Mistakes are the engine of language’s evolution
An apron was once a napron, an adder a nadder
“I BELIEVE THE children are our future,” sang Whitney Houston, making an obvious fact of life sound like a bold claim. Children will of course not only inherit the world, but shape it. And in their linguistic mistakes, their parents can get a sense of how.
Take the child collecting different kinds of animals in a video game: “I got a new specie!”, he cries. The source of the mistake is obvious. The child has heard the slightly rarefied word “species” and assumed it was the plural of something called a specie. Children do this kind of thing all the time as they learn language; generalising from things previously heard and rules previously mastered is the only way they can progress with such speed. In most cases, errors disappear on their own.
This article appeared in the Culture section of the print edition under the headline "The error of our ways"
From the February 2nd 2019 edition
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