Mondegreen--antedating a concept

[Herb Stahlke]

The origin of "mondegreen" is clear, but when was the concept first
described, if not cleverly named?  I've been preparing a lecture for an
undergrad History of Anthropology class a friend has asked me to cover
while he's out of the country.  It's the week for Boas and Sapir, and the
Boas paper is the now classic "On Alternating Sounds" (The American
Anthropologist, Vol. II, Jan. 1889, pp. 47-53).  It's a free download on
JStor.  The subject of the paper is the misperception of phonetic sequences
based on prior knowledge and experience, and he notes especially the
influence of one's first language and its orthography on one's perception
and representation of forms in another language.  A salient quote:

The clearer the percept of the sensation the less likely it will be that
another sensation is mistaken for it, and the less clear it is the more
likely it is that such a mistake will take place.
We will apply this theory to the phenomena of mishearing. The speaker
pronounces the word fan. The f will be approximately the average f. The
hearer perceives a complex of sounds. There may be two causes for his
mishearing the spoken word. First, the phonetic elements he hears are
similar to other phonetic elements. Fortuitous circumstances may make the
sensation somewhat deviate from the average in the direction of another
phonetic element, and thus it may happen that, instead of being classified
under the proper heading, it is classified under an affiliated one. The
classification is made according to the sounds thatsix are known to exist
in our lan-
guage. Thus we find the f of fan frequently classified under the somewhat
similar th. Second, the hearer does not know the meaning of the spoken
complex of sounds, as there is no context, but he knows that they are
intended to represent a certain word. Therefore when he hears the complex
of sounds these are at once classified under one of the similar words, and
this involuntary assimilation itself may influence the perception of the
component sounds.

Boas is talking about linguists transcribing utterances in unfamiliar
languages and goes on to give examples from transcriptions of Eskimo [sic]
forms.  But this is a pretty good description of what goes on in a
mondegreen.  Does anyone know of an earlier description of the phenomenon?

Herb

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