Language: Its Nature, Development and Origin

VI.—§ 1. Introductory.

In the preceding chapter, in order to simplify matters, we have dealt with sounds only, as if they were learnt by themselves and independently of the meanings attached to them. But that, of course, is only an abstraction: to the child, as well as to the grown-up, the two elements, the outer, phonetic element, and the inner element, the meaning, of a word are indissolubly connected, and the child has no interest, or very little interest, in trying to imitate the sounds of its parents except just in so far as these mean something. That words have a meaning, the child will begin to perceive at a very early age. Parents may of course deceive themselves and attribute to the child a more complete and exact understanding of speech than the child is capable of. That the child looks at its father when it hears the word ‘father,’ may mean at first nothing more than that it follows its mother’s glance; but naturally in this way it is prepared for actually associating the idea of ‘father’ with the sound. If the child learns the feat of lifting its arms when it is asked “How big is the boy?” it is not to be supposed that the single words of the sentence are understood, or that the child has any conception of size; he only knows that when this series of sounds is said he is admired if he lifts his arms up: and so the sentence as a whole has the effect of a word of command. A dog has the same degree of understanding. Hilary M. (1.0), when you said to her at any time the refrain “He greeted me so,” from “Here come three knights from Spain,” would bow and salute with her hand, as she had seen some children doing it when practising the song.

The understanding of what is said always precedes the power of saying the same thing oneself—often precedes it for an extraordinarily long time. One father notes that his little daughter of a year and seven months brings what is wanted and understands questions while she cannot say a word. It often happens that parents some fine day come to regret what they have said in the presence of a child without suspecting how much it understands. “Little pitchers have long ears.”

One can, however, easily err in regard to the range and certainty of a child’s understanding. The Swiss philologist Tappolet noticed that his child of six months, when he said “Where is the window?” made vague movements towards the window. He made the experiment of repeating his question in French—with the same intonation as in German, and the child acted just as it had done before. It is, properly speaking, only when the child begins to talk that we can be at all sure what it has really understood, and even then it may at times be difficult to sound the depths of the child’s conception.

The child’s acquisition of the meaning of words is truly a highly complicated affair. How many things are comprehended under one word? The answer is not easy in all cases. The single Danish word tæppe covers all that is expressed in English by carpet, rug, blanket, counterpane, curtain (theatrical). And there is still more complication when we come to abstract ideas. The child has somehow to find out for himself with regard to his own language what ideas are considered to hang together and so come under the same word. He hears the word ‘chair’ applied to a particular chair, then to another chair that perhaps looks to him totally different, and again to a third: and it becomes his business to group these together.

What Stern tells about his own boy is certainly exceptional, perhaps unique. The boy ran to a door and said das? (‘That?’—his way of asking the name of a thing). They told him ‘tür.’ He then went to two other doors in the room, and each time the performance was repeated. He then did the same with the seven chairs in the room. Stern says, “As he thus makes sure that the objects that are alike to his eye and to his sense of touch have also the same name, he is on his way to general conceptions.” We should, however, be wary of attributing general ideas to little children.

VI.—§ 2. First Period.

In the first period we meet the same phenomena in the child’s acquisition of word-meanings that we found in his acquisition of sounds. A child develops conceptions of his own which are as unintelligible and strange to the uninitiated as his sounds.

Among the child’s first passions are animals and pictures of animals, but for a certain time it is quite arbitrary what animals are classed together under a particular name. A child of nine months noticed that his grandfather’s dog said ‘bow-wow’ and fancied that anything not human could say (and therefore should be called) bow-wow—pigs and horses included. A little girl of two called a horse he (Danish hest) and divided the animal kingdom into two groups, (1) horses, including all four-footed things, even a tortoise, and (2) fishes (pronounced iz), including all that moved without use of feet, for example, birds and flies. A boy of 1.8 saw a picture of a Danish priest in a ruff and was told that it was a præst, which he rendered as bæp. Afterwards seeing a picture of an aunt with a white collar which recalled the priest’s ruff, he said again bæp, and this remained the name of the aunt, and even of another aunt, who was called ‘other bæp.’ These transferences are sometimes extraordinary. A boy who had had a pig drawn for him, the pig being called öf, at the age of 1.6 used öf (1) for a pig, (2) for drawing a pig, (3) for writing in general.

