THE LANGUAGE OF THE INDIVIDUAL The Child.—The screaming and babbling of the first period of a child's life may be considered preliminary exercises of the organs of speech; gradually the baby learns how to control the movements of his lips, tongue, etc., and produce what sounds he likes, and little by little he acquires the power to imitate the sounds he hears from his parents and others. The tongue is for a long time his dearest plaything, but at first nothing but a play thing; he does not as yet associate any ideas with the sounds he utters. The order in which speech sounds are acquired is not the same with all children, though among consonants lip sounds are probably always the first to appear, no doubt because the labial muscles used to produce them are the same that the baby has exercised in sucking the breast or the bottle. Some of the sounds produced by means of the tongue do not appear till the muscles of the tongue have been exercised by eating more solid things than milk, but t and d are almost universally substituted for k and g in one period. Otherwise no rules can be given for the first very inexact imitations of speech sounds, which vary from in dividual to individual, even among children of the same family. Even of ter most sounds have been learnt, some combinations of sounds will present difficulties ; transpositions (like efelant for elephant) and assimilations and partial reduplications are fre quent, e.g., capm for captain, goggi for doggie, bikykle, etc. But gradually the agreement between the child's and the community's pronunciation becomes practically perfect.
As with the sounds, so with the meanings of words, the child is often very wide of the mark. It hears a word and ascribes to it a meaning that seems to fit the situation and combination in which it is heard. One girl said soldier of any man, and everybody who was not a man was a baby. Bobbie said abuz for apples, but called cherries tiny abuz and oranges big abuz. Some children use the words, dinner, breakfast and tea interchangeably—each word to them means "meal." The ideas connected with numerals and such expressions as yesterday, last week, or on Tuesday are neces sarily very vague in the beginning. Such words as old present
difficulty; a boy knew he was three years, but could not be in duced to say "three years old"; no, he was three years new. Even more difficult are pronouns like "I," whose application shifts from person to person.
The child has to pick up in an unsystematic way not only sounds and isolated words, but also the way in which words are inflected and put together to form sentences, and here too it takes some time before he acquires full familiarity with all the intrica cies of language. After he has discovered that the plural is gen erally indicated by the addition of s, he will feel tempted to use the same mode everywhere and say gooses and tooths instead of geese and teeth. In the same way he will use analogy-formations in adjectives (gooder, baddest for better, worst), and verbs ( buyed, frowed for bought, threw and thrown), or mix up regular and irregular formations (drunked, boughted for drank, bought), etc. Some of these formations may be used invariably for quite a long time, while others are only momentary slips made even after the correct forms have been long known and used. It is not only forms that have to be learnt in this way, but also all those intricate syntactical rules for the use of cases, tenses, moods, etc., which, when set forth by learned grammarians, may fill whole volumes, and which the foreigner seldom learns to perfec tion ; after comparatively few years the native child handles all these things with nearly unfailing accuracy.
The whole process of the child's acquisition of its mother tongue may be described as a progressive socialization ; it starts with sounds and meanings that are so individualistic that they are of ten comprehensible only to the narrowest family circle, and gradually, chiefly under the influence of other children, espe cially playmates a little older than the child itself, everything comes into greater and greater harmony with common usage— and only through this general agreement is the individual's lan guage capable of fulfilling its purpose.