alphabet, for instance an ordinary Italian book, or an English one in
some good system of phonetic letters. To suppose English written in the
makeshift alphabet which we still keep in use, would be of course to
complicate the matter in hand with a new and needless difficulty. If,
then, the book be written in a sufficient alphabet, and handed to a
reader, his office will by no means stop short at rendering back into
articulate sounds the vowels and consonants before him, as though he
were reading over proofs for the press. For the emotional tone just
spoken of has dropped out in writing down the words in letters, and it
will be the reader’s duty to guess from the meaning of the words what
this tone should be, and to put it in again accordingly. He has moreover
to introduce emphasis, whether by accent or stress, on certain syllables
or words, thereby altering their effect in the sentence; if he says, for
example, ‘I never sold you that horse,’ an emphasis on any one of these
six words will alter the import of the whole phrase. Now, in emphatic
pronunciation two distinct processes are to be remarked. The effect
produced by changes in loudness and duration of words is directly
imitative; it is a mere gesture made with the voice, as we may notice by
the way in which any one will speak of ‘a _short sharp_ answer,’ ‘a
_long weary_ year,’ ‘a _loud burst_ of music,’ ‘a _gentle gliding_
motion,’ as compared with the like manner in which the gesture-language
would adapt its force and speed to the kind of action to be represented.
Written language can hardly convey but by the context the striking
effects which our imitative faculty adds to spoken language, in our
continual endeavour to make the sound of each word we speak a sort of
echo to its sense. We see this in the difference between writing and
telling the little story of the man who was worried by being talked to
about ‘good books.’ ‘Do you mean,’ he asked, speaking shortly with a
face of strong firm approval, ‘_good_ books?’ ‘or,’ with a drawl and a
fatuous-benevolent simper, ‘_goo-d_ books?’ Musical accent
(_accentus_,[255] musical tone) is turned to account as a means of
emphasis, as when we give prominence to a particular syllable or word in
a sentence by raising or depressing it a semi-tone or more. The reader
has to divide his sentences with pauses, being guided in this to some
extent by stops; the rhythmic measure in which he will utter prose as
well as poetry is not without its effect; and he has again to introduce
music by speaking each sentence to a kind of imperfect melody. Professor
Helmholtz endeavours to write down in musical notes how a German with a
bass voice, speaking on B flat, might say, ‘Ich bin spatzieren
gegangen.—Bist du spatzieren gegangen?’ falling a fourth (to F) at the
end of the affirmative sentence, and rising a fifth (to f) in asking the
question, thus ranging through an octave.[256] When an English speaker
tries to illustrate in his own language the rising and falling tones of
Siamese vowels, he compares them with the English ones of question and
answer, as in ‘Will you go? Yes.’[257] The rules of this imperfect
musical intonation in ordinary conversation have been as yet but little
studied. But as a means of giving solemnity and pathos to language, it
has been more fully developed and even systematized under exact rules of
melody, and we thus have on the one hand ecclesiastical intoning and the
less conventional half-singing so often to be heard in religious
meetings, and on the other the ancient and modern theatrical recitative.
By such intermediate stages we may cross the wide interval from spoken
prose, with the musical pitch of its vowels so carelessly kept, and so
obscured by consonants as to be difficult even to determine, to full
song, in which the consonants are as much as possible suppressed, that
they may not interfere with the precise and expressive music of the
vowels.
Proceeding now to survey such parts of the vocabulary of mankind as
appear to have an intelligible origin in the direct expression of sense
by sound, let us first examine Interjections. When Horne Tooke spoke, in
words often repeated since, of ‘the brutish inarticulate Interjection,’
he certainly meant to express his contempt for a mode of expression
which lay outside his own too narrow view of language. But the epithets
are in themselves justifiable enough. Interjections are undoubtedly to a
certain extent ‘brutish’ in their analogy to the cries of animals; and
the fact gives them an especial interest to modern observers, who are
thus enabled to trace phenomena belonging to the mental state of the
lower animals up into the midst of the most highly cultivated human
language. It is also true that they are ‘inarticulate,’ so far at least
that the systems of consonants and vowels recognized by grammarians
break down more hopelessly than elsewhere in the attempt to write down
interjections. Alphabetic writing is far too incomplete and clumsy an
instrument to render their peculiar and variously-modulated sounds, for
which a few conventionally-written words do duty poorly enough. In
reading aloud, and sometimes even in the talk of those who have learnt
rather from books than from the living world, we may hear these awkward
imitations, _ahem!_ _hein!_ _tush!_ _tut!_ _pshaw!_ now carrying the
unquestioned authority of words printed in a book, and reproduced letter
for letter with a most amusing accuracy. But when Horne Tooke fastens
upon an unfortunate Italian grammarian and describes him as ‘The
industrious and exact Cinonio, who does not appear ever to have had a
single glimpse of reason,’ it is not easy to see what the pioneer of
English philology could find to object to in Cinonio’s obviously true
assertion, that a single interjection, _ah!_ or _ahi!_ is capable of
expressing more than twenty different emotions or intentions, such as
pain, entreaty, threatening, sighing, disdain, according to the tone in
which it is uttered.[258] The fact that interjections do thus utter
feelings is quite beyond dispute, and the philologist’s concern with
them is on the one hand to study their action in expressing emotion, and
on the other to trace their passage into more fully-formed words, such
as have their place in connected syntax and form part of logical
propositions.
