ARTICULATION, I4I 



It compiises, in fact, only twenty-one distinct words, though 

 many of these were used in a great variety of acceptations, 

 indicated by the order in which they were arranged, or by 

 compounding them in various ways. . . . 



" Three or four of the words, as Dr. Hun remarks, bear an 

 evident resemblance to tl^e French, and others might, by a 

 slight change, be traced to that language. He was unable, it 

 will be seen, to say positively that the girl had never heard 

 the language spoken ; and it seems not unlikely that, if not 

 among the domestics, at least among the persons who visited 

 them, there may have been one who amused herself, innocently 

 enough, by teaching the child a few words of that tongue. It 

 is, indeed, by no means improbable that the peculiar linguistic 

 instinct may thus have been first aroused in the mind of the 

 girl, when just beginning to speak. Among the words show- 

 ing this resemblance are feu (pronounced, we are expressly 

 told, like the French word), used to signify 'fire, light, cigar, 

 sun ; ' too (the French ' tout '), meaning ' all, everything ; * and ne 

 pa (whether pronounced as in French, or otherwise, we are 

 not told), signifying 'not' Petee-petce, the name given to 

 the boy by his sister, is apparently the French ' petit,' little ; 

 and ma, ' I,' may be from the French ' moi,' ' me.' If, however, 

 the child was really able to catch and remember so readily 

 these foreign sounds at such an early age, and to interweave 

 them into a speech of her own, it would merely show how 

 readily and strongly in her case the language-making faculty 

 was developed. 



" Of w^ords formed by imitation of sounds, the language 

 shows barely a trace. The mewing of the cat evidently sug- 

 gested the word mea^ which signified both ' cat ' and ' furs.' For 

 the other vocables which make up this speech, no origin can 

 be conjectured. We can merely notice that in some of the 

 words the liking which children and some races of men have 

 for the repetition of sounds is apparent. Thus we have migno- 

 migno^ signifying ' water, wash, bath ; ' ^o-go, ' delicacies, as 

 sugar, candy, or dessert,' and waia-waiar, * black, darkness, or 

 a negro.' There is, as will be seen from these examples, no 



