THE DEVELOPMENT OF LANGUAGE. *j3 



refeiTecl to, I endeavored to show that the origin of these stocks was 

 due to a force which is in constant activity, and which I described 

 as " the language-making instinct of very young children." Every 

 parent must have noticed how his child, when beginning to talk, con- 

 stantly uses novel expressions, appai-ently of its own invention, but 

 doubtless often mere corruptions of words, perhaps misunderstood, 

 uttered by its elders. Ordinarily these peculiar expressions are soon 

 corrected and forgotten. But instances not unfrequently occur where 

 two children of the same age or nearly the same age, who are left much 

 together, proceed in their invention of these novel terms until thev 

 frame a complete language, sufficient for all purposes of their childish 

 intercourse, but totally unintelligible to those about them. Several 

 instances of the creation of such child-languages were cited, and the 

 fact was pointed out that in the first peopling of every country, when, 

 from vaxious causes, families must often be scattered at very wide 

 distances from one another, many cases must have occurred where 

 two or more young childi-en, left by the death of their parents to grow 

 up secluded from all other society, were thus compelled to frame a 

 language of their own, which would become the mother tongue of a 

 new linguistic stock. 



As the address has been published (in the volume of the Association 

 for 1886) it will not be necessary to repeat the facts and reasoning 

 which were offered in support of this theor}^ Though presented 

 nnder serious disadvantages — for the restricted limits of a public 

 address compelled the omission of much evidence which had been 

 gathered in its support — the reception thus far accorded to it, by 

 authoi'ities of the highest rank, seems to afford a good augury of its 

 ultimate general acceptance. The few objections which have been 

 made to it are only such, I am confident, as a fuller discussion and a 

 better understanding of its character and purport will remove. Most 

 of them had in fact been already anticipated and answered in the 

 original essay, of which the address in question was a brief and 

 partial summary. I am grateful, thei-efore, to the Philological Com- 

 mittee of the Institute for the opportunity which their invitation 

 affords me of laying before students of linguistic science some of the 

 omitted portions of my essay, which may aid in commending to their 

 judgment the views thus suggested on the origin of linguistic stocks, 

 and on the natural laws which govern the development of speech. 



