Rensselaer Union, Volume 7, Number 39, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 17 June 1875 — Learning to Speak. [ARTICLE]

Learning to Speak.

The first thing which the child has to leant, before speech is possible, is to observe and distinguish; to recognise the persons and things about him in their concrete individuality, and to notice as belonging to them some of their characteristic’qualities and acts. 'This is a very brief description of * very intricate psychological process—which, however, it does not belong to the student of language to draw out iu greater detail. There is involved in it, we may further remark in passing, nothing which some of the lower animals may not achieve. At the same time, the child is exercising his organs of utterance and gaining conscious command of them, partly by n mere native impulse to the exertion of all his native powers, partly by imitation of the sound-making persons about him; the child brought up in solitude would be comparatively silent. This physical process is quite analogous with the training of the hands; for some six months the child tosses them about, he knows not how or why, then he begins to notice them and work them under command, till at length he can do by conscious volition whatever is within their power. Control and management of the organs of utterance come much more slowly, but the time arrives when the child can imitate at least some of the audible as well as the visible acts of others; can reproduce a given sound as a given gesture. But before this he has learned to associate with some of the objects ' familiar to him the names by which they are called; a result of much putting of the two together on the part of his instructors. There is obviously mental training and shaping, as well as mental equipment, in the process of learning to speak. The mental action of the individual is schooled into certain habits consonant with those of his community; he acquires the current classifications and abstractions and ways of looking at things. To take an example: the quality of color is so conspicuous, and our apprehension of it so urged by the infinity of its manifested differences which are ever before our eyes, that the conception of color is only quickened and rendered more distinct by acquisition of the words which denote it. But in the classification of the shades of hue the phraseology of the language acquired bears a determining in part rthey fall into order under and about the leading names, as white, black, red , blue , green; and each hue is tested in the mind by aid of these, and referred to the one or the other class. And difierent languages make different classifications; some of them so unlike ours, so much less elaborate and complete, that their acquisition gives the eye and mind a very inferior training in distinguishing colors. This is still more strikingly the case as regards number. There are dialects which are in a state of infantile bewilderment before the problem of numeration; they have words for “ one,” “ two,” and “ threbbut all beyond is an undivided “ many." None of us it is certain would have gone farther than that bv his own absolutely unassisted efforts; but by words —and only by words; for such is the abstractness of the relations of number that they, more than any others, are dependent for their realization and manageableness on ex-pression-more and more intricate numerical relations have been mastered by us, until finally we are provided with a system which is extensible to everything short of infinity—the decimal system, namely, or that which proceeds by constant additions of ten individuals of any given denomination to form the next higher. And what is the foundation of this system? Why, as everyone knows, the simple fact that we have ten fingers (“digits") on our two hands, and that fingers are the handiest substitute for figures, the most ready and natural of aids to an unread}- reckoner. A fact as external and physical as this, and seemingly so trivial, has shaped the whole science of mathematics and, altogether without his being aware of it, gives form to all the numerical conceptions of each new learner. It is a suggestion of general human experience in the past, transmitted through language into a law- for the government of thought in the future. —Life and Growth of Language, by Wm. D. Whitney.