From A. H. Sayce 2 August 1877
Queen’s Coll. | Oxford.
Aug. 2nd 1877.
Dear Sir,
Very many thanks for your kind permission to quote your words1 as well as for the account of the last meeting of the American Philological Association & your allowing me to keep it. What Professor Holden & Professor Whitney say is at once interesting & important.2 The first word on the list of the children’s vocabulary I notice is birdie, & among other words quoted are ‘dollie & my footies.3 This illustrates one of the results to wh. the facts I have collected seem to point, namely the inclination children show for changing a monosyllable into a dissyllable by the addition of a short vowel or nasal. Other results are a clearer pronunciation of the vowels than of the consonants, a dislike to double consonants especially at the beginning of words, a use of aspirated gutturals & semi-articulate sounds very difficult for us to imitate, & an inclination to change initial s with h. I also observe in some cases that where a child has learnt to pronounce isolated words clearly & distinctly it fails to do so when it tries to combine them into sentences.
With many thanks | Yours faithfully | A. H. Sayce.
Footnotes
Bibliography
‘Biographical sketch of an infant’: A biographical sketch of an infant. By Charles Darwin. Mind 2 (1877): 285–94. [Shorter publications, pp. 409–16.]
Holden, Edward Singleton. 1877. On the vocabularies of children under two years of age. Transactions of the American Philological Association 8: 58–68.
Sayce, Archibald Henry. 1880. Introduction to the science of language. 2 vols. London: C. Kegan Paul & Co.
Whitney, William Dwight. 1877. The principle of economy as a phonetic force. Transactions of the American Philological Association 8: 123–34.
Summary
Thanks CD for permission to quote his comments; mentions some of his conclusions with regard to the early speech of children.
Thanks for [newspaper] account of American Philological Association meeting.
Letter details
- Letter no.
- DCP-LETT-11090
- From
- Archibald Henry Sayce
- To
- Charles Robert Darwin
- Sent from
- Queen’s College, Oxford
- Source of text
- DAR 177: 47
- Physical description
- ALS 4pp
Please cite as
Darwin Correspondence Project, “Letter no. 11090,” accessed on 18 April 2024, https://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/letter/?docId=letters/DCP-LETT-11090.xml