In the first place, however, it is necessary to separate from proper
interjections the many sense-words which, often kept up in a mutilated
or old-fashioned guise, come so close to them both in appearance and in
use. Among classic examples are φέρε! δεῦτε! _age!_ _macte!_ Such a word
is _hail!_ which as the Gothic Bible shows, was originally an adjective,
‘whole, hale, prosperous,’ used vocatively, just as the Italians cry
_bravo!_ _brava!_ _bravi!_ _brave!_ When the African negro cries out in
fear or wonder _mámá! mámá!_[259] he might be thought to be uttering a
real interjection, ‘a word used to express some passion or emotion of
the mind,’ as Lindley Murray has it, but in fact he is simply calling,
grown-up baby as he is, for his mother; and the very same thing has been
noticed among Indians of Upper California, who as an expression of pain
cry, _aná!_ that is ‘mother.’[260] Other exclamations consist of a pure
interjection combined with a pronoun, as οἴμοι! _oimè!_ _ah me!_ or with
an adjective, as _alas!_ _hélas!_ (ah weary!) With what care
interjections should be sifted, to avoid the risk of treating as
original elementary sounds of language what are really nothing but
sense-words, we may judge from the way in which the common English
exclamation _well! well!_ approaches the genuine interjectional sound in
the Coptic expression ‘to make _ouelouele_,’ which signifies to wail,
Latin _ululare_. Still better, we may find a learned traveller in the
18th century quite seriously remarking, apropos of the old Greek
battle-shout, ἀλαλά! ἀλαλά! that the Turks to this day call out _Allah!
Allah! Allah!_ upon the like occasion.[261]
The calls to animals customary in different countries[262] are to a
great extent interjectional in their use, but to attempt to explain them
as a whole is to step upon as slippery ground as lies within the range
of philology. Sometimes they may be in fact pure interjections, like the
_schû schû!_ mentioned as an old German cry to scare birds, as we should
say _sh sh!_, or the _aá!_ with which the Indians of Brazil call their
dogs. Or they may be set down as simple imitations of the animal’s own
cries, as the _clucking_ to call fowls in our own farm-yards, or the
Austrian calls of _pi pi!_ or _tiet tiet!_ to chickens, or the Swabian
_kauter kaut!_ to turkeys, or the shepherd’s _baaing_ to call sheep in
India. In other cases, however, they may be sense-words more or less
broken down, as when the creature is spoken to by a sound which seems
merely taken from its own common name. If an English countryman meets a
stray sheep-dog, he will simply call to him _ship! ship!_ So _schäp
schäp!_ is an Austrian call to sheep, and _köss kuhel köss!_ to cows. In
German districts _gus gus!_ _gusch gusch!_ _gös gös!_ are set down as
calls to geese; and when we notice that the Bohemian peasant calls
_husy!_ to them, we remember that the name for goose in his language is
_husa_, a word familiar to English ears in the name of John Huss. The
Bohemian, again, will call to his dog _ps ps!_ but then _pes_ means
‘dog.’ Other sense-words addressed to animals break down by long
repetition into mutilated forms. When we are told that the _to to!_ with
which a Portuguese calls a dog is short for _toma toma!_ (_i.e._, ‘take
take!’) which tells him to come and take his food, we admit the
explanation as plausible; and the _coop coop!_ which a cockney might so
easily mistake for a pure interjection, is only ‘Come up! come up!’
‘Come uppe, Whitefoot, come uppe, Lightfoot,
Come uppe, Jetty, rise and follow,
Jetty, to the milking shed.’
But I cannot offer a plausible guess at the origin of such calls as _hüf
hüf!_ to horses, _hühl hühl!_ to geese, _deckel deckel!_ to sheep. It is
fortunate for etymologists that such trivial little words have not an
importance proportioned to the difficulty of clearing up their origin.
The word _puss!_ raises an interesting philological problem. An English
child calling _puss puss!_ is very likely keeping up the trace of the
old Keltic name for the cat, Irish _pus_, Erse _pusag_, Gaelic _puis_.
Similar calls are known elsewhere in Europe (as in Saxony, _pûs pûs!_),
and there is some reason to think that the cat, which came to us from
the East, brought with it one of its names, which is still current
there, Tamil _pûsei!_ Afghan _pusha_, Persian _pushak_, &c. Mr. Wedgwood
finds an origin for the call in an imitation of the cat’s spitting, and
remarks that the Servians cry _pis!_ to drive a cat away, while the
Albanians use a similar sound to call it. The way in which the cry of
_puss!_ has furnished a name for the cat itself, comes out curiously in
countries where the animal has been lately introduced by Englishmen.
Thus _boosi_ is the recognized word for cat in the Tonga Islands, no
doubt from Captain Cook’s time. Among Indian tribes of North-West
America, _pwsh_, _pish-pish_, appear in native languages with the
meaning of cat; and not only is the European cat called a _puss puss_ in
the Chinook Jargon, but in the same curious dialect the word is applied
to a native beast, the cougar, now called ‘hyas _puss-puss_,’ _i.e._,
‘great cat.’[263]
The derivation of names of animals in this manner from calls to them,
may perhaps not have been unfrequent. It appears that _huss!_ is a cry
used in Switzerland to set dogs on to fight, as _s—s!_ might be in
England, and that the Swiss call a dog _huss_ or _hauss_, possibly from
this. We know the cry of _dill!_ _dilly!_ as a recognized call to ducks
in England, and it is difficult to think it a corruption of any English
word or phrase, for the Bohemians also call _dlidli!_ to their ducks.
Now, though _dill_ or _dilly_ may not be found in our dictionaries as
the name for a duck, yet the way in which Hood can use it as such in one
of his best-known comic poems, shows perfectly the easy and natural step
by which such transitions can be made:—
‘For Death among the water-lilies,
Cried “Duc ad me” to all her dillies.’
In just the same way, because _gee!_ is a usual call of the English
waggoner to his horses, the word _gee-gee_ has become a familiar nursery
noun meaning a horse. And neither in such nursery words, nor in words
coined in jest, is the evidence bearing on the origin of language to be
set aside as worthless; for it may be taken as a maxim of ethnology,
that what is done among civilized men in jest, or among civilized
children in the nursery, is apt to find its analogue in the serious
mental effort of savage, and therefore of primæval tribes.
Drivers’ calls to their beasts, such as this _gee!_ _gee-ho!_ to urge on
horses, and _weh!_ _woh!_ to stop them, form part of the vernacular of
particular districts. The _geho!_ perhaps came to England in the
Norman-French, for it is known in France, and appears in the Italian
dictionary as _gio!_ The traveller who has been hearing the drivers in
the Grisons stop their horses with a long _br-r-r!_ may cross a pass and
hear on the other side a _hü-ü-ü!_ instead. The ploughman’s calls to
turn the leaders of the team to right and left have passed into proverb.
