Where the Bookworms Meet

Arma virumque cano — so is it ever. It is of those lusty souls who travel by airplane from Berlin to Moscow, and cruise from the shores of the Mediterranean to the Land of the Midnight Sun, that the book of the American summer exodus tells. The migrations of the bookworms go unsung.

I wait to see in that faithful expression of our national spirit, the American press in Paris, such a note as this ‘ Miss Mary Smith of Mid-Western State College has arrived in London. Miss Smith will spend the months of July and August in the Reading Room of the British Museum, editing Early English metrical romances.’

There are dozens of Miss Smiths and Mr. Smiths living in London in the summer months, fattening the innkeepers of Bloomsbury. We are to be seen, any week-day morning between nine and ten, with our national insignia of bone-rimmed glasses and brief-cases, converging upon the gates of the British Museum. We pass the police at the gates and the pigeons on the steps, bore through the groups of tourists inquiring the whereabouts of the Museum’s choicest mummies, march between two more guards at the door marked ‘Readers Only,’ pass the tolerant admonitory sign, ‘It is particularly requested that SILENCE may be observed as strictly as possible,’ and enter into the dust and haze of the great domed Reading Room.

Perhaps there is something of symbolism in the long journey; for the path of learning which leads to the British Museum Reading Room is a rough one, and narrow is the gate. It is more difficult to become a properly certificated reader than it is to enter — the state of matrimony, for instance. The pursuit of knowledge is not regarded by the Museum authorities as a thing to be undertaken lightly, or in the first flush of youth; it is an avocation for the soberer years of maturity.

To pass the door marked ‘Readers Only’ one must have achieved twentyone years. The reader-to-be must also own to some recondite purpose in his researches — no surreptitious reading of modern fiction! Finally, he must fortify his (written) application with a letter from a London householder (sic) testifying to his honorable intentions.

The casual-minded soon learn that the Museum will accept no substitutes. It was late in the summer when I made my first assault upon its gates, and the few householders I knew were still away on their holidays. To be sure, the fever of my minority had passed and I had come decently of age, and I had exceedingly erudite works in prospect; but the crux was the householder. I flourished evidences of membership in more or less learned societies, murmuring that they were rather better evidence of my fitness to use a library than a note from a college friend’s husband was likely to be. No use. I must first catch my householder. With a new docility I sought and found him, and from that moment the pursuit of knowledge was unobstructed.

I later came to think that it would be better in the long run if the Museum authorities required a physical examination as well. Of those who pass the gates only the physically fit survive. The first part of our daily routine consists of a muscular exercise which has been neglected — wrongly, I think — by Walter Camp, probably because it is the product of a complex society, and the tiger knows it not. The device of the card-catalogue has not yet been introduced into the Reading Room. Its place is filled by hundreds of ancient leather-bound books, each weighing about as much as a bound volume of the Times, in which the entries are pasted in an approximation of alphabetical order. These are disposed in cases just above the level of the floor, so that the seeker performs the feat of hoisting them by their leather straps to the top of the case, describing an arc like that of an athlete putting a heavy shot.

It is a strong man’s work, and bit by bit it is weeding out the weaklings from the Intelligentsia. In time, the delicate college-professor of fiction will disappear from our ranks.

Behind the battlements of books achieved we look rather like a menagerie of intellectuals gathered in one great cage. The Americans, padding about in the flat-heeled shoes, and the quick-moving English are the most common species. But mixing with them are Continentals with clipped beards, dark men and women from India, in strange and graceful clothes, Orientals, and Near-Easterners of unclassifiable nationalities. West and East and North and South are met, never to speak, and never to meet again.

We work at strange tasks at our shiny black desks. The little man who reads interminably on endocrinology sits next a thatched-headed woman in a burlap dress who is writing music for songs. Next her is a bearded fellow who is compiling figures on the cost of armaments in the United States. Just beyond is one of the bone-rimmed clan, reading folk-tales of the Papuans.

Side by side we go our inexplicable solitary ways. Some of us are obscure and will end our lives in obscurity. The names of a few will be pasted many times into those great leather books. Upon us all for a little while a kind of magic sifts down through the dusty amber air, a fleeting sense of the internationality of scholarship, the brotherhood of the printed page.

THE PHILOLOGY OF BABY TALK

FEW mothers are aware that Baby Talk is a true language, as susceptible of linguistic study as Latin, Greek, or modern French. I was not aware of it myself till recently—but then, I am not a mother. I am, in fact, a bachelor, of rather fixed habits and prejudices, and it has long been a peculiar eccentricity of mine to number the very young of the species in the category with fountain-pens. Personal observation could never have led me to discover, or even to suppose, the astonishing fact that we are all of us born equipped with instinctive language, with grammar and vocabulary and, possibly, irregular verbs. This is apparently all born in us, just as the songs of the birds are hatched with them from the egg. By language, I mean, of course, much more than animal cries, emotional outbursts; I mean articulate speech, words, ideation.

Instinctive speech suggests the language of the angels. Indeed, I have dug this arresting hypothesis out of a little old stray book by an African missionary of the last century, who was hoping, by study of the primitive Bantu dialects, to discover the long-sought-for language of the Garden of Eden. He is very guarded about it, as one sensitive of ridicule from the Darwinian party. Also, there had been considerable dispute during the Middle Ages as to the original and perfect language spoken by God to Adam; and men had grown a bit sensitive about it — by the time the Dutch had put in their claim. To be sure, the subject was ‘old hat,’ even among the philosophers of ancient Greece. Herodotus begins his second book with the relation of how Rhamsinitus isolated two infants with silent attendants, in order to discover what language man would speak by nature.

