Studies of childhood / by James Sully.

  • James Sully
Date:
1903
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Studies of childhood / by James Sully. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    simplify our forms, to get rid of irregularities. This is strikingly illustrated in the use of the heterogeneous assemblage of forms known as the verb ‘ to be’. It is really hard on a child to expect him to answer the question, ‘ Are you good now ? ’ by saying, ‘Yes, I am \ He says, of course, ‘Yes, I are’. Perhaps the poor verb ‘to be’ has suffered every kind of violence at the hands of children.1 Thus the child M. used the form ‘bed’ for ‘was’. Pro¬ fessor Max Muller somewhere says that children are the purifiers of language. Would it not be well if they could become its simplifiers also, and give us in place of this con¬ geries of unrelated sounds one good decent verb-form ? Other quaint transformations occur when the child begins to combine words, as when M. joining adverb to verb invented the form of past tense ‘ fall downed ’ for ‘fell down’. Another queer form is ‘ Am’t I?’ used for ‘ am I not ? ’ after the pattern of ‘ aren’t we ?5 An even finer linguistic stroke than this, is ‘ Bettern’t you ? ’ for ‘Had you not better?’ where the child was evidently trying to get in the form ‘ hadn’t you,’ along with the awkward ‘better,’ which seemed to belong to the ‘had,’ and solved the problem by treating ‘better’ as the verb, and dropping ‘ had ’ altogether. A study of these solecisms, which are nearly always amusing, and sometimes daintily pretty, is useful to mothers and young teachers by way of showing how much hard work, how much of real conjectural inference, enters into- children’s essays in talking. We ought not to wonder that they now and again slip ; rather ought we to wonder that, with all the intricacies and pitfalls of our language —this applies of course with especial force to the motley irregular English tongue—they slip so rarely. As a matter of fact, the latter and more ‘correct’ talk—which is correct 1 Cf. Preyer’s account of a German child’s liberties with the same verb, where we find ‘gebist,’ ‘binst,’ and other odd forms, op. cit., p. 438. 12
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