In France they say of a stupid clown ‘Il n’entend ni à _dia!_ ni à
_hurhaut!_’ and the corresponding Platt-Deutsch phrase is ‘He weet nich
_hutt!_ noch _hoh!_’ So there is a regular language to camels, as
Captain Burton remarks on his journey to Mekka: _ikh ikh!_ makes them
kneel, _yáhh yáhh!_ urges them on, _hai hai!_ induces caution, and so
forth. In the formation of these quaint expressions, two causes have
been at work. The sounds seem sometimes thoroughly interjectional, as
the Arab _hai!_ of caution, or the French _hue!_ North German _jö!_
Whatever their origin, they may be made to carry their sense by
imitative tones expressive to the ear of both horse and man, as any one
will say who hears the contrast between the short and sharp high-pitched
_hüp!_ which tells the Swiss horse to go faster, and the long-drawn
_hü-ü-ü-ü!_ which brings him to a stand. Also, the way in which common
sense-words are taken up into calls like _gee-up!_ _woh-back!_ shows
that we may expect to find various old broken fragments of formal
language in the list, and such on inspection we find accordingly. The
following lines are quoted by Halliwell from the Micro-Cynicon (1599):—
‘A base borne issue of a baser syer,
Bred in a cottage, wandering in the myer,
With nailed shooes and whipstaffe in his hand,
Who with a _hey_ and _ree_ the beasts command.’
This _ree!_ is equivalent to ‘right’ (riddle-me-ree = riddle me right),
and tells the leader of the team to bear to the right hand. The _hey!_
may correspond with _heit!_ or _camether!_ which call him to bear
‘hither,’ _i.e._, to the left. In Germany _har!_ _här!_ _har-üh!_ are
likewise the same as ‘her,’ ‘hither, to the left.’ So _swude!_
_schwude!_ _zwuder!_ ‘to the left,’ are of course simply ‘zuwider,’ ‘on
the contrary way.’ Pairs of calls for ‘right’ and ‘left’ in
German-speaking countries are _hot!_—_har!_ and _hott!_—_wist!_ This
_wist!_ is an interesting example of the keeping up of ancient words in
such popular tradition. It is evidently a mutilated form of an old
German word for the left hand, _winistrâ_, Anglo-Saxon _winstre_, a name
long since forgotten by modern High German, as by our own modern
English.[264]
As quaint a mixture of words and interjectional cries as I have met
with, is in the great French Encyclopædia,[265] which gives a minute
description of the hunter’s craft, and prescribes exactly what is to be
cried to the hounds under all possible contingencies of the chase. If
the creatures understood grammar and syntax, the language could not be
more accurately arranged for their ears. Sometimes we have what seem
pure interjectional cries. Thus, to encourage the hounds to work, the
huntsman is to call to them _hà halle halle halle!_ while to bring them
up before they are uncoupled it is prescribed that he shall call _hau
hau!_ or _hau tahaut!_ and when they are uncoupled he is to change his
cry to _hau la y la la y la tayau!_ a call which suggests the Norman
original of the English _tally-ho!_ With cries of this kind plain French
words are intermixed, _hà bellement là ila, là ila, hau valet!_—_hau
l’ami, tau tau après après, à route à route!_ and so on. And sometimes
words have broken down into calls whose sense is not quite gone, like
the ‘vois le ci’ and the ‘vois le ce l’est’ which are still to be
distinguished in the shout which is to tell the hunters that the stag
they have been chasing has made a return, _vauleci revari vaulecelez!_
But the drollest thing in the treatise is the grave set of English words
(in very Gallic shape) with which English dogs are to be spoken to,
because, as the author says, ‘there are many English hounds in France,
and it is difficult to get them to work when you speak to them in an
unknown tongue, that is, in other terms than they have been trained to.’
Therefore, to call them, the huntsman is to cry _here do-do ho ho!_ to
get them back to the right track he is to say _houpe boy, houpe boy!_
when there are several on ahead of the rest of the pack, he is to ride
up to them and cry _saf me boy! saf me boy!_ and lastly, if they are
obstinate and will not stop, he is to make them go back with a shout of
_cobat, cobat!_
How far the lower animals may attach any inherent meaning to
interjectional sounds is a question not easy to answer. But it is plain
that in most of the cases mentioned here they only understand them as
recognized signals which have a meaning by regular association, as when
they remember that they are fed with one noise and driven away with
another, and they also pay attention to the gestures which accompany the
cries. Thus the well-known Spanish way of calling the cat is _miz miz!_
while _zape zape!_ is used to drive it away; and the writer of an old
dictionary maintains that there can be no real difference between these
words except by custom, for, he declares, he has heard that in a certain
monastery where they kept very handsome cats, the brother in charge of
the refectory hit upon the device of calling _zape zape!_ to them when
he gave them their food, and then he drove them away with a stick,
crying angrily _miz miz_; and this of course prevented any stranger from
calling and stealing them, for only he and the cats knew the
secret![266] To philologists, the manner in which such calls to animals
become customary in particular districts illustrates the consensus by
which the use of words is settled. Each case of the kind indicates that
a word has prevailed by selection among a certain society of men, and
the main reasons of words holding their ground within particular limits,
though it is so difficult to assign them exactly in each case, are
probably inherent fitness in the first place, and traditional
inheritance in the second.
When the ground has been cleared of obscure or mutilated sense-words,
there remains behind a residue of real sound-words, or pure
interjections. It has long and reasonably been considered that the place
in history of these expressions is a very primitive one. Thus De Brosses
describes them as necessary and natural words, common to all mankind,
and produced by the combination of man’s conformation with the interior
affections of his mind. One of the best means of judging the relation
between interjectional utterances and the feelings they express, is to
compare the voices of the lower animals with our own. To a considerable
extent there is a similarity. As their bodily and mental structure has
an analogy with our own, so they express their minds by sounds which
have to our ears a certain fitness for what they appear to mean. It is
so with the bark, the howl, and the whine of the dog, the hissing of
geese, the purring of cats, the crowing and clucking of cocks and hens.
