In certain cases the analogical extension gives place to what we should
call a classification. One child for example, knowing the word
steam-ship and wanting the name sailing-ship, invented the form
‘wind-ship’. The little girl M., when one year and nine months old,
showed quite a passion for classing by help of compounds, arranging the
rooms into ‘morner-room,’ ‘dinner-room’ (she was fond of adding ‘er’ at
this time) and ‘nursery-room’.
It might be supposed from a logical point of view that in these
inventions the qualifying or determining word would come more naturally
after the generic name, as in the French _moulin à vent, cygne noir_. I
have heard of one English child who used the form ‘mill-wind’ in
preference to ‘wind-mill,’ and the order ‘dog black’ in preference to
‘black dog’. It would be worth while to note any similar instances.
In these inventions, again, we may detect a close resemblance between
children’s language and that of savages. In presence of a new object a
savage behaves very much as a child, he shapes a new name out of
familiar ones, a name that commonly has much of the metaphorical
character. Thus the Aztecs called a boat a ‘water-house’; and the
Vancouver islanders when they saw a screw-steamer called it the
‘kick-kicket’.[98]
-----
Footnote 98:
Tylor, _Anthropology_, chap. v.
-----
A somewhat different class of word-inventions is that in which a child
frames a new word on the analogy of known words. A common case is the
invention of new substantives from verbs after the pattern of other
substantives. The results are often quaint enough. Sometimes it is the
agent who is named by the new word, as when the boy C. talked of the
‘Rainer,’ the fairy who makes rain, or when another little boy dubbed a
teacher the ‘lessoner’. Sometimes it is the product of the action that
is named, as when the same child C. and the deaf-mute Laura Bridgman
both invented the form ‘thinks’ for ‘thoughts’. In much the same way a
boy of three called the holes which he dug in his garden his ‘digs’. The
reverse process, the formation of a verb from a substantive, also
occurs. Thus one child invented the form ‘dag’ for striking with a
dagger; and Preyer’s boy when two years and two months old formed the
verb ‘messen’ to express cut from the substantive ‘messer’ (a knife). It
was probably a similar process when the child M. at one year ten months,
after seeing a motionless worm and being told that it was dead, asked to
see another worm ‘deading’. The same child coined the neat verb-form
‘unparcel’. This readiness to form verbs from substantives and _vice
versâ_, which is abundantly illustrated in the development of language,
is without doubt connected with the primitive and natural mode of
thinking. The object is of greatest interest both to the child and to
primitive man as an agent, or as the last stage or result of an action.
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