The Portland daily press., 1888-11-24
SOURCE OF SPEECH.
Cases where Children Develop Orig
inaI Languages
[san FrancIsco ChronIcle.l

[San Francisco Chronicle.1
A Boston newspaper recently published
an account Of two brothers living in that
city, who, it declares, have grown to mans
estate without ever being able to speak the
English language, although born in the
United States Of American parents, and
having heard English spoken continuously
Their vocal organs have been examined by
the bestspecialists and found to be perfect.
ly normal. These brothers. it is asserted,
speak language Of their own, which they per-
fectly understand, but which, thus far. has
has been unintelligible to everybody else.
Some words Of the language were given by
the journal referred to. and a philologist
would trace resemblance, II nothing more,
to Sanscrit.
But the case referred to il not without its
parallel: The writer Of this article saw, on
brother and sister, living at little stage sta
ton in the State Of Nevada, who had invent
ed language of their own, which they con-
stantly used in talking with each other.
The girl was 9 or 10 years Of age, and the
boy year or two younger. There could be
would play together and chatter in this
strange speech Of their own devising, and it
was perfectly apparent that 1t was not such
meaningless gibberish as children often use
In play, but genuine language. 1t resent
bled no language with which the writer had
any acquaintance. There could be detected
no resemblance to any modern language, no
similarity to root forms or stems which may
be said, roughly. to be common to all spoken
languages; nor was there any likeness to
either Latin or Greek, and consequently none
to the cognate language which Is called Sans
crit
The children were not at all shy about
talking in the presence of strangers, but they
could not be made TO understand what trans
lation from English into their language
meant. They understood English, and could
and did speak it when spoken to; but they
either could not or would not give the equiv
alents of English words in their own Ian
guage. The mother of the children said she
linguistic freak. She said that the first time
she heard them, and indeed for many times
afterward, she paid no attention, as she sup
posed they were ''only s.jabbering nonsense"
as she expressed ii, and so she was entirely
unable to say whether the language was evo-
lutionary, or whether the children spoke it
just as well the first time as the last. They
certainly spoke enough OF 1t when the writer
heard them to understand them without diff
Guilty, although it seemed to the writer from
the curs0ry observations he could make that
the vocabulary was a very limited one; but
that would have been equally the case with
children of that age had they been speaking
English.
There has been story in vogue for many
years. although it is impossible to verify it.
and it is probably apocryphal, that for the
purpose of determining whether there was
primal language, and If so what 1t was, two
infants were at one time confined in the Bas-
tile, and were never allowed to hear word
of any language spoken, 1t being supposed
that nature would supply them with the
means OF communicating with each other as
they grew old enough to talk, and that the
controversy as to primal language would
be conclusively determined. The story says,
however, that up to IL years of age the chill
dren never uttered an articulate sound. They
communicated with each other in fashion,
but it was entirely by signs, and not by any
thing resembling aspoken language Of any
kind. The story goes on to. say that they
were then released from their confinement
and placed among people where they heard
French spoken all around them, and that
they soon learned to speak the language
which they heard, but never gave any signs
of knowing any other tongue.
The story may be true, or 1t may not. Ii
tits, it would tend very strongly to show
that our speech is the result of imitation, and
that the faculty of articulate speech depends
Cd the ability to repeat what is gathered
from the speech Of Others. This view re-
ceives confirmation from the observation of
deaf and dumb people, who are, as rule,
dumb because they are deaf. They possess
TIE vocal organs fully developed, but they
cannot speak because they are not able TO
Initiate either the SOUND Oh language or tne
mechanical vocal efforts of speaking persons,
and this, not because Of innate inability, but
because of the lack of medium Of intercom-
munication.
And yet the observation of the cases in
Massachusetts and Nevada to which we
have referred shows that there must be ex-
ceptions to what would seem to be general
rule. Those children in Nevada knew no
more of the accepted theories of philology
than they did of the differential calculus
They did not know the first thing about the
development theory; they never heard OF the
rules of linguistic structure; and yet they
constructed Tor themselves language which
was, for all practical purposes, just as much
language as Hebrew or Greek or German
or English. 1t meant something to them;
each could understand the other; each could
say what he or she wanted to say, and that
constitutes language.
The Boston case Is somewhat different, IL
1t Is told correctly. In that case there would
seem to be some structural deficiency in the
brain-sOme distorted convolution or some
thing of the sort-for. generally speaking,
man who can speak one language can speak
every other, at least after a fashion; but
these brothers, it is asserted, cannot speak
English, although they can UNDERESTIMATE to
a certain extent.
These cases, strange as they may be, do
not initiate in any degeee against the gen.
orally received doctrines of philology. They
are freaks of nature, nothing more, and are,
II we stop to consider, no more strange than
other cases with which we are familiar.