But in other cases, as with the hooting of owls and the shrieks of
parrots and many other birds, we cannot suppose that these sounds are
intended to utter anything like the melancholy or pain which such cries
from a human being would be taken to convey. There are many animals that
never utter any cry but what, according to our notions of the meaning of
sounds, would express rage or discomfort; how far are the roars and
howls of wild beasts to be thus interpreted? We might as well imagine
the tuning violin to be in pain, or the moaning wind to express sorrow.
The connexion between interjection and emotion depending on the physical
structure of the animal which utters or hears the sound, it follows that
the general similarity of interjectional utterance among all the
varieties of the human race is an important manifestation of their close
physical and intellectual unity.
Interjectional sounds uttered by man for the expression of his own
feelings serve also as signs indicating these feelings to another. A
long list of such interjections, common to races speaking the most
widely various languages, might be set down in a rough way as
representing the sighs, groans, moans, cries, shrieks, and growls by
which man gives utterance to various of his feelings. Such for instance,
are some of the many sounds for which _ah!_ _oh!_ _ahi!_ _aie!_ are the
inexpressive written representatives; such is the sigh which is written
down in the Wolof language of Africa as _hhihhe!_ in English as
_heigho!_ in Greek and Latin as ἒ ἒ! ἒ ἒ! _heu!_ _eheu!_ Thus the
open-mouthed _wah wah!_ of astonishment, so common in the East,
reappears in America in the _hwah!_ _hwah-wa!_ of the Chinook Jargon;
and the kind of groan which is represented in European languages by
_weh!_ _ouais!_ οὐαί! _vae!_ is given in Coptic by _ouae!_ in Galla by
_wayo!_ in the Ossetic of the Caucasus by _voy!_ among the Indians of
British Columbia by _woī!_ Where the interjections taken down in the
vocabularies of other languages differ from those recognized in our own,
we at any rate appreciate them and see how they carry their meaning.
Thus with the Malagasy _u-u!_ of pleasure, the North-American Indian’s
often-described guttural _ugh!_ the _kwish!_ of contempt in the Chinook
Jargon, the Tunguz _yo yo!_ of pain, the Irish _wb wb!_ of distress, the
native Brazilian’s _teh teh!_ of wonder and reverence, the _hai-yah!_ so
well known in the Pigeon-English of the Chinese ports, and even, to take
an extreme case, the interjections of surprise among the Algonquin
Indians, where men say _tiau!_ and women _nyau!_ It is much the same
with expressions which are not uttered for the speaker’s satisfaction,
but are calls addressed to another. Thus the Siamese call of _hē!_ the
Hebrew _he! ha!_ for ‘lo! behold!’ the _hói!_ of the Clallam Indians for
‘stop!’ the Lummi _hái!_ for ‘hold, enough!’—these and others like them
belong just as much to English. Another class of interjections are such
as any one conversant with the gesture-signs of savages and deaf-mutes
would recognize as being themselves gesture signs, made with vocal
sound, in short, voice-gestures. The sound _m’m, m’n_, made with the
lips closed, is the obvious expression of the man who tries to speak,
but cannot. Even the deaf-and-dumb child, though he cannot hear the
sound of his own voice, makes this noise to show that he is dumb, that
he is _mu mu_, as the Vei negroes of West Africa would say. To the
speaking man, the sound which we write as _mum!_ says plainly enough
‘hold your tongue!’ ‘_mum’s_ the word!’ and in accordance with this
meaning has served to form various imitative words, of which a type is
Tahitian _mamu_, to be silent. Often made with a slight effort which
aspirates it, and with more or less continuance, this sound becomes what
may be indicated as _‘m_, _‘n_, _h’m_, _h’n_, &c., interjections which
are conventionally written down as words, _hem!_ _ahem!_ _hein!_ Their
primary sense seems in any case that of hesitation to speak, of ‘humming
and hawing,’ but this serves with a varied intonation to express such
hesitation or refraining from articulate words as belongs either to
surprise, doubt or enquiry, approbation or contempt. In the vocabulary
of the Yorubas of West Africa, the nasal interjection _huñ_ is rendered,
just as it might be in English, as ‘fudge!’ Rochefort describes the
Caribs listening in reverent silence to their chief’s discourse, and
testifying their approval with a _hun-hun!_ just as in his time (17th
century) an English congregation would have saluted a popular
preacher.[267] The gesture of blowing, again, is a familiar expression
of contempt and disgust, and when vocalized gives the labial
interjections which are written _pah!_ _bah!_ _pugh!_ _pooh!_ in Welsh
_pw!_ in Low Latin _puppup!_ and set down by travellers among the
savages in Australia as _pooh!_ These interjections correspond with the
mass of imitative words which express blowing, such as Malay _puput_, to
blow. The labial gestures of blowing pass into those of spitting, of
which one kind gives the dental interjection _t’ t’ t’!_ which is
written in English or Dutch _tut tut!_ and that this is no mere fancy, a
number of imitative verbs of various countries will serve to show,
Tahitian _tutua_, to spit, being a typical instance.
The place of interjectional utterance in savage intercourse is well
shown in Cranz’s description. The Greenlanders, he says, especially the
women, accompany many words with mien and glances, and he who does not
well apprehend this may easily miss the sense. Thus when they affirm
anything with pleasure they suck down air by the throat with a certain
sound, and when they deny anything with contempt or horror, they turn up
the nose and give a slight sound through it. And when they are out of
humour, one must understand more from their gestures than their
words.[268] Interjection and gesture combine to form a tolerable
practical means of intercourse, as where the communication between
French and English troops in the Crimea is described as ‘consisting
largely of such interjectional utterances, reiterated with expressive
emphasis and considerable gesticulation.’[269] This description well
brings before us in actual life a system of effective human intercourse,
in which there has not yet arisen the use of those articulate sounds
carrying their meaning by tradition, which are the inherited words of
the dictionary.
