonetics, in grammatical structure and in vocabulary; see especially Roland B. Dixon and Alfred L. Kroeber, “The Native Languages of California,” in the American Anthropologist, 1903. Even where recent research seems to establish some kind of kinship between families hitherto considered as distinguished stocks (as in Dixon’s interesting paper, “Linguistic Relationships within the Shasta-Achomawi Stock,” XV Congrès des Américanistes, 1906) the similarities are still so incomplete, so capricious and generally so remote that they seem to support Hale’s explanation rather than a gradual splitting of the usual kind.
As for Brazil, I shall quote some interesting remarks from C. F. P. v. Martius, Beiträge zur Ethnographie u. Sprachenkunde Amerika’s, 1867, i. p. 46: “In Brazil we see a scant and unevenly distributed native population, uniform in bodily structure, temperament, customs and manner of living generally, but presenting a really astonishing diversity in language. A language is often confined to a few mutually related individuals; it is in truth a family heirloom and isolates its speakers from all other people so as to render any attempt at understanding impossible. On the vessel in which we travelled up the rivers in the interior of Brazil, we often, among twenty Indian rowers, could count only three or four that were at all able to speak together ... they sat there side by side dumb and stupid.”
Hale’s theory is worthy, then, of consideration, and now, at the close of our voyage round the world of children’s language, we have gained a post of vantage from which we can overlook the whole globe and see that the peculiar word-forms which children use in their ‘little language’ period can actually throw light on the distribution of languages and groups of languages over the great continents. Yes,
Scorn not the little ones! You oft will find
They reach the goal, when great ones lag behind.