STUDIES OF CHILDHOOD. 783 



before the verb, as apparently in the following example given by 

 Miss Shinn : A little girl, delighted at the j^rospect of going out 

 to see the moon, exclaimed, " Moo'-'ky (sky) baby shee " (see).* 

 Another kind of inversion occurs when more complex experiences 

 are attempted, as in connecting " my " with an adjective. Thus 

 one child said prettily, " Poor my friends." f 



These inversions of our familiar order are suggestive. They 

 have some resemblance to the curious order which appears in the 

 spontaneous sign-making of deaf-mutes. Thus a deaf-mute an- 

 swered the question, Who made God ? by saying, " God made 

 nothing'' i. e,, "nothing made God." Similarly the deaf-mute 

 Laura Bridgman expressed the petition " Give Laura bread " by 

 the form " Laura bread give," J Such inversions, as we know, are 

 common in certain languages e. g., Latin. The study of the syn- 

 tax of child language and of the sign-making of deaf-mutes might 

 suggest that our English order is not the spontaneous or natural 

 order of expression,* 



A somewhat similar inversion of what seems to us the proper 

 order appears in the child's first attempts at negation. The child 

 C early in his third year expressed the idea that he was not go- 

 ing into the sea thus : " No (his name) go in water, no." Similarly 

 Pollock's child expressed acquiescence in a prohibition in this 

 manner : " Baby have papa (pepper) no," where the " no " followed 

 without a pause. The same order appears in the case of French 

 children : e, g., " Papa non " i. e,, " It is not papa," and seems to 

 be a common if not a universal form of the first half-spontaneous 

 sentence-building. Here, again, we see an analogy to the syntax 

 of deaf-mutes, who appear to append the sign of negation in a 

 similar way : e. g., " Teacher I beat, deceive, scold, no " i. e., " I 

 must not beat, deceive, scold my teacher," In the use of special 

 signs of affirmation the correspondence seems less close. Thus 

 Pollock's child was wont to emphasize a positive statement in 

 this way : " Es, es (yes, yes), baby's book there," The deaf-mute 

 appears in such cases to append the affirmative sign. 



Another closely related characteristic of this early childish 

 sentence-building is the love of antithesis under the form of two 

 balancing statements. Thus a child will often oppose an affirma- 

 tive to a negative statement as a means of bringing out the full 



* Notes on the Development of a Child, p. 84. 



\ Canton, The Invisible Playmate, p. 32 ; who adds that this exactly answers to the 

 form " Good, my lord ! " 



\ See Romanes, op. cif., p. 116 f , where other examples may be found. 



* The languages of savages appear to differ like those of civilized races in respect of 

 order, the succession substantive, verb, attributive, as in " John is good," appeai-ing along- 

 sideof the inverse e. g., " Good is John," See article L'Importance des Langues Sauvages, 

 Revue Philosophique, 1894, p. 465 fP. 