Such transferences may seem very absurd, but are not more so than some transferences occurring in the language of grown-up persons. The word Tripos passed from the sense of a three-legged stool to the man who sat on a three-legged stool to dispute with candidates for degrees at Cambridge. Then, as it was the duty of Mr. Tripos also to provide comic verses, these were called tripos verses, such verses being printed under that name till very near the end of the nineteenth century, though Mr. Tripos himself had disappeared long ago. And as the examination list was printed on the back of these verses, it was called the Tripos list, and it was no far cry to saying of a successful candidate, “he stands high on the Tripos,” which now came to mean the examination itself.

But to return to the classifications in the minds of the children. Hilary M. (1.6 to 2.0) used the word daisy (1) of the flower itself, (2) of any flower, (3) of any conventional flower in a pattern, (4) of any pattern. One of the first words she said was colour (1.4), and she got into a way of saying it when anything striking attracted her attention. Originally she heard the word of a bright patch of colour in a picture. The word was still in use at the age of two. For some months anything that moved was a fly, every man was a soldier, everybody that was not a man was a baby. S. L. (1.8) used bing (1) for a door, (2) for bricks or building with bricks. The connexion is through the bang of a door or a tumbling castle of bricks, but the name was transferred to the objects. It is curious that at 1.3 she had the word bang for anything dropped, but not bing; at 1.8 she had both, bing being specialized as above. From books about children’s language I quote two illustrations. Ronjat’s son used the word papement, which stands for ‘kaffemensch,’ in speaking about the grocer’s boy who brought coffee; but as he had a kind of uniform with a flat cap, papement was also used of German and Russian officers in the illustrated papers. Hilde Stern (1.9) used bichu for drawer or chest of drawers; it originated in the word bücher (books), which was said when her picture-books were taken out of the drawer.

A warning is, however, necessary. When a grown-up person says that a child uses the same word to denote various things, he is apt to assume that the child gives a word two or three definite meanings, as he does. The process is rather in this way. A child has got a new toy, a horse, and at the same time has heard its elders use the word ‘horse,’ which it has imitated as well as it can. It now associates the word with the delight of playing with its toy. If the next day it says the same sound, and its friends give it the horse, the child gains the experience that the sound brings the fulfilment of its wish: but if it sets its eye on a china cow and utters the same sound, the father takes note that the sound also denotes a cow, while for the child it is perhaps a mere experiment—“Could not I get my wish for that nice thing fulfilled in the same way?” If it succeeds, the experiment may very well be repeated, and the more or less faulty imitation of the word ‘horse’ thus by the co-operation of those around it may become also firmly attached to ‘cow.’

When Elsa B. (1.10), on seeing the stopper of a bottle in the garden, came out with the word ‘beer,’ it would be rash to conclude (as her father did) that the word ‘beer’ to her meant a ‘stopper’: all we know is that her thoughts had taken that direction, and that some time before, on seeing a stopper, she had heard the word ‘beer.’

Parents sometimes unconsciously lead a child into error about the use of words. A little nephew of mine asked to taste his father’s beer, and when refused made so much to-do that the father said, “Come, let us have peace in the house.” Next day, under the same circumstances, the boy asked for ‘peace in the house,’ and this became the family name for beer. Not infrequently what is said on certain occasions is taken by the child to be the name of some object concerned; thus a sniff or some sound imitating it may come to mean a flower, and ‘hurrah’ a flag. S. L. from an early age was fond of flowers, and at 1.8 used ‘pretty’ or ‘pretty-pretty’ as a substantive instead of the word ‘flower,’ which she learnt at 1.10.

I may mention here that analogous mistakes may occur when missionaries or others write down words from foreign languages with which they are not familiar. In the oldest list of Greenlandic words (of 1587) there is thus a word panygmah given with the signification ‘needle’; as a matter of fact it means ‘my daughter’s’: the Englishman pointed at the needle, but the Eskimo thought he wanted to know whom it belonged to. In an old list of words in the now extinct Polabian language we find “scumbe, yesterday, subuda, to-day, janidiglia, to-morrow”: the questions were put on a Saturday, and the Slav answered accordingly, for subuta (the same word as Sabbath) means Saturday, skumpe ‘fasting-day,’ and ja nedila ‘it is Sunday.’

