782 THiJ POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



This sentence construction begins with a certain timidity. The 

 age at which such conversation is first observed varies greatly. It 

 seems in most cases to be somewhere about the twenty-first month ; 

 yet a friend of mine, a professor of literature, tells me that his 

 boy formed simple sentences as early as fifteen months. We 

 commonly have at first two-worded sentences formed by two 

 words in apposition. These may be what we should call an ad- 

 jective added to and qualifying a substantive, as in the simple 



utterance of the child C , "Big bir" (bird), or the exclamation 



" Papa no " (papa's nose) ; or they may arise by a combination of 

 substantives, as in the sentence given by Tracy, " Papa cacker " 

 i. e., " Papa has crackers " ; and one quoted by Preyer, " Auntie 

 cake " (German, " Danna Kuha " i. e., " Tante Kuclie ") for 

 " Auntie has given me cake " ; and in a somewhat different ex- 

 ample of a compound sentence also given by Preyer, " Home 

 milk " (German, " Haim Mimi "'), which interpreted is " I want 

 to go home and have milk."' In the case of one child about the 

 age of twenty-three months most of the sentences were composed 

 of two words, one of which corresponded to our verb in the im- 

 perative, as " go ! " 



Little by little the learner manages longer sentences, econo- 

 mizing his resources to the utmost, troubling nothing about in- 

 flections or the insertion of prepositions, so as to indicate precise 

 relations ; but leaving his hearer to discover his meaning as best 

 he may ; and it is truly wonderful what the child manages to 

 express in this rude fashion. Pollock's little girl in the first 

 essay at sentence-building, recorded at the age of twenty-one 

 months and a half, actually managed a neat antithesis : " Cabs 

 dati, clam clin " that is to say, " Cabs are dirty, and the per- 

 ambulator is clean." Preyer's boy, in the beginning of the third 

 year, brought out the following : " Mimi atta teppa papa oi " that 

 is to say, " Milch atta Teppich Papa fui,'' which appears to have 

 signified, " The milk is gone, it is on the carpet, and papa said 

 ' Fie.' " 



The order of words in these first juxtapositions is noticeable. 

 It frequently differs from what we should suppose to be the 

 natural order. Sometimes the subject follows the predicate, as in 

 an example given by Pollock: "Run away man" i.e., "The 

 man runs " or " has run away '' ; and in the still quainter example 

 given by the same writer, " Out-pull-baby 'pecs (spectacles) " 

 i. e., " Baby pulls or will pull out the spectacles." In like man- 

 ner the attributive (adjective used as predicate) may precede the 

 subject, as in the examj^les given by Maillet, " JoJie la fleur" 

 (pretty flower), and so on.* Sometimes, again, the object comes 



* Quoted by Compayre, L'Evolution intellectuelle et morale de I'Enfant, p. '206. 



