Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 46.djvu/461

Rh It might be supposed that the qualifying or determining word might come just as naturally after the generic name as before it, as in the French moulin à vent, cygne noir. I have heard of one child who used the form "mill-wind" in preference to "windmill." It would be worth while to note any similar instances.

In these inventions, again, we may detect a close resemblance between children's language and that of savages. In presence of a new object a savage behaves very much as a child; he shapes a new name out of familiar ones, a name that commonly has much of the metaphorical character. Thus the Aztecs called a boat a "water house"; and the Vancouver islanders, when they saw a screw steamer, called it the "kick-kicke."

A somewhat different class of word inventions is that in which a child frames a new word on the analogy of known words. The more common case is the invention of new substantives from verbs after the pattern of other substantives. The results are often quaint enough. Sometimes it is the agent who is named by the new word, as when the boy C talked of the "Rainer," or the fairy who makes rain. Sometimes it is the product of the action, as when the same child C and the deaf-mute Laura Bridgman both invented the form "thinks" for "thoughts." Similarly, a boy of three called the holes which he dug in his garden his "digs." The reverse process, the formation of a verb from a substantive, also occurs. Thus one child invented the form "dag" for striking with a dagger; and Preyer's boy, when two years and two months old, formed the verb "messen," to express "cut," from the substantive Messer (a knife). This readiness to form verbs from substantives, and vice versa, which is abundantly illustrated in the development of community language, is without doubt connected with the primitive and natural mode of thinking. The object is of greatest interest to a child as to primitive man as an agent, or as the last stage or result of an action.

In certain of these original formations we may detect a fine feeling for verbal analogy. Thus, a French boy, after killing the limaces (snails) which were eating the plants in the garden, dignified his office by styling himself a "limacier," where the inventive faculty was no doubt led by the analogy of voiturier formed from voiture.

In certain cases these original constructions are of a more clumsy order, and due to a partial forgetfulness of a word and an effort to complete it. The same little boy who talked of his