_Ning_ signified desire
for milk, and was employed for that up to the age of two years. (The
word may possibly have been derived from the word _milk_,[E] frequently
heard.) At nine months the child made use of the words _pretty things_
for animals; at ten months it formed many small sentences.
The child practiced itself in speaking, even without direct imitation of
words just spoken, for at the age of two years it began to say over a
number of nursery rhymes that nobody in the house knew, and that could
not have been learned from other children, because the child had no
intercourse with such. At a later period the child declared that the
rhymes had been learned from a former nurse, whom it had not seen for
nearly three months. Thus the articulation was perfecting itself for
weeks before it was understood. The exercises of the child sounded like
careless reading aloud.
The book of Prof. Ludwig Struempell, of Leipsic, "Psychologische
Paedagogik" (Leipsic, 1880, 368 pages), contains an appendix, "Notizen
ueber die geistige Entwickelung eines weiblichen Kindes waehrend der
ersten zwei Lebensjahre" ("Notes on the Mental Development of a Female
Child during the First Two Years of Life"); in this are many
observations that relate to the learning of speech. These are from the
years 1846 and 1847.
In the tenth week, _ah! ah!_ was an utterance of joy; in the thirteenth,
the child sings, all alone; in the nineteenth comes the guttural
utterance, _grrr_, but no consonant is assigned to this period.
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