Little by little the learner manages longer sentences, economising his resources to the utmost, troubling nothing about inflections or the insertion of prepositions so as to indicate precise relations, but leaving his hearer to discover his meaning as best he may; and it is truly wonderful how much the child manages to express in this rude fashion. A boy nineteen and a half months old gave this elaborate order to his father: ‘Dada toe toe ba,’ that is, ‘Dada is to go and put his toes in the bath’. Pollock’s little girl in the first essay at sentence-building, recorded at the age of twenty-one and a half months, actually managed a neat antithesis: ‘Cabs dati, clam clin,’ that is to say, ‘Cabs are dirty, and the perambulator is clean’. Preyer’s boy in the beginning of the third year brought out the following, ‘Mimi atta teppa papa oi,’ that is to say, ‘Milch atta Teppich Papa fui,’ which appears to have signified, “The milk is gone, it is on the carpet, and papa said ‘Fie’”. It may be added that the difficulties of deciphering these early sentences is aggravated by the frequent resort to slurs, as when a child says, ‘m’ out’ for ‘take me out,’ ‘’t on’ for ‘put it on’. The order of words in these first tentative sentences is noticeable. Sometimes the subject is placed after the predicate, as in an example given by Pollock, ‘Run away man,’ _i.e._, ‘The man runs (or has run) away,’ and in the still quainter example given by the same writer, ‘Out-pull-baby ’pecs (spectacles),’ _i.e._, ‘Baby pulls or will pull out the spectacles’. In like manner the adjective used as predicate may precede the subject, as in the examples given by Maillet, ‘Jolie la fleur,’ etc.[103] Sometimes, again, the object comes before the verb, as apparently in the following example given by Miss Shinn: a little girl delighted at the prospect of going out to see the moon exclaimed, “Moo-ky (sky), baby shee (see)”.[104] Here is a delightful example of a transposition of subject and object. A boy two years and three months asked, ‘Did Ack (Alec) chocke an apple?’ _i.e._, ‘Did an apple choke Alec?’ though in this case we very probably have to do with a misunderstanding of the action choke. Other kinds of inversion occur when more complex experiments are attempted, as in connecting ‘my’ with an adjective. Thus one child said prettily, ‘Poor my friends’;[105] which archaic form may be compared with the following Gallic-looking idiom used by M. at the age of one year ten months: ‘How Babba (baby, _i.e._, herself) does feed nicely!’ The same little girl put the auxiliary out of its place, saying, ‘Tan (can) Babba wite’ for ‘Baby can write,’ though this was probably a reminiscence of the question-form. ----- Footnote 103: See Compayré, _op. cit._, p. 206. Footnote 104: _Notes on the Development of a Child_, p. 84. Footnote 105: Canton, _The Invisible Playmate_, p. 32, who adds that this exactly answers to the form, “Good my lord!” -----