While the little explorer in the _terra incognita_ of language can proceed safely in this direction up to a certain point he is apt, as we all know, to stumble now and again; nor is this to be wondered at when we remember the intricacies, the irregularities, which characterise a language like ours. In trying, for example, to manage the preterite of an English verb he is certain, as, indeed, is the foreigner, to go wrong. The direction of the error is often in the transformation of the weak to the strong form; as when ‘screamed’ becomes ‘scram,’ ‘split’ (preterite) ‘splat’ or ‘splut,’ and so forth. In other cases the child wall convert a strong into a weak form, as when Laura Bridgman, like many another child, would say, ‘I eated,’ ‘I seed,’ and so forth.[111] Sometimes, again, delightful doublings of the past tense occur, as ‘sawed’ for ‘saw,’ ‘eatened’ for ‘eaten,’ ‘didn’t saw’ for ‘didn’t see,’ ‘did you gave me?’ for ‘did you give me?’ Active and passive forms are sometimes confused, as when M. said ‘not yike being picking up’ for ‘not like being picked up,’ etc. It is curious to note the different lines of imitative construction followed out in these cases. ----- Footnote 111: The same double tendency from weak to strong forms and _vice versâ_ is seen in the list of transformed past participles given by Preyer, _op. cit._, p. 360. ----- One thing seems clear here: the child’s instinct is to simplify our forms, to get rid of irregularities. This is strikingly illustrated in the use of the heterogeneous assemblage of forms known as the verb ‘to be’. It is really hard on a child to expect him to answer the question, ‘Are you good now?’ by saying, ‘Yes, I am’. He says, of course, ‘Yes, I are’. Perhaps the poor verb ‘to be’ has suffered every kind of violence at the hands of children.[112] Thus the child M. used the form ‘bēd’ for ‘was’. Professor Max Müller somewhere says that children are the purifiers of language. Would it not be well if they could become its simplifiers also, and give us in place of this congeries of unrelated sounds one good decent verb-form? ----- Footnote 112: _Cf._ Preyer’s account of a German child’s liberties with the same verb, where we find ‘gebisst,’ ‘binnst,’ and other odd forms, _op. cit._, p. 438. ----- Other quaint transformations occur when the child begins to combine words, as when M. joining adverb to verb invented the form of past tense ‘fall downed’ for ‘fell down’. Another queer form is ‘Am’t I?’ used for ‘am I not?’ after the pattern of ‘aren’t we?’ An even finer linguistic stroke than this, is ‘Bettern’t you?’ for ‘Had you not better?’ where the child was evidently trying to get in the form ‘hadn’t you,’ along with the awkward ‘better,’ which seemed to belong to the ‘had,’ and solved the problem by treating ‘better’ as the verb, and dropping ‘had’ altogether.