According to O’Shea (p. 131) “a child was greatly impressed with the horns of a buck the first time he saw him. The father used the term ‘sheep’ several times while the creature was being inspected, and it was discovered afterwards that the child had made the association between the word and the animal’s horns, so now sheep signifies primarily horns, whether seen in pictures or in real life.” It is clear that mistakes of that kind will happen more readily if the word is said singly than when it is embodied in whole connected sentences: the latter method is on the whole preferable for many reasons.

VI.—§ 3. Father and Mother.

A child is often faced by some linguistic usage which obliges him again and again to change his notions, widen them, narrow them, till he succeeds in giving words the same range of meaning that his elders give them.

Frequently, perhaps most frequently, a word is at first for the child a proper name. ‘Wood’ means not a wood in general, but the particular picture which has been pointed out to the child in the dining-room. The little girl who calls her mother’s black muff ‘muff,’ but refuses to transfer the word to her own white one, is at the same stage. Naturally, then, the word father when first heard is a proper name, the name of the child’s own father. But soon it must be extended to other individuals who have something or other in common with the child’s father. One child will use it of all men, another perhaps of all men with beards, while ‘lady’ is applied to all pictures of faces without beards; a third will apply the word to father, mother and grandfather. When the child itself applies the word to another man it is soon corrected, but at the same time it cannot avoid hearing another child call a strange man ‘father’ or getting to know that the gardener is Jack’s ‘father,’ etc. The word then comes to mean to the child ‘a grown-up person who goes with or belongs to a little one,’ and he will say, “See, there goes a dog with his father.” Or, he comes to know that the cat is the kittens’ father, and the dog the puppies’ father, and next day asks, “Wasps, are they the flies’ father, or are they perhaps their mother?” (as Frans did, 4.10). Finally, by such guessing and drawing conclusions he gains full understanding of the word, and is ready to make acquaintance later with its more remote applications, as ‘The King is the father of his people; Father O’Flynn; Boyle was the father of chemistry,’ etc.

Difficulties are caused to the child when its father puts himself on the child’s plane and calls his wife ‘mother’ just as he calls his own mother ‘mother,’ though at other moments the child hears him call her ‘grandmother’ or ‘grannie.’ Professor Sturtevant writes to me that a neighbour child, a girl of about five years, called out to him, “I saw your girl and your mother,” meaning ‘your daughter and your wife.’ In many families the words ‘sister’ (‘Sissie’) or ‘brother’ are used constantly instead of his or her real name. Here we see the reason why so often such names of relations change their meaning in the history of languages; G. vetter probably at first meant ‘father’s brother,’ as it corresponds to Latin patruus; G. base, from ‘father’s sister,’ came to mean also ‘mother’s sister,’ ‘niece’ and ‘cousin.’ The word that corresponds etymologically to our mother has come to mean ‘wife’ or ‘woman’ in Lithuanian and ‘sister’ in Albanian.

The same extension that we saw in the case of ‘father’ now may take place with real proper names. Tony E. (3.5), when a fresh charwoman came, told his mother not to have this Mary: the last charwoman’s name was Mary.[19] In exactly the same way a Danish child applied the name of their servant, Ingeborg, as a general word for servant: “Auntie’s Ingeborg is called Ann,” etc., and a German girl said viele Augusten for ‘many girls.’ This, of course, is the way in which doll has come to mean a ‘toy baby,’ and we use the same extension when we say of a statesman that he is no Bismarck, etc.

VI.—§ 4. The Delimitation of Meaning.

The association of a word with its meaning is accomplished for the child by a series of single incidents, and as many words are understood only by the help of the situation, it is natural that the exact force of many of them is not seized at once. A boy of 4.10, hearing that his father had seen the King, inquired, “Has he a head at both ends?”—his conception of a king being derived from playing-cards. Another child was born on what the Danes call Constitution Day, the consequence being that he confused birthday and Constitution Day, and would speak of “my Constitution Day,” and then his brother and sister also began to talk of their Constitution Day.