When, however, we look closely into these inherited sense-words
themselves, we find that interjectional sounds have actually had more or
less share in their formation. Not stopping short at the function
ascribed to them by grammarians, of standing here and there outside a
logical sentence, the interjections have also served as radical sounds
out of which verbs, substantives, and other parts of speech have been
shaped. In tracing the progress of interjections upward into fully
developed language, we begin with sounds merely expressing the speaker’s
actual feelings. When, however, expressive sounds like _ah!_ _ugh!_
_pooh!_ are uttered not to exhibit the speaker’s actual feelings at the
moment, but only in order to suggest to another the thought of
admiration or disgust, then such interjections have little or nothing to
distinguish them from fully formed words. The next step is to trace the
taking up of such sounds into the regular forms of ordinary grammar.
Familiar instances of such formations may be found among ourselves in
nursery language, where to _woh_ is found in use with the meaning of to
stop, or in that real though hardly acknowledged part of the English
language to which belong such verbs as to _boo-hoo_. Among the most
obvious of such words are those which denote the actual utterance of an
interjection, or pass thence into some closely allied meaning. Thus the
Fijian women’s cry of lamentation _oile!_ becomes the verb _oile_ ‘to
bewail,’ _oile-taka_ ‘to lament for’ (the men cry _ule!_); now this is
in perfect analogy with such words as _ululare_, to _wail_. With
different grammatical terminations, another sound produces the Zulu verb
_gigiteka_ and its English equivalent to _giggle_. The Galla _iya_, ‘to
cry, scream, give the battle-cry’ has its analogues in Greek ἰά, ἰή, ‘a
cry,’ ἰήïος ‘wailing, mournful,’ &c. Good cases may be taken from a
curious modern dialect with a strong propensity to the use of obvious
sound-words, the Chinook Jargon of North-West America. Here we find
adopted from an Indian dialect the verb to _kish-kish_, that is, ‘to
drive cattle or horses’; _humm_ stands for the word ‘stink,’ verb or
noun; and the laugh, _heehee_, becomes a recognized term meaning fun or
amusement, as in _mamook heehee_, ‘to amuse’ (_i.e._, ‘to make
_heehee_’) and _heehee house_, ‘a tavern.’ In Hawaii, _aa_ is ‘to
insult;’ in the Tonga Islands, _úi!_ is at once the exclamation ‘fie!’
and the verb ‘to cry out against.’ In New Zealand, _hé!_ is an
interjection denoting surprise at a mistake, _hé_ as a noun or verb
meaning ‘error, mistake, to err, to go astray.’ In the Quiché language
of Guatemala, the verbs _ay_, _oy_, _boy_, express the idea of ‘to call’
in different ways. In the Carajas language of Brazil, we may guess an
interjectional origin in the adjective ei, ‘sorrowful,’ and can scarcely
fail to see a derivation from expressive sound in the verb _hai-hai_ ‘to
run away’ (the word _aie-aie_, used to mean ‘an omnibus’ in modern
French slang, is said to be a comic allusion to the cries of the
passengers whose toes are trodden on). The Camacan Indians, when they
wish to express the notion of ‘much’ or ‘many,’ hold out their fingers
and say _hi_. As this is an ordinary savage gesture expressing
multitude, it seems likely that the _hi_ is a mere interjection,
requiring the visible sign to convey the full meaning.[270] In the
Quichua language of Peru, _alalau!_ is an interjection of complaint at
cold, whence the verb _alalauñini_, ‘to complain of the cold.’ At the
end of each strophe of the Peruvian hymns to the Sun was sung the
triumphant exclamation _haylli!_ and with this sound are connected the
verbs _hayllini_ ‘to sing,’ _hayllicuni_, ‘to celebrate a victory.’ The
Zulu _halala!_ of exultation, which becomes also a verb ‘to shout for
joy,’ has its analogues in the Tibetan _alala!_ of joy, and the Greek
ἀλαλά, which is used as a noun meaning the battle-cry and even the onset
itself, ἀλαλάζω, ‘to raise the war-cry,’ as well as Hebrew _hillel_, ‘to
sing praise,’ whence _hallelujah!_ a word which the believers in the
theory that the Red Indians were the Lost Tribes naturally recognized in
the native medicine-man’s chant of _hi-le-li-lah!_ The Zulu makes his
panting _ha!_ do duty as an expression of heat, when he says that the
hot weather ‘says _ha ha_’; his way of pitching a song by a _ha! ha!_ is
apparently represented in the verb _haya_, ‘to lead a song,’ _hayo_ ‘a
starting song, a fee given to the singing-leader for the _haya_’; and
his interjectional expression _bà bà!_ ‘as when one smacks his lips from
a bitter taste,’ becomes a verb-root meaning ‘to be bitter or sharp to
the taste, to prick, to smart.’ The Galla language gives some good
examples of interjections passing into words, as where the verbs
_birr-djeda_ (to say _brr!_) and _birēfada_ (to make _brr!_) have the
meaning ‘to be afraid.’ Thus _o!_ being the usual answer to a call, and
also a cry to drive cattle, there are formed from it by the addition of
verbal terminations, the verbs _oada_, ‘to answer,’ and _ofa_, ‘to
drive.’
