LANGUAGE STUDY AND LANGUAGE PSYCHOLOGY 381 



phrase at once, as the mind, not the eye, sees a complete circle of fire 

 when the burning tip of a reed is turned rapidly about. False phrasing 

 is like the false word division that misled Mr. Pickwick, the antiquarian, 

 when confronted with the inscription 



+ 



BILST 



UM 



PSHI 



S.M. 



AEK. 



It may seem de trop for an Englishman to indicate gender and 

 Dumber in his adjectives, but all the Eomance peoples do it, and a 

 German further indicates case. My experience as a teacher has shown 

 me that the Latin ablative absolute, when you allow a slovenly transla- 

 tion, is a thing the dullest student fails not to recognize. Given the 

 full phrase, and it is a blunder to give a student less, there is little 

 more likelihood that even a dullard would, in our Caesar sentence, for 

 one moment think of the dative than the average reader would be likely 

 to think of " bier " if he heard the sentence " Malt was used in making 

 this beer." The fact is that what is theoretically equivocal in language 

 is rarely so in experience. So true is this that only a few years ago 

 French scholars went to the extreme of denying in toto the possibility 

 of conscious effort to avoid verbal confusion : as though the whole 

 stylistic juggle with synonyms — a phenomenon, to be sure, scarcely to 

 be reckoned with in unlettered speech — did not look the other way. 



On this point, I can contribute an interesting observation of a child's 

 feeling for homonyms. My small niece, still under two, called her 

 father, among other things, something like " baba," and we could not 

 distinguish this name from her pronunciation of " barber," a word she 

 probably had never heard till her little brother Jack went down the street 

 one day to get his hair cut. Several of us, wishing to test whether she 

 also confounded the two individuals, asked her questions like " Did baba 

 cut brother Jack's hair ?" But we never tripped her. The answer was 

 always prompt as rhyme, " No, no, the baba." Were the two " baba's " 

 she pronounced the same to her ear or did her acoustic image of the 

 word " barber " contain the two very slightly trilled r's of our southern 

 accent — though to the best of our observation they formed no part of 

 her vocal reproduction of the image ? Or was the differentiating factor 

 in her mind the article " the " ? The same child was not troubled by 

 shifts in word order. One name she used for her father was " daddy- 

 pops," and in trying to confuse her over the two " babas " I reversed it 

 to " poppy-dads," which she instantly appropriated without a hint of 

 confusion. A very simple shift of order will confuse an adult — 

 perhaps the adult is more easily confused in this way — as I feel con- 

 fused when I read from the Marseillaise hymn — 