Hilary M. (2.0) and Murdoch D. (2.6) used dinner, breakfast and tea interchangeably—the words might be translated ‘meal.’ Other more or less similar confusions may be mentioned here. Tony F. (2.8) used the term sing for (1) reading, (2) singing, (3) any game in which his elders amused him. Hilary said indifferently, ‘Daddy, sing a story three bears,’ and ‘Daddy, tell a story three bears.’ She cannot remember which is knife and which is fork. Beth M. (2.6) always used can’t when she meant won’t. It meant simply refusal to do what she did not want to.

VI.—§ 5. Numerals. Time.

It is interesting to watch the way in which arithmetical notions grow in extent and clearness. Many children learn very early to say one, two, which is often said to them when they learn how to walk; but no ideas are associated with these syllables. In the same way many children are drilled to say three when the parents begin with one, two, etc. The idea of plurality is gradually developed, but a child may very well answer two when asked how many fingers papa has; Frans used the combinations some-two and some-three to express ‘more than one’ (2.4). At the age of 2.11 he was very fond of counting, but while he always got the first four numbers right, he would skip over 5 and 7; and when asked to count the apples in a bowl, he would say rapidly 1-2-3-4, even if there were only three, or stop at 3, even if there were five or more. At 3.4 he counted objects as far as 10 correctly, but might easily pass from 11 to 13, and if the things to be counted were not placed in a row he was apt to bungle by moving his fingers irregularly from one to another. When he was 3.8 he answered the question “What do 2 and 2 make?” quite correctly, but next day to the same question he answered “Three,” though in a doubtful tone of voice. This was in the spring, and next month I noted: “His sense of number is evidently weaker than it was: the open-air life makes him forget this as well as all the verses he knew by heart in the winter.” When the next winter came his counting exercises again amused him, but at first he was in a fix as before about any numbers after 6, although he could repeat the numbers till 10 without a mistake. He was fond of doing sums, and had initiated this game himself by asking: “Mother, if I have two apples and get one more, haven’t I then three?” His sense of numbers was so abstract that he was caught by a tricky question: “If you have two eyes and one nose, how many ears have you?” He answered at once, “Three!” A child thus seems to think in abstract numbers, and as he learns his numbers as 1, 2, 3, 4, etc., not as one pear, two pears, three pears, one may well be skeptical about the justification for the recommendation made by many pedagogues that at an early stage of the school-life a child should learn to reckon with concrete things rather than with abstract numbers.

A child will usually be familiar with the sound of higher numerals long before it has any clear notion of what they mean. Frans (3.6) said, “They are coming by a train that is called four thirty-four,” and (4.4) he asked, “How much is twice hundred? Is that a thousand?”

A child’s ideas of time are necessarily extremely vague to begin with; it cannot connect very clear or very definite notions with the expressions it constantly hears others employ, such as ‘last Sunday,’ ‘a week ago,’ or ‘next year.’ The other day I heard a little girl say: “This is where we sat next time,” evidently meaning ‘last time.’ All observers of children mention the frequent confusion of words like to-morrow and yesterday, and the linguist remembers that Gothic gistradagis means ‘to-morrow,’ though it corresponds formally with E. yesterday and G. gestern.

VI.—§ 6. Various Difficulties.

Sometimes a mere accidental likeness may prove too much for the child. When Hilary M. had a new doll (2.0) her mother said to her: “And is that your son?” Hilary was puzzled, and looking out of the window at the sun, said: “No, that’s my sun.” It was very difficult to set her out of this confusion.[20] Her sister Beth (3.8), looking at a sunset, said: “That’s what you call a sunset; where Ireland (her sister) is (at school) it’s a summerset.” About the same time, when staying at Longwood Farm, she said: “I suppose if the trees were cut down it would be Shortwood Farm?”

An English friend writes to me: “I misunderstood the text, ‘And there fell from his eyes as it were scales,’ as I knew the word scales only in the sense ‘balances.’ The phenomenon seemed to me a strange one, but I did not question that it occurred, any more than I questioned other strange phenomena recounted in the Bible. In the lines of the hymn—

I supposed that the words ‘as little as my bed’ were descriptive of my future grave, and that it was my duty according to the hymn to fear the grave.”

