Page:Essays on the Chinese Language (1889).djvu/162

148 children to save them from boy-hunting demons, we find mi-mi or kitten used as a personal name. Further, the child says the hen t‘e-lo, that is, clucks or cackles, and this in some places is a child-term, not only for the cackle but also for the hen. At Foochow the horse is known to children as the animal which makes kak-kak in trotting. Now the man who personates another at one of the State Examinations has long been called the ma, or horse, of the man for whom he appears. But at Foochow the term came to be well known, and so it is there often replaced by kak-kak, to the utter mystification of all strangers. Another Foochow child-word is nu-nu, or a sound like that. When a fat baby is rounding "to a separate mind" he distinguishes himself as nu-nu, and his seniors allow him the designation. It must be owned that often an infant "see-saws his voice in inarticulate noises." He finds much difficulty in imitating certain sounds, and hence he, like his elders, often makes utterances which convey no meaning. To these, as not being articulate speech, disparaging epithets are often applied. Among the Amoy-speaking people one name for them is li-li-la-la, and this is also used to denote the infantile prattling of grown-up people. In Mandarin the terms ya (啞) and ou (嘔) are used separately or together to denote the sounds made by a child beginning to talk. Then ya-ya comes to mean, not only the a-a of a baby, but also "to prattle nonsense," to babble like a baby.

One of the first accomplishments of a baby is expressed in English by suck, "a word imitative of the sound." So a Foochow mother calls her baby to sauk-sauk (variously given also as soh-sah, siah, etc.), and thence we have the verb sauk in such an expression as suaksauk [sic]-neing, to suck milk. In Tientsin the thirsty infant cries for tsa-tsa. In Shanghai the baby calls for ma-ma, and this is the name for a woman's breasts there, and the name, for the same reason, is used in other parts of China. Again, at Tientsin a baby cries for food by whimpering pei-pei, and so the mother uses this expression to call the little creature to his food. The actual feeding of the baby is called pu or pu-pu, from the noise made by it during the process, and hence arose