918 Dynamic Theory. 



volubility whenever he met someone he knew. He was sent to school 

 and became well educated. Pug-ge-cly was the easiest articulation in 

 this case for organs already formed for articulation, and no doubt ex- 

 pressed some state of the boy's mimd. It illustrates what took place at 

 the beginning of language; such vocal organs as were then possessed be- 

 ing set in motion by conditions of the brain and uttering the cries they 

 were fitted for. * 



It is said of certain villagers in the desert parts of Africa, that often 

 all the able bodied adults are obliged to be away from home for weeks 

 at a time, on long expeditions, leaving the .children in the care of a few 

 infirm old folks. These youngsters, left largely to their own devices, 

 construct language in their own way. ' ' The more voluble condescend 

 to the less precocious, and thus from this* infant Babel proceeds a dia- 

 lect of a host of mongrel words and phrases, joined together without 

 rule, and in the course of one generation the entire character of the 

 language is changed. " (Miiller). This "condescension" to the "less 

 precocious " is significant of the absence of plan or premeditation, and 

 the adoption of the haphazard articulation of infants likely to occur 

 in the earliest formation of language, among people whose mental con- 

 dition never got much beyond that of infancy. Occasionally children, 

 from bashfulness or some unaccountable whim, refuse to learn their 

 mother tongue and invent a speech of their own. Horatio Hale, in an 

 address before the "American Association," discusses this subject and 

 gives some examples 1 . In one case near Boston, twin boys adopted a 

 language of their own, refusing to learn their mother tongue till they 

 were sent to school at the age of six or seven. For a week they were 

 mum, watching and listening to the rest; they then began to talk 

 English and gradually forgot their own language. Another case de- 

 scribed in the Monthly Journal of Psychological Medicine in 1868, is 

 that of a little girl at Albany, N. Y. , who at two years of age began to 

 talk in a language of her own, and constructed a considerable vocabu- 

 lary which was afterwards acquired by a brother 18 months younger than 

 herself, and they used it freely* between themselves, though the boy 

 used some English words to converse with his parents. 



Lubbock observes : " Many names of animals, such as cuckoo, crow, peewit, &c., are evi- 

 dently derived from the sounds made by those birds. Every one admits that such words 

 as bang, crack, purr, whizz, hum, etc., have arisen from the attempt to represent sounds 

 characteristic of the object it is intended to designate. Take again the inarticulate hu- 

 man sounds, sob, sigh, moan, groan, laugh, cough, weep, whoop, shriek, yawn ; or of ani- 

 mals, as cackle, chuckle, gobble, quack, twitter, chirp, coo, hoot, caw, croak, chatter, 

 neigh, whinney, mew, purr, bark, yelp, roar, bellow; the collision of hard bodies: clap, 

 rap, tap, knap, snap, trap, flap, slap, crack, smack, whack, thwack, pat, bat, batter, beat f 

 butt; and again, clash, flash, plash, splash, smash, dash, crash, bang, clang, twang, ring', 

 ding, din, bump, thump, plump, boom, hum, drum, hiss, rustle, bustle, whistle, whisper, 

 murmur, babble, &c. So also sounds denoting certain motions and actions : whirr, whizz, 

 puff, frizz, fly, flit, flow, flutter, patter, clatter, crackle, rattle, bubble, guggle, dabble, 



1 See Popular Science Monthly. 



