192 



scie:nce. 



[Vol. VIII., No. 18& 



when two children who are just beginning to 

 speak are left much together, they sometimes in- 

 vent a complete language, sufficient for all pur- 

 poses of mutual mtercourse, yet totally unintelli- 

 gible to their parents and others about them. The 

 first to observe, though not the first to publish, an 

 instance of this nature was Miss E. H. Watson, a 

 lady of Boston, the authoress of several esteemed 

 works on historical subjects. In giving to the 

 world, in 1878, a treatise by her father, the late 

 George Watson, on ' The structm-e of language,' 

 she prefixed to it an essay of her own on the 

 ' Origin of language,' in which an interesting 

 account is given of the 'childrens' language.' 

 The children in question were twin boys, born in 

 1860, in a respectable family, residing in a suburb 

 of Boston. They were constantly together, and 

 an intense affection existed between them. "At 

 the usual age," the authoress states, " these twins 

 began to talk, but strange to say, not their 

 ' mother-tongue.' They had a language of their 

 own, and no pains could induce them to speak 

 anything else. They persistently refused to utter 

 a syllable of English. Their mother relates that 

 although she could not understand their language, 

 she contrived, by attention, to discover what they 

 wished or meant." The important information is 

 added that " even in that early stage, the lan- 

 guage was complete and full ; that is, it was all 

 that was needed. The children were at no loss to 

 express themselves in then- plays, — their ' chatter- 

 ings' with each other all day." At last they were 

 sent to a school, where they gradually learned 

 English, as children learn a foreign language, and 

 the memory of their own speech faded from their 

 minds. 



Miss Watson, unfortunately, did not become 

 aware of these circumstances until some time 

 afterwards, when all recollection of this peculiar 

 language was lost, except of a single word. 

 Another observer, at about the same time, was 

 more fortunate. A physician of Albany, Dr. 

 E. R. Hun, in an article published in 1868, in 

 the Monthly journal of psychological medicine, 

 under the title of ' Singular development of lan- 

 guage in a child,' has given a clear and scientific 

 account of a similar phenomenon, with speci- 

 mens of the language. In this case the speech 

 was invented by a little girl, aged four years and 

 a half, in conjunction with her brother, eighteen 

 months younger than herself. About twenty of 

 the words are given, most of which were used in 

 several allied acceptations, — as mea, meaning 

 both cat and furs ; migno-migno, water, wash, 

 bath ; hau, soldier, music ; odo, to send for, to go 

 out, to take away ; waia-waiar, black, darkness, 

 a negro. The language had its own forms of con- 



struction, as in mea waia-waiar, 'dark furs' (lit- 

 erally, ' furs dark ' ), when the adjective follows 

 its substantive. Dr. Hun adds, "She uses her 

 language readily and freely, and when she is with 

 her brother they converse with great rapidity and 

 fluency." 



Further inquiries have shown that such cases of 

 child-language are by no means uncommon apd 

 these cases, it must be considered, are, after all, 

 merely intensified forms of a phenomenon which 

 is of constant recurrence. The inclination of very . 

 young children to employ words and forms of 

 speech of their own is well known, though it is 

 only under peculiar circumstances that this lan- 

 guage acquires the extent and the permanence 

 which it attained in the cases now recorded. 



In the light of the facts which have now been 

 set forth, it becomes evident that, to insure the 

 creation of a speech which shall be the parent of 

 a new linguistic stock, all that is needed is that 

 two or more young children should be placed by 

 themselves in a condition where they will be en- 

 tirely, or in a large degree, free from the presence 

 and influence of their elders. They must, of 

 course, continue in this condition long enough to 

 gi-ow up, to form a household, and to have de- 

 scendants to whom they can communicate their 

 new speech. We have only to inquire under 

 what circumstances an occurrence of this nature 

 can be expected to take place. 



There was once a time when no beings endowed 

 with articulate speech existed on the globe. 

 When such beings appeared, the spi'ead of this 

 human population over the earth would necessa- 

 rily be gradual. So very slow and gi-adual, indeed,^ 

 has it been, that many outlying tracts — Iceland,^ 

 Madeira, the Azores, the Mauritius, St. Helena, 

 the Falkland Islands, Bounty Island, and others — 

 have only been peopled within recent historical 

 times, and some of them during the present cen- 

 tury. This diffusion of population would take 

 place in various ways, and under many different 

 impulses ; — sometimes as the natural result of in- 

 crease and overcrowding, sometimes through the 

 dispersion caused by war, frequently from a spirit 

 of adventm-e, and occasionally by accident, a& 

 when a canoe was drifted on an unknown shore. 

 In most instances, a considerable party, compris- 

 ing many families, would emigrate together. 

 Such a party would carry their language with 

 them ; and the change of speech which theii- isola- 

 tion would produce would be merely a dialectical 

 difference, such as distinguishes the Greek from 

 the Sanscrit, or the Ethiopic from the Arabic. 

 The basis of the language would remain the same. 

 No length of time, so far as can be inferred from 

 the present state of our knowledge, would suffice 



