788 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



alongside of the proper name, the child, for example, saying some- 

 times " baby " or " Ilda," sometimes " I " or " me." In some cases, 

 again, the two forms are used at the same time in opposition, as in 

 the delightful form not unknown in older folk's language, " Hilda, 

 my book." The forms " I " and " me," are, moreover, confined at 

 first to a few expressions, as " I am " " I went," and so forth. The 



dropping of the old forms, as may be seen by a glance at C 's 



lingual jargon and at Preyer's correct diary, is a gradual process. 



Quaint solecisms mark the first stages in the use of these pro- 

 nouns. As in the case of the earlier use of substantives, one and 

 the same form will be used economically for a variety of mean- 

 ings, as when " me " was used by the boy C to do duty for 



" mine " also, and " us " for "ours." Sometimes new and delight- 

 ful forms are added, as when the same little experimenter struck 

 out the possessive form " she's." 



The perfect and free use of these puzzling forms comes much 

 later. Preyer quotes a case in which a child, Olga, aged four 

 years, would say, " She has made me wet," meaning that she her- 

 self had done it. But this perhaps points to that tendency to 

 split up the self into a number of personalities to which reference 

 was made in an earlier chapter. 



There is one part of this child's work of learning our language 

 of which I have said hardly anything viz., the divining of the 

 verbal context, of the meaning we put or try to put into our 

 words. A brief reference to this may well bring this study of 

 childish linguistics to a close. 



The least attention to a child in the process of language-learn- 

 ing will show how much of downright hard work goes to the un- 

 derstanding of language. If we are to judge by the efi^ort re- 

 quired, we might say that the child does as much in deciphering 

 his mother tongue as an Oriental scholar in deciphering a system 

 of hieroglyphics. Just think, for example, how many careful 

 comparisons the small child-brain has to carry out comparisons 

 in the several uses of the word by others in varying circum- 

 stances before he can get anything approaching to a clear idea, 

 answering even to such seemingly simple words as " clean," " old," 

 or " clever." The way in which inquiring children plague us 

 with questions of the form " What does such and such a word 

 mean?" sufficiently shows how much thought-activity goes in 

 the trying to get at meanings. This difficulty, moreover, persists, 

 reappearing in new forms as the child pushes his way onward 

 into the more tangled tracts of the lingual terrane. It is felt, and 

 felt keenly, too, when most of the torments of articulation are 

 over and forgotten. Many of us can remember how certain words 

 haunted us as uncanny forms, into the nature of which we tried 

 hard but in vain to penetrate. 



