From the time they are born, children hear people speak. They are spoken to not only before they understand what is said to them, but before they can repeat the sounds they hear. Their organs, still benumbed, adapt themselves only by degrees to imitating the sounds dictated to them, and it is not even certain that these sounds are borne to their ears at first as distinctly as to ours.
I do not disapprove of a nurse's amusing the child with songs, and with blithe and varied tones. But I do disapprove of her perpetually deafening him with a multitude of useless words, of which he understands only the tone she gives them.
I would like the first articulate sounds he must hear to be few in number, easy, distinct, often repeated. The words they form should represent only material objects which can be shown him. Our unfortunate readiness to content ourselves with words that have no meaning to us whatever, begins earlier than we suppose. Even as in his swaddling-clothes the child hears his nurse's babble, he hears in cla** the verbiage of his teacher. It strikes me that if he were to be so brought up that he could not understand it at all, he would be very well instructed.[6]
Reflections crowd upon us when we set about discussing the formation of children's language, and their baby talk itself. In spite of us, they always learn to speak by the same process, and all our philosophical speculations about it are entirely useless.
They seem, at first, to have a grammar adapted to their own age, although its rules of syntax are more general than ours. And if we were to pay close attention to them, we should be astonished at the exactness with which they follow certain an*logies, very faulty if you will, but very regular, that are displeasing only because harsh, or because usage does not recognize them.
It is unbearable pedantry, and a most useless labor, to attempt correcting in children every little fault against usage; they never fail themselves to correct these faults in time. Always speak correctly in their presence; order it so that they are never so happy with any one as with you; and rest a**ured their language will insensibly be purified by your own, without your having ever reproved them.
But another error, which has an entirely different bearing on the matter, and is no less easy to prevent, is our being over-anxious to make them speak, as if we feared they might not of their own accord learn to do so. Our injudicious haste has an effect exactly contrary to what we wish. On account of it they learn more slowly and speak more indistinctly. The marked attention paid to everything they utter makes it unnecessary for them to articulate distinctly. As they hardly condescend to open their lips, many retain throughout life an imperfect pronunciation and a confused manner of speaking, which makes them nearly unintelligible.
Children who are too much urged to speak have not time sufficient for learning either to pronounce carefully or to understand thoroughly what they are made to say. If, instead, they are left to themselves, they at first practise using the syllables they can most readily utter; and gradually attaching to these some meaning that can be gathered from their gestures, they give you their own words before acquiring yours. Thus they receive yours only after they understand them. Not being urged to use them, they notice carefully what meaning you give them; and, when they are sure of this, they adopt it as their own.
The greatest evil arising from our haste to make children speak before they are old enough is not that our first talks with them, and the first words they use, have no meaning to them, but that they have a meaning different from ours, without our being able to perceive it. Thus, while they seem to be answering us very correctly, they are really addressing us without understanding us, and without our understanding them. To such ambiguous discourse is due the surprise we sometimes feel at their sayings, to which we attach ideas the children themselves have not dreamed of. This inattention of ours to the true meaning words have for children seems to me the cause of their first mistakes, and these errors, even after children are cured of them, influence their turn of mind for the remainder of their life.
The first developments of childhood occur almost all at once. The child learns to speak, to eat, to walk, nearly at the same time. This is, properly, the first epoch of his life. Before then he is nothing more than he was before he was born; he has not a sentiment, not an idea; he scarcely has sensations; he does not feel even his own existence.