59 2 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



turned "Watts" also into fdk. It is possible, as M. Taine suggests, 

 that to her there is some shade of difference in the sounds which escapes 

 adult ears. At twenty months twenty-five days she said vats or vats. 

 "Walk" has its proper sense as a mode of motion, opposed to riding, 

 in perambulator for herself, or in carriage for others. She is much in- 

 terested in watching callers going away, and says to them dyi dyi or 

 zhi zhi (gee-gee) . . . wdk, as if to ask how they mean to go ; or, per- 

 haps, merely to show her knowledge. Sometimes she begins to say td 

 td to a visitor, not that she is tired of his or her presence, but that she 

 wants the amusement of seeing the departure. 



She has learned to repeat no no after she has been told not to do 

 something, as an act of assent to the prohibition, and she seems to take 

 pleasure in saying no no to the cat. 



Twenty months. Dash or <#sA=dust. Td'sh or tdi'sh, learned, I 

 think, from " touch," one day repeated several times without assignable 

 meaning, and then dropped. Tdsh, however, is adopted for [musjtache. 

 N. B. Final sibilants are more under command than initial. Final g 

 now produced: geg=fizgig (toy so called). 



At this time a sudden advance was made to dissyllables. Several 

 words were produced with success on or about the same day : " Fanny, 

 honey, money " (these two learned from the rhyme of " Sing a song of 

 sixpence "), very distinct. " Money," however, seems to be confused 

 with " moon : " when told to say moon she says money. Others are 

 attempted with more or less success: as fd-wd, flower; la-ta, letter; 

 ha-pi, happy (taught her as opposite of "poor," but I doubt if she sees 

 the meaning. She has taken up ha-pi to stand for " empty," which we 

 tried to teach her, and in that sense uses it without prompting). Bd-ta, 

 butter. The child's own name, Alice, is given as A-si, or perhaps A-si 

 (later d-si). As to sound, she is now acquiring the English long sound 

 of i (ai). H is still impracticable, and attempts to form it sometimes 

 give d (but this was very transient, and I soon became the common 

 substitute) : compare the converse Bengalese treatment of Sanskrit d, 

 which, I believe, is in Bengal regularly pronounced as r. " P'ram," for 

 perambulator, becomes thlarn : the th, with an extra aspiration, almost 

 %B. A few weeks later this was simplified into khlam. There seems 

 to be a difficulty about initial vowels : " egg^ becomes lleg (or perhaps 

 yleg would be nearer), which I can only write symbolically : the sound 

 marked as 11 or yl is something like the Spanish 11 with an aspiration. 

 A few days later the initial sound was more sibilant and less vocal, say 

 (symbolically) zhy. 



Early in March (at twenty months) we noted the first attempt at 

 sustained conversation. The child was looking, or pretending to look, 

 for a lost object on the floor. We told her she would get her hands 

 dirty. On this she exclaimed, in a tone of dissenting interrogation, 

 "Dirty!" (da-ti), and then, after looking at her hands, holding them 



