Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 50.djvu/122

110 the country. "No language to say it in," that expresses the condition of a deaf child's mind before he is taught very well, but perhaps "and no language to think it in" should be added. Let the reader try for himself and see how much consecutive thought he can accomplish without words; and if, with his mind trained by years of intelligent thinking, he can do little until the words come, let him imagine, if he can, the state of a mind cut off from language.

By way of example, let us take the seemingly simple fact of similarity or likeness between two objects. Your three-year-old baby says, "I want a woolly baa-lamb like that one," or "Dose two kitties is dust alike," or "Mamma, you didn't give me the same as brother" all expressions of the same idea of likeness. Now, an ordinary deaf child is eight or nine years old before he has acquired language enough to express either in speech or writing what the baby just learning to talk has said so easily—namely, the idea of similarity. Not but what he knows the things are similar; in this case it is simply the language that is wanting.

Language is a growth. A hearing child begins to absorb language from the very day of his birth. When he gets to be thirteen or fourteen months old, sometimes when he is younger, he begins to give back a word or two of the thousands of words which have been given to him over and over again every waking hour since he was born. It must be remembered that words spoken in a child's hearing are just as much given to him as words spoken directly to him. From the single words with which a baby begins he goes on to phrases and sentences, constantly learning to use more words or to use already familiar words in new ways, until at seven or eight or nine he is able to talk about common things just as intelligently as do his father and mother. In other words, he has learned to talk. His language has grown with his growth, nourished by the daily gifts of those about him, unconsciously given and unconsciously received, no doubt, but none the less contributing their share toward the future structure—i. e., the ordinary vocabulary of man.

Now let us see how the deaf child fares during these impressible years while his hearing brother is absorbing so much. He sees just as much as do the people around him, but it is all unexplained. If you were set down suddenly in utterly strange surroundings, you would be dazed until some explanation was made to you, but the deaf child must go without explanation for years. Life is one long pantomime to him until he goes to school, and the pantomime often means one thing to the person who uses it and another to the person who sees it. While the hearing child is acquiring the language of home, of play, of the street, of time and place and weather, of buying and selling, loving and praying, the deaf child is gaining only crude ideas of all these subjects.