Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 46.djvu/806

786 general types or norms of the language, so far as this has become familiar.

The English child is not much troubled by inflections of substantives. The pronouns, however, as every mother knows, are apt to cause much heartburning to the little linguist. The mastery of "I" and "you," "me," "mine," etc., forms an epoch in the development of linguistic faculty and of the power of thought which is so closely correlated with these. Hence it will repay a brief inspection.

As is well known, children begin by designating themselves and those whom they address by names, as when they say, "Baby good," "Mamma come." This is described as speaking "in the third person," yet this is not quite accurate, seeing that there is as yet no distinction of person in the child language.

Later, when the little brain grows more cunning and the tongue nimbler, the child introduces differences of person, and uses the pronominal forms "I" or "me," "you," etc. So far as I can ascertain, most children begin to say "me" before they say "you." Yet I have met with one or two apparent exceptions to this rule. Thus the boy C certainly seemed to get hold of the form of the second person before that of the first, and the priority of "you" is attested in another case sent to me. It is desirable to get more observations on this point.

To determine the exact date at which an intelligent use of the first person appears is much less easy than it looks. A child is apt at first to use the forms "me" and "you" mechanically—that is, imitating exactly what another says, and so speaking of another person as "I" and of himself as "you." Here it is evident there is no clear proof of the pronominal form. Allowing for these difficulties, it may be said with some degree of confidence that the great transition from "baby" to "I" is wont to take place in favorable cases early in the third year. Thus among the dates assigned by different observers I find twenty-four months and twenty-five months (cases given by Preyer), between twenty-five and twenty-six (Pollock), twenty-seven months (the boy C). A lady friend tells me that her boy began to use "I" at twenty-four months. In the case of a certain number of precocious children this point is attained at an earlier date. Thus Preyer quotes a case of a child speaking in the first person at twenty months. Schultze gives a case at nineteen months. A friend of mine, a professor of English literature, whose boy showed great precocity at sentence-building, reports that he used the forms "me" and "I" within the sixteenth month. Preyer's boy, on the other hand, who was evidently somewhat slow in lingual development, first used the forms of the first person "to me' (mir) at the age of twenty-nine months.