Babbling

“ This doubling of syllables, involuntary and surely contrary to the will of the child, stands in remarkable contrast with the indolence he commonly shows in reproducing anything said, even when the fault is not to be charged to teasing, stubbornness, or inability. The child then finds more gratification in other movements than those of the muscles of speech. The babbling only, abounding in consonants, yields him great pleasure, particularly when it is laughed at, although it remains wholly void of meaning as language. ”

“ The Forest of Montmorency.
I do not like explanatory lectures; young people pay very little attention to them, and seldom remember them. Things! things! I cannot repeat often enough that we attach too much importance to words. Our babbling education produces nothing but babblers.
Suppose that while we are studying the course of the sun, and the manner of finding where the east is, Émile all at once interrupts me, to ask, "What is the use of all this?" ”

“ The babbling monologues have become infrequent and more of a play with words and the syllables of them, e. g., in the frequently repeated papa-ŭ-á-ŭa.
On the other hand, independent thoughts expressed by words are more and more multiplied. Here is an example: The child had been extraordinarily pleased by the Christmas-tree. ”

“ To the expressive beginnings of speech belongs the sum total of the inarticulate sounds—crying, whimpering, grunting, cooing, squealing, crowing, laughing, shouting (for joy) , modulation of the voice, smacking, and many others, but also the silent movement of the tongue; further, articulation, especially before imitation begins; the formation of sound, and so the gradual perfecting of the vowels, aspirates, and consonants; at the same time the forming of syllables. The last is especially easy to follow in the babbling monologues of the infant, which are often very long. ”

“ Babbling may be a weakness, but to my thinking mystery is a vice. ”

“ She can lead her little one to oo-oo, and ee-ee, and mamma, and bub-bub, etc., by doing these babblings herself while the baby is in her arms and his tiny hands are wandering over her lips and face and throat. ”

“ C’est un franc —; he is a regular babbler. Ne vous fiez pas à cet homme-là, c’est un —; don’t trust that man, he is a great blab.
*babillard, -e, adj., babbling, talkative, chattering.
*babillement, n.m., talkativeness, loquacity, garrulity.
*babiller, v.n., to prate, to tattle, to gossip.
[51]
babine, n.f., lip (of animals) ; chop. Il s’en lèche les —s; he is smacking his lips over it.
babiole, n.f., bauble, gewgaw, toy, knick-knack, plaything, trifle, trinket. ”

“ The truth is, that each elementary sound that enters into the composition of words is represented in our language by so many different combinations of letters, in different cases, that the child has very little clue from the sound of a syllable to guide him in the spelling of it. We ourselves, from long habit, have become so accustomed to what we call the right spelling—which, of course, means nothing more than the customary one—that we are apt to imagine, as has already been said, that there is some natural fitness in it ”

“ This is the first and strongest language of nature. It may be employed, [40] when words have failed, in the most effectual manner. The angry man, choked with rage, unable to speak, tells the violent passions, burning in his bosom, in a language which can not be mistaken. The actions of a friend are a surer test of friendship than all the honied words he may utter. Actions speak louder than words. The first impressions of maternal affection are produced in the infant mind by the soothing attentions of the mother. In the same way we may understand the language of the deaf and dumb. ”

“ Just Talk
Following the Intermission the Jumbler unravels the difference between speech and talk and think and thought.
From time an infant draws first breath
And 'gins its virgin squaking,
Each mother proud, not saving one,
Translates all goos as talking. ”

“ In childhood—in fact, in infancy—we begin the slow and painful process of acquiring a vocabulary to express our ideas and we continue the work till death, ever imitating more or less closely the habits of speech of those about us. Thus language is modified perhaps without conscious effort, upon our part. By careful speakers the purity and the propriety of our speech are safeguarded. On the other hand, our language is corrupted and debased by those of careless and slipshod habits of utterance. ”

“ Children who hear acquire language without any particular effort; the words that fall from others' lips they catch on the wing, as it were, delightedly, while the little deaf child must trap them by a slow and often painful process. But whatever the process, the result is wonderful. Gradually from naming an object we advance step by step until we have traversed the vast distance between our first stammered syllable and the sweep of thought in a line of Shakespeare.
At first, when my teacher told me about a new thing I asked very few questions. ”

“ THE talk of empty-headed, vain and tiresome babblers, who with no foundation of solid matter let out a stream of tipsy, tottering words, has justly been thought to come from the lips and not from the heart. ”

“ Only then can we say that the child has really learned to speak, to express his perceptions, his images, and his feeling and willing in speech.
(3) When the child has reached this stage when he begins to comprehend the practical importance of this activity of his vocal organs, he begins to imitate voluntarily, eagerly, the speech of grown people. This imitation is to some extent mechanical, without involving any comprehension of the meaning of the words. The child simply enjoys being able to produce the same words which grown people use. ”

“ Like reading, it satisfies the instinctive love of knowledge. If we perfectly understand what is said to us, a few words, a monosyllable, suffices to sustain conversation. This art demands a special exercise all the more, as listening is the true and only means of acquiring pronunciation. The vocal power is entirely under the government of the ear. At the Lyceum, not an hour is given to this exercise in all the course of study. How few persons, after four or five years of English in class, can understand Englishmen when speaking their language, and how few can pronounce English correctly! ”

“ Talking—especially in one’s mother tongue—may serve as a last example. We find it impossible to follow the muscular action of the mouth and tongue in framing every letter or syllable we utter. We have probably spoken for years and years before we became aware that the letter h is a labial sound, and until we have to utter a word which is difficult from its unfamiliarity we speak “trippingly on the tongue” with no attention except to the substance of what we wish to say. ”

