The perfect unfettered use of these puzzling forms comes much later.
Preyer quotes a case in which a child Olga, aged four years, would say,
‘She has made me wet,’ meaning that she herself had done it. But this
perhaps points to that tendency to split up the self into a number of
personalities, to which reference was made in an earlier essay.
The third year, which witnesses the important addition of the pronouns,
sees other refinements introduced. Thus the definite article was
introduced in the case of Preyer’s boy in the twenty-eighth month, in
that of an English boy at the age of two years eight months.
Prepositions are introduced about the same time. In this way childish
talk begins to lose its primitive disjointed character, and to grow into
an articulated structure.[115] Yet the perfect mastery of these takes
time. A feeling for analogy easily leads the little explorer astray at
first, as when the child M. said ‘far to’ after the model ‘near to’.
-----
Footnote 115:
For a fuller account of this progress, the reader cannot do better
than consult Preyer, _op. cit._, Cap. 20 and 21.
-----
Through this whole period of language-learning the child continues to
show his originality, his inventiveness. He is rarely at a loss, and
though the gaps in his verbal acquisitions are great he is very skilful
in filling them up. If, for example, our bright little linguist M., at
the age of one year eight and a half months, after being jumped by her
father, wants him to jump her mother also, she says, in default of the
word ‘jump,’ “Make mamma high”. A boy of twenty-seven months ingeniously
said, ‘It rains off,’ for ‘The rain has left off’. Forms are sometimes
combined, as when a boy of three years three months used ‘my lone,’
‘your lone,’ for ‘me alone’ or ‘by myself,’ ‘you alone’ or ‘by
yourself’. Another girl, two years ten months, said, ‘No two ’tatoes
left,’ meaning ‘only one potato is left’. Pleonasms occur in abundance,
as when a boy of two would say, ‘Another one bicca (biscuit),’ and,
better still, ‘another more’.
_Getting at our Meanings._
There is one part of this child’s work of learning our language of which
I have said hardly anything, _viz._, the divining of the verbal content,
of the meaning we put or try to put into our words. A brief reference to
this may well bring this study of childish linguistics to a close.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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