Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 46.djvu/805

Rh when "screamed" becomes "scram"; "split" (preterit), "splat" or "splut," and so forth. In other cases the child will convert a strong into a weak form, as when Laura Bridgman, like many another child, would say "I eated," "I seed," and so forth. These differences in the direction of the solecism would probably turn on differences in the word-forms serving as model or precedent which happen to be learned first and to make the strongest impression on the memory.

One thing seems clear here: the child's instinct is to 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. Prof. Max Müller 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 heap of dissimilar sounds one good decent verb-form?

Other quaint transformations occur when the child begins to combine words, as when he says, "Am't I?" for "Am I not," after the pattern of "Aren't we?" 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 later and more "correct" talk—which is correct just because there is a large memory-stock of particular word-forms, and consequently a much greater scope for pure uninventive imitation—is much less admirable than the early inventive imitation; for this last not only has the quality of originality, but shows the germ of a truly grammatical feeling for the