Words with several meanings may cause children much difficulty. A Somerset child said, “Moses was not a good boy, and his mother smacked ’un and smacked ’un and smacked ’un till she couldn’t do it no more, and then she put ’un in the ark of bulrushes.” This puzzled the teacher till he looked at the passage in Exodus: “And when she could hide him no longer, she laid him in an ark of bulrushes.” Here, of course, we have technically two different words hide; but to the child the difficulty is practically as great where we have what is called one and the same word with two distinct meanings, or when a word is used figuratively.

The word ‘child’ means two different things, which in some languages are expressed by two distinct words. I remember my own astonishment at the age of nine when I heard my godmother talk of her children. “But you have no children.” “Yes, Clara and Eliza.” I knew them, of course, but they were grown up.

Take again the word old. A boy knew that he was three years, but could not be induced to say ‘three years old’; no, he is three years new, and his father too is new, as distinct from his grandmother, who he knows is old. A child asked, “Why have grand dukes and grand pianos got the same name?” (Glenconner, p. 21).

When Frans was told (4.4) “Your eyes are running,” he was much astonished, and asked, “Are they running away?”

Sometimes a child knows a word first in some secondary sense. When a country child first came to Copenhagen and saw a soldier, he said, “There is a tin-soldier” (2.0). Stern has a story about his daughter who was taken to the country and wished to pat the backs of the pigs, but was checked with the words, “Pigs always lie in dirt,” when she was suddenly struck with a new idea; “Ah, that is why they are called pigs, because they are so dirty: but what would people call them if they didn’t lie in the dirt?” History repeats itself: only the other day a teacher wrote to me that one of his pupils had begun his essay with the words: “Pigs are rightly called thus, for they are such swine.”

Words of similar sound are apt to be confused. Some children have had trouble till mature years with soldier and shoulder, hassock and cassock, diary and dairy. Lady Glenconner writes: “They almost invariably say ‘lemon’ [for melon], and if they make an effort to be more correct they still mispronounce it. ‘Don’t say melling.’ ‘Very well, then, mellum.’” Among other confusions mentioned in her book I may quote Portugal for ‘purgatory,’ King Solomon’s three hundred Columbines, David and his great friend Johnson, Cain and Mabel—all of them showing how words from spheres beyond the ordinary ken of children are assimilated to more familiar ones.

Schuchardt has a story of a little coloured boy in the West Indies who said, “It’s three hot in this room”: he had heard too = two and literally wanted to ‘go one better.’ According to Mr. James Payne, a boy for years substituted for the words ‘Hallowed be Thy name’ ‘Harold be Thy name.’ Many children imagine that there is a pole to mark where the North Pole is, and even (like Helen Keller) that polar bears climb the Pole.

This leads us naturally to what linguists call ‘popular etymology’—which is very frequent with children in all countries. I give a few examples from books. A four-year-old boy had heard several times about his nurse’s neuralgia, and finally said: “I don’t think it’s new ralgia, I call it old ralgia.” In this way anchovies are made into hamchovies, whirlwind into worldwind, and holiday into hollorday, a day to holloa. Professor Sturtevant writes: A boy of six or seven had frequently had his ear irrigated; when similar treatment was applied to his nose, he said that he had been ‘nosigated’—he had evidently given his own interpretation to the first syllable of irrigate.

There is an element of ‘popular etymology’ in the following joke which was made by one of the Glenconner children when four years old: “I suppose you wag along in the wagonette, the landau lands you at the door, and you sweep off in the brougham” (pronounced broom).

VI.—§ 7. Shifters.

A class of words which presents grave difficulty to children are those whose meaning differs according to the situation, so that the child hears them now applied to one thing and now to another. That was the case with words like ‘father,’ and ‘mother.’ Another such word is ‘enemy.’ When Frans (4.5) played a war-game with Eggert, he could not get it into his head that he was Eggert’s enemy: no, it was only Eggert who was the enemy. A stronger case still is ‘home.’ When a child was asked if his grandmother had been at home, and answered: “No, grandmother was at grandfather’s,” it is clear that for him ‘at home’ meant merely ‘at my home.’ Such words may be called shifters. When Frans (3.6) heard it said that ‘the one’ (glove) was as good as ‘the other,’ he asked, “Which is the one, and which is the other?”—a question not easy to answer.

