ABSTRACT
According to Ogden Nash, the behaviour of children and drunks is equally confusing. Linguists would perhaps agree with him. Listening to infants speaking is like being in topsy-turvy land. The problems of children faced with adult language sometimes seem trivial to a linguist who is trying to decipher infant burbles. But far worse than the problem of decipherment is the difficulty of interpreting the utterances. One writer remarked that writing about the acquisition of language:
is somewhat like the problem of reconstructing a dinosaur while the bones are still being excavated. It can happen that after you have connected what you earnestly believe are the hind legs you find that they are the jaw bones.
