784 TBK POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



meaning of the former. The boy C , for example, would say 



" This a nice bow-wow, not nasty bow-wow." This use of nega- 

 tion by way of contrast or opposition took an odd form in the 

 case of one child, who, at the age of two years and two months, 

 would describe things by negations. Thus an orange was de- 

 scribed by saying, " No, 'tisn't apple " ; porridge, by saying, " No, 

 'tisn't bread and milk." It is interesting to note that deaf-mutes 

 proceed in a similar fashion by way of antithetic negative state- 

 ment. One of these expressed the thought, " I must love and 

 honor my teacher," by the order, " Teacher I beat, deceive, scold, 

 no ! I love, honor, yes ! " * 



These first essays in sentence-building illustrate the skill of the 

 child in eking out its scanty vocabulary by the help of a meta- 

 phorical transference of meaning. Taine gives a charming ex- 

 ample of this. A little girl of eighteen months had acquired the 

 word " coucou" as used by her mother or nurse when playfully 

 hiding behind a door or chair, and the expression " ga hrule " as 

 employed to warn her that her dinner was too hot, or that she 

 must put on her hat in the garden to keep off the hot sun. One 

 day, on seeing the sun disappear behind a hill, she exclaimed, " A 

 bule coucou." f 



It is a tremendous moment when the child first tries its hand 

 at inflections, and more especially, in our language, those of verbs. 

 Pollock's child made the attempt, and successfully, at the age of 

 twenty-two months. Such first essays are probably perfectly imi- 

 tative, the precise form used having been previously heard from 

 others. Hence, Avhile they show a growing thought-power, a 

 differencing of relations of number and time, they do not involve 

 verbal construction proper. This appears as soon as the child 

 carries over his knowledge of particular cases of verbal inflection 

 and applies it to new words. This involves a nascent apprecia- 

 tion of the reason or rule according to which words are modified. 

 The development of this feeling for the general mode of verbal 

 change underlies all the later advance in correct speaking. 



While the little explorer in the terra incognita of language 

 can proceed safely in this direction up to a certain point, he is 

 apt, as we all know, to stumble now and again ; nor is this to be 

 wondered at when we remember the intricacies, the irregularities, 

 which characterize a language like ours. In trying, for example, 

 to manage the preterit of an English verb, he is certain, as in- 

 deed is the foreigner, to go wrong. The direction of the errors is 

 often in the transformation of the weak to the strong form ; as 



* A curious example of negative antithesis is given by Perez, op. cif., p. 196. On other 

 analogies between the syntax of children and deaf-mutes, see Compayrj, oj). ci'., p. 251 f. 

 f On Intelligence, j)art i, book i, chaps, ii, vi. 



