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
The third case cited by Mr. Hale is that of two little boys of Toronto,
Canada,--five or six years of age, one being about a year older than the
other, who attended a school in that city: "These children were left
much to themselves, and had a language of their own, in which they
always conversed. The other children in the school used to listen to
them as they chattered together, and laugh heartily at the strange
speech of which they could not understand a word. The boys spoke English
with difficulty, and very imperfectly, like persons struggling to
express their ideas in a foreign tongue. In speaking it, they had to eke
out their words with many gestures and signs to make themselves
understood; but in talking together in their own language, they used no
gestures and spoke very fluently. She remembers that the words which
they used seemed quite short" (249. 18).
Mr. Hale's studies of these comparatively uninvestigated forms of human
speech led him into the wider field of comparative philology and
linguistic origins. From the consideration of these data, the
distinguished ethnologist came to regard the child as a factor of the
utmost importance in the development of dialects and families of speech,
and to put forward in definite terms a theory of the origin and growth
of linguistic diversity and dialectic profusion, to the idea of which he
was led by his studies of the multitude of languages within the
comparatively restricted area of Oregon and California (249. 9).
Starting with the language-faculty instinct in the child, says Mr. Hale:
"It was as impossible for the first child endowed with this faculty not
to speak in the presence of a companion similarly endowed, as it would
be for a nightingale or a thrush not to carol to its mate. The same
faculty creates the same necessity in our days, and its exercise by
young children, when accidentally isolated from the teachings and
influence of grown companions, will readily account for the existence of
all the diversities of speech on our globe" (249. 47). Approaching, in
another essay, one of the most difficult problems in comparative
philology, he observes: "There is, therefore, nothing improbable in the
supposition that the first Aryan family--the orphan children, perhaps,
of some Semitic or Accadian fugitives from Arabia or Mesopotamia--grew
up and framed their new language on the southeastern seaboard of
Persia." Thus, he thinks, is the Aryo-Semitic problem most
satisfactorily solved (467. 675). In a second paper (250) on _The
Development of Language_, Mr. Hale restates and elaborates his theory
with a wealth of illustration and argument, and it has since won
considerable support from the scientists of both hemispheres.
Professor Romanes devotes not a few pages of his volume on _Mental
Evolution in Man_, to the presentation of Mr. Hale's theory and of
the facts upon which it is based (338. 138-144).
_Secret Languages._
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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