The most important class of shifters are the personal pronouns. The child hears the word ‘I’ meaning ‘Father,’ then again meaning ‘Mother,’ then again ‘Uncle Peter,’ and so on unendingly in the most confusing manner. Many people realize the difficulty thus presented to the child, and to obviate it will speak of themselves in the third person as ‘Father’ or ‘Grannie’ or ‘Mary,’ and instead of saying ‘you’ to the child, speak of it by its name. The child’s understanding of what is said is thus facilitated for the moment: but on the other hand the child in this way hears these little words less frequently and is slower in mastering them.

If some children soon learn to say ‘I’ while others speak of themselves by their name, the difference is not entirely due to the different mental powers of the children, but must be largely attributed to their elders’ habit of addressing them by their name or by the pronouns. But Germans would not be Germans, and philosophers would not be philosophers, if they did not make the most of the child’s use of ‘I,’ in which they see the first sign of self-consciousness. The elder Fichte, we are told, used to celebrate not his son’s birthday, but the day on which he first spoke of himself as ‘I.’ The sober truth is, I take it, that a boy who speaks of himself as ‘Jack’ can have just as full and strong a perception of himself as opposed to the rest of the world as one who has learnt the little linguistic trick of saying ‘I.’ But this does not suit some of the great psychologists, as seen from the following quotation: “The child uses no pronouns; it speaks of itself in the third person, because it has no idea of its ‘I’ (Ego) nor of its ‘Not-I,’ because it knows nothing of itself nor of others.”

It is not an uncommon case of confusion for a child to use ‘you’ and ‘your’ instead of ‘I,’ ‘me,’ and ‘mine.’ The child has noticed that ‘will you have?’ means ‘will Jack have?’ so that he looks on ‘you’ as synonymous with his own name. In some children this confusion may last for some months. It is in some cases connected with an inverted word-order, ‘do you’ meaning ‘I do’—an instance of ‘echoism’ (see below). Sometimes he will introduce a further complication by using the personal pronoun of the third person, as though he had started the sentence with ‘Jack’—then ‘you have his coat’ means ‘I have my coat.’ He may even speak of the person addressed as ‘I.’ ‘Will I tell a story?’ = ‘Will you tell a story?’ Frans was liable to use these confused forms between the ages of two and two and a-half, and I had to quicken his acquaintance with the right usage by refusing to understand him when he used the wrong. Beth M. (2.6) was very jealous about her elder sister touching any of her property, and if the latter sat on her chair, she would shriek out: “That’s your chair; that’s your chair.”

The forms I and me are a common source of difficulty to English children. Both Tony E. (2.7 to 3.0) and Hilary M. (2.0) use my for me; it is apparently a kind of blending of me and I; e.g. “Give Hilary medicine, make my better,” “Maggy is looking at my,” “Give it my.” See also O’Shea, p. 81: ‘my want to do this or that; my feel bad; that is my pencil; take my to bed.’

His and her are difficult to distinguish: “An ill lady, his legs were bad” (Tony E., 3.3).

C. M. L. (about the end of her second year) constantly used wour and wours for our and ours, the connexion being with we, as ‘your’ with you. In exactly the same way many Danish children say vos for os on account of vi. But all this really falls under our next chapter.

VI.—§ 8. Extent of Vocabulary.

The number of words which the child has at command is constantly increasing, but not uniformly, as the increase is affected by the child’s health and the new experiences which life presents to him. In the beginning it is tolerably easy to count the words the child uses; later it becomes more difficult, as there are times when his command of speech grows with astonishing rapidity. There is great difference between individual children. Statistics have often been given of the extent of a child’s vocabulary at different ages, or of the results of comparing the vocabularies of a number of children.

