33 
The development of the child repeats the history of the race. Let 
us turn to some of the more remarkable phases of the development of 
natural nursery language, of which the full importance was first 
recognised by Dr. Horatio Hale in his Presidental address to the 
Philological Section of the American Association for the Advancement: 
of Science in 1886. Max Muller states in his “Science of Language” 
that children do not invent a language of their own. Dr. Hale cites 
two cases of children born with a speech inventing faculty. In one 
instance twin boys invented and conversed in an intelligible language 
of their own for several years. They had ultimately to be forced to 
learn their mother tongue like a foreign language. In another case a 
little girl four and a half years old invented a language with her 
younger brother. The syntax in these children’s language differs as 
well as the vocabularies and resembles the syntax of deaf mutes and 
gesture language. The adjective qualifies the noun and comes after it, 
The object before the action. Still more significant is the fact that one 
word has several allied meanings. In another case, noted by Herr A. 
Von Gablentz, of a child who called things also by names of his own 
invention before he learned his mother tongue, we get the remarkable 
fact of the employment of different vowels to denote smallness or 
greatness. This child called a little doll’s chair Mikill; an ordinary 
chair likal ; and a great arm chair dukull. His root for round objects 
was m-n. He called the stars min, min, min, a watch or plate mem, a 
round table mum. This is an extremely interesting case of natural 
vowel modification. Dr. Tylor had previously pointed out that any 
child can see that a scale of vowels makes a most impressive scale of 
distances, and that many pronouns and adverbs have probably arisen 
from this simple device, although the same vowel is not always employed 
to denote nearness or to signify remoteness. His list of sounds for “this ” 
and “that,” “here” and “there,” is a very interesting one, and 
could be considerably extended.* It would seem as though the 
_eréches of our large towns offer unusual facilities for the study of so 
peculiar a branch of philological enquiry as the spontaneous develop- 
ment of roots and the order of the production of the consonants and 
their natural alternations, although the conditions might not facilitate 
calm scientific observation. But the children of the poor are for 
obvious reasons brought up by children of but little larger growth, 
and the use of such spontaneous root-words might, therefore, be pro- 
longed among them. Directly the children mix with adults their 
special language dies out, often, probably, umreccrded. Archdeacon 
arrar had noted that the neglected children in some of the Canadian 
and Indian villages, who are left alone for days together, do invent a 
language for themselves, and African children are known to develop a 
special language also under similar circumstances. Like Winchester 
school boys, the younger members of some African communities speak 
a different language among themselves before they are admitted as 
members of the tribe. Special hunting and war jargons are occasionally 
invented by adult savages distinct from their every day speech, and 
they really seem to delight in puns and shifting word development. 
* See ‘‘ Primitive Culture,” by E. B. Tylor, 
