The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought: Studies of the Activities and Influences of the Child Among Primitive Peoples, Their Analogues and Survivals in the Civilization of To-DayChamberlain, Alexander Francis
Science
The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought: Studies of the Activities and Influences of the Child Among Primitive Peoples, Their Analogues and Survivals in the Civilization of To-Day
Chamberlain, Alexander Francis
Child rearing; Children -- Folklore; Folklore and children
Mr. Horatio Hale, who resumes the case just noticed in his address
before the Anthropological Section of the American Association for the
Advancement of Science (Buffalo, 1886), gives also valuable details of
the language of a little four-year-old girl and her younger brother in
Albany, as reported by Dr. E. R. Hun (249. 13). The chief facts are as
follows: "The mother observed when she was two years old that she was
backward in speaking, and only used the words 'papa' and 'mamma.' After
that she began to use words of her own invention, and though she readily
understood what was said, never employed the words used by others.
Gradually she extended her vocabulary until it reached the extent
described below [at least twenty-one distinct words, many of which were
used in a great variety of meanings]. She has a brother eighteen months
younger than herself, who has learned her language, so that they talk
freely together. He, however, seems to have adopted it only because he
has more intercourse with her than with others; and in some instances he
will use a proper word with his mother, and his sister's word with her.
She, however, persists in using only her own words, though her parents,
who are uneasy about her peculiarity of speech, make great efforts to
induce her to use proper words."
More may be read concerning this language in the account of Dr. Hun
(published in 1868).
Mr. Hale mentions three other cases, information regarding which came to
him. The inventors in the first instance were a boy between four and
five years old, said to have been "unusually backward in his speech,"
and a girl a little younger, the children of a widower and a widow
respectively, who married; and, according to the report of an intimate
friend: "He and the little girl soon became inseparable playmates, and
formed a language of their own, which was unintelligible to their
parents and friends. They had names of their own invention for all the
objects about them, and must have had a corresponding supply of verbs
and other parts of speech, as their talk was fluent and incessant." This
was in Kingston, Ontario, Canada (249. 16).
The second case is that of two young children, twins, a boy and a girl:
"When they were three or four years old they were accustomed, as their
elder sister informs me, to talk together in a language which no one
else understood.... The twins were wont to climb into their father's
carriage in the stable, and 'chatter away,' as my informant says, for
hours in this strange language. Their sister remembers that it sounded
as though the words were quite short. But the single word which survives
in the family recollection is a dissyllable, the word for milk, which
was _cully_. The little girl accompanied her speech with gestures,
but the boy did not. As they grew older, they gradually gave up their
peculiar speech" (249. 17).
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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