An American child who was closely observed by his mother, Mrs. Winfield S. Hall, had in the tenth month 3 words, in the eleventh 12, in the twelfth 24, in the thirteenth 38, in the fourteenth 48, in the fifteenth 106, in the sixteenth 199, and in the seventeenth 232 words (Child Study Monthly, March 1897). During the first month after the same boy was six years old, slips of paper and pencils were distributed over the house and practically everything which the child said was written down. After two or three days these were collected and the words were put under their respective letters in a book kept for that purpose. New sets of papers were put in their places and other lists made. In addition to this, the record of his life during the past year was examined and all of his words not already listed were added. In this way his summer vocabulary was obtained; conversations on certain topics were also introduced to give him an opportunity to use words relating to such topics. The list is printed in the Journal of Childhood and Adolescence, January 1902, and is well worth looking through. It contains 2,688 words, apart from proper names and numerals. No doubt the child was really in command of words beyond that total.

This list perhaps is exceptional on account of the care with which it was compiled, but as a rule I am afraid that it is not wise to attach much importance to these tables of statistics. One is generally left in the dark whether the words counted are those that the child has understood, or those that it has actually used—two entirely different things. The passive or receptive knowledge of a language always goes far beyond the active or productive.

One also gets the impression that the observers have often counted up words without realizing the difficulties involved. What is to be counted as a word? Are I, me, we, us one word or four? Is teacup a new word for a child who already knows tea and cup? And so for all compounds. Is box (= a place at a theatre) the same word as box (= workbox)? Are the two thats in ‘that man that you see’ two words or one? It is clear that the process of counting involves so much that is arbitrary and uncertain that very little can be built on the statistics arrived at.

It is more interesting perhaps to determine what words at a given age a child does not know, or rather does not understand when he hears them or when they occur in his reading. I have myself collected such lists, and others have been given me by teachers, who have been astonished at words which their classes did not understand. A teacher can never be too cautious about assuming linguistic knowledge in his pupils—and this applies not only to foreign words, about which all teachers are on the alert, but also to what seem to be quite everyday words of the language of the country.

In connexion with the growth of vocabulary one may ask how many words are possessed by the average grown-up man? Max Müller in his Lectures stated on the authority of an English clergyman that an English farm labourer has only about three hundred words at command. This is the most utter balderdash, but nevertheless it has often been repeated, even by such an authority on psychology as Wundt. A Danish boy can easily learn seven hundred English words in the first year of his study of the language—and are we to believe that a grown Englishman, even of the lowest class, has no greater stock than such a beginner? If you go through the list of 2,000 to 3,000 words used by the American boy of six referred to above, you will easily convince yourself that they would far from suffice for the rudest labourer. A Swedish dialectologist, after a minute investigation, found that the vocabulary of Swedish peasants amounted to at least 26,000 words, and his view has been confirmed by other investigators. This conclusion is not invalidated by the fact that Shakespeare in his works uses only about 20,000 words and Milton in his poems only about 8,000. It is easy to see what a vast number of words of daily life are seldom or never required by a poet, especially a poet like Milton, whose works are on elevated subjects. The words used by Zola or Kipling or Jack London would no doubt far exceed those used by Shakespeare and Milton.[21]

VI.—§ 9. Summary.

To sum up, then. There are only very few words that are explained to the child, and so long as it is quite small it will not even understand the explanations that might be given. Some it learns because, when the word is used, the object is at the same time pointed at, but most words it can only learn by drawing conclusions about their meaning from the situation in which they arise or from the context in which they are used. These conclusions, however, are very uncertain, or they may be correct for the particular occasion and not hold good on some other, to the child’s mind quite similar, occasion. Grown-up people are in the same position with regard to words they do not know, but which they come across in a book or newspaper, e.g. demise. The meanings of many words are at the same time extraordinarily vague and yet so strictly limited (at least in some respects) that the least deviation is felt as a mistake. Moreover, the child often learns a secondary or figurative meaning of a word before its simple meaning. But gradually a high degree of accuracy is obtained, the fittest meanings surviving—that is (in this connexion) those that agree best with those of the surrounding society. And thus the individual is merged in society, and the social character of language asserts itself through the elimination of everything that is the exclusive property of one person only.