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Language: Its Nature, Development and Origin. Otto Jespersen
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isbn 4057664590428
Автор произведения Otto Jespersen
Жанр Языкознание
Издательство Bookwire
First, then, come single vowels or vowels with a single consonant preceding them, as la, ra, lö, etc., though a baby’s sounds cannot be identified with any of ours or written down with our letters. For, though the head and consequently the mouth capacity is disproportionally great in an infant and grows more rapidly than its limbs, there is still a great difference between its mouth capacity and that required to utter normal speech-sounds. I have elsewhere (PhG, p. 81 ff.) given the results of a series of measurings of the jaw in children and adults and discussed the importance of these figures for phonetic theory: while there is no growth of any importance during the talking period (for a child of five may have the same jaw-length as a man of thirty-seven), the growth is enormous during the first months of a child’s life: in the case of my own child, from 45 mm. a few days after birth to 60 mm. at three months old and 75 mm. at eleven months, while the average of grown-up men is 99 mm. and of women 93 mm. The consequence is that the sounds of the baby are different from ours, and that even when they resemble ours the mechanism of production may be different from the normal one; when my son during the first weeks said something like la, I was able to see distinctly that the tip of the tongue was not at all in the position required for our l. This want of congruence between the acoustic manners of operation in the infant and the adult no doubt gives us the key to many of the difficulties that have puzzled previous observers of small children.
Babbling or crowing begins not earlier than the third week; it may be, not till the seventh or eighth week. The first sound exercises are to be regarded as muscular exercises pure and simple, as is clear from the fact that deaf-mutes amuse themselves with them, although they cannot themselves hear them. But the moment comes when the hearing child finds a pleasure in hearing its own sounds, and a most important step is taken when the little one begins to hear a resemblance between the sounds uttered by its mother or nurse and its own. The mother will naturally answer the baby’s syllables by repeating the same, and when the baby recognizes the likeness, it secures an inexhaustible source of pleasure, and after some time reaches the next stage, when it tries itself to imitate what is said to it (generally towards the close of the first year). The value of this exercise cannot be over-estimated: the more that parents understand how to play this game with the baby—of saying something and letting the baby say it after, however meaningless the syllable-sequences that they make—the better will be the foundation for the child’s later acquisition and command of language.
V.—§ 2. First Sounds.
It is generally said that the order in which the child learns to utter the different sounds depends on their difficulty: the easiest sounds are produced first. That is no doubt true in the main; but when we go into details we find that different writers bring forward lists of sounds in different order. All are agreed, however, that among the consonants the labials, p, b and m, are early sounds, if not the earliest. The explanation has been given that the child can see the working of his mother’s lips in these sounds and therefore imitates her movements. This implies far too much conscious thought on the part of the baby, who utters his ‘ma’ or ‘mo’ before he begins to imitate anything said to him by his surroundings. Moreover, it has been pointed out that the child’s attention is hardly ever given to its mother’s mouth, but is steadily fixed on her eyes. The real reason is probably that the labial muscles used to produce b or m are the same that the baby has exercised in sucking the breast or the bottle. It would be interesting to learn if blind children also produce the labial sounds first.
Along with the labial sounds the baby produces many other sounds—vowel and consonant—and in these cases one is certain that it has not been able to see how these sounds are produced by its mother. Even in the case of the labials we know that what distinguishes m from b, the lowering of the soft palate, and b from p, the vibrations of the vocal chords, is invisible. Some of the sounds produced by means of the tongue may be too hard to pronounce till the muscles of the tongue have been exercised in consequence of the child having begun to eat more solid things than milk.
By the end of the first year the number of sounds which the little babbler has mastered is already considerable, and he loves to combine long series of the same syllables, dadadada … , nenenene … , bygnbygnbygn … , etc. That is a game which need not even cease when the child is able to talk actual language. It is strange that among an infant’s sounds one can often detect sounds—for instance k, g, h, and uvular r—which the child will find difficulty in producing afterwards when they occur in real words, or which may be unknown to the language which it will some day speak. The explanation lies probably in the difference between doing a thing in play or without a plan—when it is immaterial which movement (sound) is made—and doing the same thing of fixed intention when this sound, and this sound only, is required, at a definite point in the syllable, and with this or that particular sound before and after. Accordingly, great difficulties come to be encountered when the child begins more consciously and systematically to imitate his elders. Some sounds come without effort and may be used incessantly, to the detriment of others which the child may have been able previously to produce in play; and a time even comes when the stock of sounds actually diminishes, while particular sounds acquire greater precision. Dancing masters, singing masters and gymnastic teachers have similar experiences. After some lessons the child may seem more awkward than it was before the lessons began.
The ‘little language’ which the child makes for itself by imperfect imitation of the sounds of its elders seems so arbitrary that it may well be compared to the child’s first rude drawings of men and animals. A Danish boy named Gustav (1.6)[17] called himself [dodado] and turned the name Karoline into [nnn]. Other Danish children made skammel into [gramn] or [gap], elefant into [vat], Karen into [gaja], etc. A few examples from English children: Hilary M. (1.6) called Ireland (her sister) [a·ni], Gordon M. (1.10) called Millicent (his sister) [dadu·]. Tony E. (1.11) called his playmate Sheila [dubabud].
V.—§ 3. Sound-laws of the Next Stage.
As the child gets away from the peculiarities of his individual ‘little language,’ his speech becomes more regular, and a linguist can in many cases see reasons for his distortions of normal words. When he replaces one sound by another there is always some common element in the formation of the two sounds, which causes a kindred impression on the ear, though we may have difficulty in detecting it because we are so accustomed to noticing the difference. There is generally a certain system in the sound substitutions of children, and in many instances we are justified in speaking of ‘strictly observed sound-laws.’ Let us now look at some of these.
Children in all countries tend to substitute [t] for [k]: both sounds are produced by a complete stoppage of the breath for the moment by the tongue, the only difference being that it is the back of the tongue which acts in one case, and the tip of the tongue in the other. A child who substitutes t for k will also substitute d for g; if he says ‘tat’ for ‘cat’ he will say ‘do’ for ‘go.’
R is a difficult sound. Hilary M. (2.0) has no r’s in her speech. Initially they become w, as in [wʌn] for ‘run,’ medially between vowels they become l, as in [veli, beli] for ‘very, berry,’ in consonantal combinations they are lost, as in [kai, bʌʃ] for ‘cry, brush.’ Tony E. (1.10 to 3.0) for medial r between vowels first substituted d, as in [vedi] for ‘very,’ and later g [vegi]; similarly in [mu·gi] for ‘Muriel,’ [tægi] for ‘carry’; he often dropped initial r, e.g. oom for ‘room.’ It is not unusual for children who use w for r in most combinations to say [tʃ] for tr and [dʒ] for dr, as in ‘chee,’ ‘jawer’ for ‘tree,’ ‘drawer.’ This illustrates the fact that what to us is one sound, and therefore represented in writing by one letter, appears to the