We may now pass to another of the commonly recognised defects of early articulation, _viz._, the transposition of sounds or metathesis. Sometimes it is two contiguous sounds which are transposed, as when ‘star’ is rendered by ‘tsar’ and ‘spoon’ by ‘psoon’. Here the motive of the change is evidently to facilitate the combination. We have a parallel to this in the use of ‘aks’ (ax) for ‘ask,’ a transposition which was not long since common enough in the West of England.[87] In other transpositions sounds are shifted further from their place. Preyer quotes a case in which there was a dislocation of vowel sounds, _viz._, in the transformation of ‘bite’ (German) into ‘beti’.[88] Here there seems to be no question of avoiding a difficult combination. Other examples are the following: ‘hoogshur’ for ‘sugar’ (one of the first noticed at the age of two); ‘mungar’ for ‘grandmamma,’ ‘punga’ for ‘grandpapa,’ and ‘natis’ for ‘nasty’ (boy between eighteen and twenty-four months); and ‘boofitul’ for ‘beautiful’. Here again we have an analogy to defective speech in adults. When a man is very tired he is liable to precisely similar inversions of order. The explanation seems to be that the right group of sounds may present itself to the speaker’s consciousness without any clear apprehension of their temporal order. Perhaps quasi-æsthetic preferences play a part here too. The child M. seems to have preferred the sequence _m-n_ to _n-m_, saying ‘jaymen’ for ‘geranium’, ‘burman’ for ‘laburnum’. ----- Footnote 87: See Sweet, _History of English Sounds_, p. 33; _cf._ also the change of ‘frith’ to ‘firth’. Footnote 88: _Op. cit._, p. 397. ----- Another interesting feature in this early articulation is the impulse to double sounds, to get a kind of effect of assonance or of rhyme by a repetition of sound or sound-group. The first and simplest form of this is where a whole sound-mass or syllable is iterated, as in the familiar ‘ba-ba,’ ‘gee-gee’ ‘ni-ni’ (for nice). Some children frequently turn monosyllables into reduplications, making book ‘boom-boom’ and so forth. It is, however, in attempting dissyllables that the reduplication is most common. Thus ‘naughty’ becomes ‘na-na,’ ‘faster’ ‘fa-fa,’ ‘Julia’ ‘dum-dum,’ and so forth, where the repeated syllable displaces the second original syllable and so serves to retain something of the original word-form. In some cases the second and unaccented syllable is selected for reduplication, as in the instance quoted by Perez, ‘peau-peau’ for ‘chapeau’. Such reduplications are sometimes aided by kinship of sound, as when the little girl M. changed ‘purple’ into its primitive form ‘purpur’.