“ The signs—as they are to the deaf—made by the vocal organs are entirely arbitrary, and have not even a fraction of the redeeming feature of naturalness which oralists demand in ordinary gestures. (4) Circumstances, such as light, position of the speaker, &c., must be favourable for the lip-reading to approach certainty. (5) Styles of speech vary, and it is a constant experience that even pupils who comparatively easily read their teacher’s lips, to whose style of utterance they are accustomed, fail to read other people’s lips. ”

“ We resume the consideration of nouns this evening, in relation to person, number, gender, and position or case.
In the use of language there is a speaker, person spoken to, and things spoken of. Those who speak are the first persons, those who hear the second, and those who are the subject of conversation the third.
The first and second persons are generally used in reference to human beings capable of speech and understanding. But we sometimes condesend to hold converse with animals and inanimate matter. ”

“ The proverb is: 'From the mouths of scholars, but not from the mouth of books.' Verbal communication finds various aids either in pausing or continuing to speak, according to the requirements of the sentence, by raising or lowering the voice, in expressing astonishment, question, narrative, desire, fear or submission by means of gestures, without which speech by itself would remain inadequate. Occasionally the speaker even has recourse to movements of eyes, eyebrows, or the whole head and hands, in order to express anger, pleasure, humility or haughtiness to the degree desired. ”

“ The inactive jaw, tongue, and lips must be made mobile, and in the working away of clumsiness and slovenliness of speech, some degree of stiltedness must perhaps, for a time, be in evidence, but matured practice ought finally to result, not only in accuracy and finish, but in simplicity and ease in speaking.
MAKING THE POINT When the student has made a fair degree of progress in the more strictly mechanical features of speech, the formation of tone, and the delivery of words, he is ready to give himself up more fully to the effective expression of thought. ”

“ Both kinds of initiatory attempts at speaking testify more and more plainly to awakening intellect, for, in order to use a noun together with a verb in such a way as to correspond to a wish or to a fact experienced, there must be added to the imitation of words heard and to the memory of them something which adapts the sense of them to the outward experiences at the time and the peculiar circumstances, and associates them with one another. ”

“ Pay attention to the conversation of Phœbe and Marion, and listen to your Little Mother’s mode of speech. I assure you there is nothing either winning or clever in the use of slang phrases. A street gamin is able to employ them as readily as you do, yet may never aspire to refined speech. To cast your lot with the ignorant and uncultured, rather than with those of your own class, is to abandon the advantages of birth and refined associations. ”

“ The adult patient can no longer speak correctly, because those parts are no longer complete or capable of performing their functions. The parallelism is perfect even to individual cases, if children of various ages are carefully observed in regard to their acquirement of speech. As to facts of a more general nature, we arrive, then, at the three following:
1. The normal infant understands spoken language much earlier than he can himself produce through imitation the sounds, syllables, and words he hears. ”

“ And so we learn naturally to understand first by gesture and then by speech, even as we do with the deaf and dumb. [3] I maintain that a child in its first and second year is able to understand what a wrinkled and what an unwrinkled forehead mean, what a threat indicated by the finger means, what a nod means, what a repeated nod means, etc., which in truth is the basis of rhetorical action. ”

“ The drawling method of talking to young children, as well as using words that are not found in any written language, (called child’s talk,) is decidedly wrong. A child will pronounce and understand the application of a correct word as quickly as an incorrect one. ”

“ Another class of interjections are such as any one conversant with the gesture-signs of savages and deaf-mutes would recognize as being themselves gesture signs, made with vocal sound, in short, voice-gestures. The sound m’m, m’n, made with the lips closed, is the obvious expression of the man who tries to speak, but cannot. Even the deaf-and-dumb child, though he cannot hear the sound of his own voice, makes this noise to show that he is dumb, that he is mu mu, as the Vei negroes of West Africa would say. To the speaking man, the sound which we write as mum! ”

“ Slang.—By slang we mean strange words or expressions, not employed in serious or dignified composition, whether written or spoken. They are sometimes used in conversation, largely in jest, by persons of intelligence and education, but more generally by persons of defective education, who are not really acquainted with the forms of the language used by the educated classes. There can be no great objection to playing with words on occasions where play is appropriate, particularly when the speakers are young or full of boisterous fun. ”

“ We call attention to only a few of the simpler and more common vocal manifestations of feeling, counselling the student who is to deliver a selected speech, to adapt his speaking to the style of that speech. In so doing he will get a varied training, and at length will find his own most effective style.
The speech which is matter-of-fact and commonplace only, has characteristically much short, sharp inflection of voice, with the rapidly varying intervals of pitch that we notice in one's everyday talking. ”

“ Our family circle by and by represented Babel in miniature, for scraps and fragments of all these tongues kept buzzing about our ears from morning to night, each sporting his newly acquired word or sentence on every possible occasion, propounding idioms and peculiar expressions like riddles, to puzzle the rest.
In this way, the labour of learning was very considerably lightened, and every one came to know a few words of each language. ”

“ The little hearing child learns these from constant repetition and imitation. The conversation he hears in his home stimulates his mind and suggests topics and calls forth the spontaneous expression of his own thoughts. This natural exchange of ideas is denied to the deaf child. My teacher, realizing this, determined to supply the kinds of stimulus I lacked. This she did by repeating to me as far as possible, verbatim, what she heard, and by showing me how I could take part in the conversation. ”

“ How many parents become discouraged, and manifest their discouragement and dissatisfaction to the child in reproving and complaints, at what they consider his slow progress in learning to spell—forgetting that in the English language there are in common, every-day use eight or ten thousand words, almost all of which are to be learned separately, by a bare and cheerless toil of committing to memory, with comparatively little definite help from the sound. ”

“ In the same way, if we should take a lot of tiny babies and bring them up where they never heard a word of speech, there is little doubt that when it became time for them to talk, they would invent for themselves a language to talk with. ”