If the magnific and honorific _o_ of Japanese grammar can be assigned to
an interjectional origin, its capabilities in modifying signification
become instructive.[271] It is used before substantives as a prefix of
honour; _couni_, ‘country,’ thus becoming _ocouni_. When a man is
talking to his superiors, he puts _o_ before the names of all objects
belonging to them, while these superiors drop the _o_ in speaking of
anything of their own, or an inferior’s; among the higher classes,
persons of equal rank put _o_ before the names of each other’s things,
but not before their own; it is polite to say _o_ before the names of
all women, and well-bred children are distinguished from little peasants
by the way in which they are careful to put it even before the nursery
names of father and mother, _o toto_, _o caca_, which correspond to the
_papa_ and _mama_ of Europe. A distinction is made in written language
between _o_, which is put to anything royal, and _oo_ which means great,
as may be instanced in the use of the word _mets’ké_ or ‘spy’ (literally
‘eye-fixer’); _o mets’ké_ is a princely or imperial spy, while _oo
mets’ké_ is the spy in chief. This interjectional adjective _oo_, great,
is usually prefixed to the name of the capital city, which it is
customary to call _oo Yedo_ in speaking to one of its inhabitants, or
when officials talk of it among themselves. And lastly, the _o_ of
honour is prefixed to verbs in all their forms of conjugation, and it is
polite to say _ominahai matse_, ‘please to see,’ instead of the mere
plebeian _minahai matse_. Now an English child of six years old would at
once understand these formations if taken as interjectional; and if we
do not incorporate in our grammar the _o!_ of admiration and reverential
embarrassment, it is because we have not chosen to take advantage of
this rudimentary means of expression. Another exclamation, the cry of
_io!_ has taken a place in etymology. When added by the German to his
cry of ‘Fire!’ ‘Murder!’ _Feuerio!_ _Mordio!_ it remains indeed as mere
an interjection as the _o!_ in our street cries of ‘Pease-_o!_’
‘Dust-_o!_’ or the _â!_ in old German _wafenâ!_ ‘to arms!’ ‘_hilfâ!_
‘help!’ But the Iroquois of North America makes a fuller use of his
materials, and carries his _io!_ of admiration into the very formation
of compound words, adding it to a noun to say that it is beautiful or
good; thus, in Mohawk, _garonta_ means a tree, _garontio_ a beautiful
tree; in like manner, _Ohio_ means ‘river-beautiful;’ and _Ontario_,
‘hill-rock-beautiful,’ is derived in the same way. When, in the old
times of the French occupation of Canada, there was sent over a
Governor-General of New France, Monsieur de Montmagny, the Iroquois
rendered his name from their word _ononte_, ‘mountain,’ translating him
into _Onontio_, or ‘Great Mountain,’ and thus it came to pass that the
name of Onontio was handed down long after, like that of Cæsar, as the
title of each succeeding governor, while for the King of France was
reserved the yet higher style of ‘the great Onontio.’[272]
The quest of interjectional derivations for sense-words is apt to lead
the etymologist into very rash speculations. One of his best safeguards
is to test forms supposed to be interjectional, by ascertaining whether
anything similar has come into use in decidedly distinct languages. For
instance, among the familiar sounds which fall on the traveller’s ear in
Spain is the muleteer’s cry to his beasts, _arre! arre!_ From this
interjection, a family of Spanish words are reasonably supposed to be
derived; the verb _arrear_, ‘to drive mules,’ _arriero_, the name for
the ‘muleteer’ himself, and so forth.[273] Now is this _arre!_ itself a
genuine interjectional sound? It seems likely to be so, for Captain
Wilson found it in use in the Pelew Islands, where the paddlers in the
canoes were kept up to their work by crying to them _arree! arree!_
Similar interjections are noticed elsewhere with a sense of mere
affirmation, as in an Australian dialect where _a-ree!_ is set down as
meaning ‘indeed,’ and in the Quichua language where _ari!_ means ‘yes!’
whence the verb _ariñi_, ‘to affirm.’ Two other cautions are desirable
in such enquiries. These are, not to travel too far from the absolute
meaning expressed by the interjection, unless there is strong
corroborative evidence, and not to override ordinary etymology by
treating derivative words as though they were radical. Without these
checks, even sound principle breaks down in application, as the
following two examples may show. It is quite true that _h’m!_ is a
common interjectional call, and that the Dutch have made a verb of it,
_hemmen_, ‘to hem after a person.’ We may notice a similar call in West
Africa, in the _mma!_ which is translated ‘hallo! stop!’ in the language
of Fernando Po. But to apply this as a derivation for German _hemmen_,
‘to stop, check, restrain,’ to _hem_ in, and even to the _hem_ of a
garment, as Mr. Wedgwood does without even a perhaps,[274] is travelling
too far beyond the record. Again, it is quite true that sounds of
clicking and smacking of the lips are common expressions of satisfaction
all over the world, and words may be derived from these sounds, as where
a vocabulary of the Chinook language of North-West America expresses
‘good’ as _t’k-tok-te_, or _e-tok-te_, sounds which we cannot doubt to
be derived from such clicking noises, if the words are not in fact
attempts to write down the very clicks themselves. But it does not
follow that we may take such words as _deliciæ_, _delicatus_, out of a
highly organized language like Latin, and refer them, as the same
etymologist does, to an interjectional utterance of satisfaction,
_dlick!_[275] To do this, is to ignore altogether the composition of
words; we might as well explain Latin _dilectus_ or English _delight_ as
direct formations from expressive sound. In concluding these remarks on
interjections, two or three groups of words may be brought forward as
examples of the application of collected evidence from a number of
languages, mostly of the lower races.
The affirmative and negative particles, which bear in language such
meanings as ‘yes!’ ‘indeed!’ and ‘no!’ ‘not,’ may have their derivations
from many different sources. It is thought that the Australian dialects
all belong to a single stock, but so unlike are the sounds they use for
‘no!’ and ‘yes!’ that tribes are actually named from these words as a
convenient means of distinction. Thus the tribes known as _Gureang_,
_Kamilaroi_, _Kogai_, _Wolaroi_, _Wailwun_, _Wiratheroi_, have their
names from the words they use for ‘no,’ these being _gure_, _kamil_,
_ko_, _wol_, _wail_, _wira_, respectively; and on the other hand the
_Pikambul_ are said to be so called from their word _pika_, ‘yes.’ The
device of naming tribes, thus invented by the savages of Australia, and
which perhaps recurs in Brazil in the name of the _Cocatapuya_ tribe
(_coca_ ‘no,’ _tapuya_ ‘man’) is very curious in its similarity to the
mediæval division of _Langue d’oc_ and _Langue d’oïl_, according to the
words for ‘yes!’ which prevailed in Southern and Northern France: _oc!_
is Latin _hoc_, as we might say ‘that’s it!’ while the longer form _hoc
illud_ was reduced to _oïl!_ and thence to _oui!_ Many other of the
words for ‘yes!’ and ‘no!’ may be sense-words, as, again, the French and
Italian _si!_ is Latin _sic_. But on the other hand there is reason to
think that many of these particles in use in various languages are not
sense-words, but sound-words of a purely interjectional kind; or, what
comes nearly to the same thing, a feeling of fitness of the sound to the
meaning may have affected the choice and shaping of sense-words—a remark
of large application in such enquiries as the present. It is an old
suggestion that the primitive sound of such words as _non_ is a nasal
interjection of doubt or dissent.[276] It corresponds in sound with the
visible gesture of closing the lips, while a vowel-interjection, with or
without aspiration, belongs rather to open-mouthed utterance. Whether
from this or some other cause, there is a remarkable tendency among most
distant and various languages of the world, on the one hand to use
vowel-sounds, with soft or hard breathing, to express ‘yes!’ and on the
other hand to use nasal consonants to express ‘no!’ The affirmative form
is much the commoner. The guttural _i-i!_ of the West Australian, the
_ēē!_ of the Darien, the _a-ah!_ of the Clallam, the _é!_ of the Yakama
Indians, the _e!_ of the Basuto, and the _ai!_ of the Kanuri, are some
examples of a wide group of forms, of which the following are only part
of those noted down in Polynesian and South American districts—_ii!_
_é!_ _ia!_ _aio!_ _io!_ _ya!_ _ey!_ &c., _h’!_ _heh!_ _he-e!_ _hü!_
_hoehah!_ _ah-ha!_ &c. The idea has most weight where pairs of words for
‘yes!’ and ‘no!’ are found both conforming. Thus in the very suggestive
description by Dobrizhoffer among the Abipones of South America, for
‘yes!’ the men and youths say _héé!_ the women say _háá!_ and the old
men give a grunt; while for ‘no’ they all say _yna!_ and make the
loudness of the sound indicate the strength of the negation. Dr.