In fact, speculation upon the origin of language is as old as it is perennially fresh. There is hardly a month’s issue of periodicals that docs not contain some story of a Tarzan of the Apes discovering or inventing language for himself.

My African missionary is probably no credited authority among philologists. Bantu represented to him almost pure Edenic as spoken by Adam 5801 years previously (Archbishop Usher’s reckoning). But as few persons of intelligence still hold to the literal account. of the Creation, I have ventured to read ‘language of instinct’ for ‘language of Eden,’ and so to apply to a new and interesting hypothesis philological observations quite wasted upon a lost cause.

We may not all be descended from Adam, but we are, with no exceptions that I can think of off-hand, all descended, in the sense of being grown up, from the infant state. It is quite possible, I think, to trace certain elements in all languages of mankind to that basic root-language, that universal Sanskrit, which every living one of us spoke first — Baby Talk. I do not pretend that chairs of Baby Talk will ever be established in our universities, or that Esperantists will hold their next international conference in this lingua franca of the bassinet. I present only what I feel would interest a mother, and what she may verify by observation without bothering to look up text references.

Infant speech begins with the sound ‘Ah!’ A natural remark and one that adult speech retains in its purity, as an expression of surprise and astonishment. This ah sound is hardly a vowel, because the mouth docs nothing to shape the natural tone as it emerges direct from the throat. Upon this ä the closing of the lips imposes the interruptive consonant sound M. When baby begins to say ‘mama,’ he is referring to himself. It is the first vocal expression of personal consciousness. Roughly translated it means, ‘I am getting along in great shape.’

Bubbles are next blown. The lips are here engaged with the consonant series pi-beta-phi (Grimm’s law). ‘P-brrr-fff’ becomes ‘puffs,’ as in English, and is accompanied with a gesture of airily waved fists thrust upward out of the cradle. ‘P’ff’ is rather a term of derision. Compare Pooh! Bah! Pshaw! Faugh! It. is applied in Baby Talk to almost anything that is above baby’s comprehensions, that is up in the air, airy, vapid. The gesture is that of a Podsnap flourishing away the French nation. But baby still regards his hand as a wing. He blows with his lips and fans with his wings.

In due course, baby will begin to crow and chuckle, and otherwise to emit gargling sounds of the consonant series kappa-gamma-chi. These gutturals (k, g, ch,) express life, motion. ‘Gaga’ may be translated ‘Something doing!’ By aspiration, the consonant is intensified. ‘Gha-gha!' ‘This is jolly!’ The reserved English alphabet has no letters by which we can render phonetically the crowing sounds. Arabic, however, has several such aspirates, which carry the intensification through the gargling, chuckling stages of aspiration, almost to the hiccoughs — which is where aspiration of the guttural ceases in Baby Talk. The laughter of adults may easily be traced back to the root ga (go, something going on, a lively time).

‘Ta’ is, of course, ‘take,’ without the k of adult executive action. ‘Ta-ta’ is accompanied by a reaching gesture. ‘Da-da’ (see Grimm’s law again) is a softened or more polite form —‘ I ‘ll thank you to hand me that.’ ‘Ta’ expresses an emphatic demand, hence t he explosive consonant. The gesture of grabbing may in moods of temper be reversed, when ‘ ta-ta!' will have the meaning of ‘Take that, you!’ (ta’-tha’).

These then are the consonants. P for airy trifles, for fluttering frivolity. K for life and a gay one. T for desire. M must be added, for, from a mere closing of the lips, it comes to signify reserve, retirement, self, whatever is within. N, or nasalization, is a later accretion. It is an intensification of dignity and importance. Babies probably do not grunt instinctively; they learn to do so as they grow older, by association with their parents and the world.

The three vowel sounds are ä, properly aa (as in laager beer), oo, and ee.

Aa, the most elemental, a mere bleat, has a meaning in Baby Talk that is best expressed by the spreading gesture of the hands. It, expresses urbanity, the broader point of view, the generous generality, horizontality. ‘Ga’ may thus be seen to be composed of G + Aa, which is to say, the guttural of action with the vowel of horizontality. Hence ‘ga’ as a root means go, something going on, on the go. ‘Ma’ (M+ A) in its verbal sense will be readily seen to mean ‘I myself am getting along, broadening out in my views, extending my acquaintance,’ and so forth.

Oo, the second vowel, requires considerable practice in shaping the mouth. The vowel is generally acquired in conjunction with the consonant P. Oo sounds an early note of criticism. The accompanying gesture is upward, as if measuring the fullness of things, or estimating higher qualities. ‘Goo’ (G+OO) means, of course, ‘good.’ Adults naturally associate the d or the t of grabbing with anything that is goo.

Ee is introspective. It is by far the most difficult vowel to pronounce, and it marks the highest development of instinctive speech. It expresses personal identity, physical consciousness, pain. When the infant, gazing inward upon his still soul, cries ‘Me’ (M+E), he has achieved that self-expression which we recognize as the ultimate purpose of language.

These primitive roots apparently all exist in Bantu, and may be traced, more or less, through all languages. Thus ta — English, take; French, tiens; Spanish, tome; Latin, teneo; Arabic, a’ta; Japanese, dasu, etc. Comparative philology is the easiest thing in the world if you go about it the right way. You can always find a word sounding something like what you want it to sound; meaning something like what you want it to mean. And in doing this you pass over about a thousand exceptions. All this is allowed, and is quite regular. But I am not. going to go into this part of my subject.

In conclusion, I will say t hat whet her or not two shipwrecked, orphaned infants brought up on two desert isles by maternal crocodiles would, upon attaining their respective manhood and womanhood, speak the same language, is a question that seems to me of slight practical interest, if any. But the popularity of this type of story shows that people are still wondering, as Rhamsinitus did, about it. I can’t help wondering myself.