The concerted cries during co-operative work to which Noirée ascribes the origin of language-sounds would seem, while having a special physiological cause as concomitant and probably auxiliary motor processes, to be analogous at least to emotional cries, in so far as they spring out of a peculiar condition of feeling, that of effort. On the other hand, as _concerted_ they came under the head of imitative movements. So far as I can learn the nursery supplies no analogies to these utterances. ----- While vocal sounds which are clearly traceable to emotional expressions or to imitations form the staple of the normal child’s inventions they do not exhaust them. Some of these early self-prompted linguistic sounds cannot be readily explained. I find, for example, that children are apt to invent names for their nurses and sometimes for themselves which, so far as I can ascertain, bear no discoverable resemblance to the sounds used by others. Thus the same little girl that invented ‘numby’ for food and ‘afta’ for drinking called her nurse ‘Lee’ though no one else called her by any other name than ‘nurse’. It is difficult to suppose that the child was transforming the sound ‘nurse’ in this case. Preyer’s boy called his nurse, whom others addressed as Marie, ‘Wolá,’ which Preyer explains rather forcedly as deriving by inversion from the frequently heard ‘Ja wohl!’ A lady friend informs me that her little boy when thirteen months old called himself ‘Bla-a,’ though he was always addressed by others as Jeffrey, and that he stuck to ‘Bla-a’ for six months.[72] A germ of imitation is doubtless recognisable here in the preservation of the syllabic form or structure (that of monosyllable or dissyllable). Yet the amount of transformation is, to say the least, surprising in children, who show themselves capable of fairly close imitation. Possibly a child’s ear notes analogies of sound which escape our more sophisticated organ. However this be, the fact of such origination of names (other than those clearly onomatopoetic) is noteworthy. ----- Footnote 72: His brother when one year old called his nurse, whose real name was Maud, Bur, which was probably a rough rendering of ‘nurse’. -----