Martius’s collection of vocabularies of Brazilian tribes, philologically
very distinct, contains several such pairs of affirmatives and
negatives, the equivalents of ‘yes!’—‘no!’ being in Tupi _ayé_—_aan!
aani!_; in Guato _ii!_—_mau!_; in Jumana, _aeae!_—_mäiu!_; in Miranha
_ha ú!_—_nani!_ The Quichua of Peru affirms by _y!_ _hu!_ and expresses
‘no,’ ‘not,’ ‘not at all,’ by _ama!_ _manan!_ &c., making from the
latter the verb _manamñi_, ‘to deny.’ The Quiché of Guatemala has _e_ or
_ve_ for the affirmative, _ma_, _man_, _mana_, for the negative. In
Africa, again, the Galla language has _ee!_ for ‘yes!’ and _hn_, _hin_,
_hm_, for ‘not!’; the Fernandian _ee!_ for ‘yes!’ and _‘nt_ for ‘not;’
while the Coptic dictionary gives the affirmative (Latin ‘sane’) as
_eie_, _ie_, and the negative by a long list of nasal sounds such as
_an_, _emmen_, _en_, _mmn_, &c. The Sanskrit particles _hi!_ ‘indeed,
certainly,’ _na_, ‘not,’ exemplify similar forms in Indo-European
languages, down to our own _aye!_ and _no!_[277] There must be some
meaning in all this, for otherwise I could hardly have noted down
incidentally, without making any attempt at a general search, so many
cases from such different languages, only finding a comparatively small
number of contradictory cases.[278]
De Brosses maintained that the Latin _stare_, to _stand_, might be
traced to an origin in expressive sound. He fancied he could hear in it
an organic radical sign designating fixity, and could thus explain why
_st!_ should be used as a call to make a man _stand still_. Its
connexion with these sounds is often spoken of in more modern books, and
one imaginative German philologer describes their origin among primæval
men as vividly as though he had been there to see. A man stands
beckoning in vain to a companion who does not see him, till at last his
effort relieves itself by the help of the vocal nerves, and
involuntarily there breaks from him the sound _st!_ Now the other hears
the sound, turns toward it, sees the beckoning gesture, knows that he is
called to stop; and when this has happened again and again, the action
comes to be described in common talk by uttering the now familiar _st!_
and thus _sta_ becomes a root, the symbol of the abstract idea to
stand![279] This is a most ingenious conjecture, but unfortunately
nothing more. It would be at any rate strengthened, though not
established, if its supporters could prove that the _st!_ used to call
people in Germany, _pst!_ in Spain, is itself a pure interjectional
sound. Even this, however, has never been made out. The call has not yet
been shown to be in use outside our own Indo-European family of
languages; and so long as it is only found in use within these limits,
an opponent might even plausibly claim it as an abbreviation of the very
_sta!_ (‘stay! stop!’) for which the theory proposes it as an
origin.[280]
That it is not unfair to ask for fuller evidence of a sound being purely
interjectional than its appearance in a single family of languages, may
be shown by examining another group of interjections, which are found
among the remotest tribes, and thus have really considerable claims to
rank among the primary sounds of language. These are the simple
sibilants, _s!_ _sh!_ _h’sh!_ used especially to scare birds, and among
men to express aversion or call for silence. Catlin describes a party of
Sioux Indians, when they came to the portrait of a dead chief, each
putting his hand over his mouth with a _hush-sh_; and when he himself
wished to approach the sacred ‘medicine’ in a Mandan lodge, he was
called to refrain by the same _hush-sh!_ Among ourselves the sibilant
interjection passes into two exactly opposite senses, according as it is
meant to put the speaker himself to silence, or to command silence for
him to be heard; and thus we find the sibilant used elsewhere, sometimes
in the one way and sometimes in the other. Among the wild Veddas of
Ceylon, _iss!_ is an exclamation of disapproval, as in ancient or modern
Europe; and the verb _shârak_, to hiss, is used in Hebrew with a like
sense, ‘they shall hiss him out of his place.’ But in Japan reverence is
expressed by a hiss, commanding silence. Captain Cook remarked that the
natives of the New Hebrides expressed their admiration by hissing like
geese. Casalis says of the Basutos, ‘Hisses are the most unequivocal
marks of applause, and are as much courted in the African parliaments as
they are dreaded by our candidates for popular favour.’[281] Among other
sibilant interjections, are Turkish _sûsâ!_ Ossetic _ss!_ _sos!_
‘silence!’ Fernandian _sia!_ ‘listen!’ ‘tush!’ Yoruba _sió!_ ‘pshaw!’
Thus it appears that these sounds, far from being special to one
linguistic family, are very widespread elements of human speech. Nor is
there any question as to their passage into fully-formed words, as in
our verb to _hush_, which has passed into the sense of ‘to quiet, put to
sleep’ (adjectively, ‘as _hush_ as death’), metaphorically to _hush_ up
a matter, or Greek σίζω ‘to hush, say hush! command silence.’ Even Latin
_silere_ and Gothic _silan_, ‘to be silent,’ may with some plausibility
be explained as derived from the interjectional _s!_ of silence.
Sanskrit dictionaries recognize several words which explicitly state
their own interjectional derivation; such are _hûñkâra_ (_hûm_-making),
‘the utterance of the mystic religious exclamation _hûm!_’ and
_çiççabda_ (_çiç_-sound), ‘a hiss.’ Besides these obvious formations,
the interjectional element is present to some greater or less degree in
the list of Sanskrit radicals, which represent probably better than
those of any other language the verb-roots of the ancient Aryan stock.
In _ru_, ‘to roar, cry, wail’ and in _kakh_, ‘to laugh,’ we have the
simpler kind of interjectional derivation, that which merely describes a
sound. As to the more difficult kind, which carry the sense into a new
stage, Mr. Wedgwood makes out a strong case for the connexion of
interjections of loathing and aversion, such as _pooh!_ _fie!_ &c., with
that large group of words which are represented in English by _foul_ and
_fiend_, in Sanskrit by the verbs _pûy_, ‘to become foul, to stink’ and
_piy_, _pîy_, ‘to revile, to hate.’[282] Further evidence may be here
adduced in support of this theory. The languages of the lower races use
the sound _pu_ to express an evil smell; the Zulu remarks that ‘the meat
says _pu_’ (inyama iti _pu_), meaning that it stinks; the Timorese has
_poöp_ ‘putrid;’ the Quiché language has _puh_, _poh_ ‘corruption, pus,’
_pohir_ ‘to turn bad, rot,’ _puz_ ‘rottenness, what stinks;’ the Tupi
word for nasty, _puxi_, may be compared with the Latin _putidus_, and
the Columbia River name for the ‘skunk,’ _o-pun-pun_, with similar names
of stinking animals, Sanskrit _pûtikâ_ ‘civet-cat,’ and French _putois_
‘pole-cat.’ From the French interjection _fi!_ words have long been
formed belonging to the language, if not authenticated by the Academy;
in mediæval French ‘maistre _fi-fi_’ was a recognized term for a
scavenger, and _fi-fi_ books are not yet extinct.
There has been as yet, unfortunately, too much separation between what
may be called generative philology, which examines into the ultimate
origins of words, and historical philology, which traces their
transmission and change. It will be a great gain to the science of
language to bring these two branches of enquiry into closer union, even
as the processes they relate to have been going on together since the
earliest days of speech. At present the historical philologists of the
school of Grimm and Bopp, whose great work has been the tracing of our
Indo-European dialects to an early Aryan form of language, have had much
the advantage in fulness of evidence and strictness of treatment. At the
same time it is evident that the views of the generative philologists,
from De Brosses onward, embody a sound principle, and that much of the
evidence collected as to emotional and other directly expressive words,
is of the highest value in the argument. But in working out the details
of such word-formation, it must be remembered that no department of
philology lies more open to Augustine’s caustic remark on the
etymologists of his time, that like the interpretation of dreams, the
derivation of words is set down by each man according to his own fancy.
(Ut somniorum interpretatio ita verborum origo pro cujusque ingenio
prædicatur.)
Footnote 247:
C. de Brosses, ‘Traité de la Formation Mécanique des Langues,’ &c.
(1st ed. 1765); Wedgwood, ‘Origin of Language’ (1866); ‘Dic. of
English Etymology’ (1859, 2nd ed. 1872); Farrar, ‘Chapters on
Language’ (1865).
Footnote 248:
Among the principal savage and barbaric languages here used for
evidence, are as follows:—Africa: Galla (Tutschek, Gr. and Dic.),
Yoruba (Bowen, Gr. and Dic.), Zulu (Döhne, Dic.). Polynesia, &c.:
Maori (Kendall, Vocab., Williams, Dic.), Tonga (Mariner, Vocab.), Fiji
(Hazlewood, Dic.), Melanesia (Gabelentz, Melan. Spr.). Australia
(Grey, Moore, Schürmann, Oldfield, Vocabs.). N. America: Pima, Yakama,
Clallam, Lummi, Chinuk, Mohawk, Micmac (Smithson. Contr. vol. iii.),
Chinook Jargon (Gibbs, Dic.), Quiché (Brasseur, Gr. and Dic.). S.
America: Tupi (Diaz, Dic.), Carib (Rochefort, Vocab.), Quichua
(Markham, Gr. and Dic.), Chilian (Febres, Dic.), Brazilian tribes
(Martius, ‘Glossaria linguarum Brasiliensium’). Many details in Pott,
‘Doppelung,’ &c.
Footnote 249:
Bonwick, ‘Daily Life of Tasmanians,’ p. 140; Capt. Wilson, in ‘Tr.
Eth. Soc.,’ vol. iv. p. 322, &c.; J. L. Wilson, in ‘Journ. Amer.
Oriental Soc.,’ vol. i. 1849, No. 4; also Cranz., ‘Grönland,’ p. 279
(cited below, p. 186). For other accounts, see ‘Early Hist. of
Mankind,’ p. 77.
Footnote 250:
Forbes, ‘Aymara Indians,’ in Journ. Eth. Soc. 1870, vol. ii. p. 208.
Footnote 251:
See Helmholtz, ‘Tonempfindungen,’ 2nd ed. p. 163; McKendrick, Text
Book of Physiology, p. 681, &c., 720, &c.; Max Müller, ‘Lectures,’ 2nd
series, p. 95, &c.
Footnote 252:
See Pallegoix, ‘Gramm. Ling. Thai.’; Bastian, in ‘Monatsb. Berlin.
Akad.’ June 6, 1867, and ‘Roy. Asiatic Soc.,’ June, 1867.
Footnote 253:
Burton, in ‘Mem. Anthrop. Soc.,’ vol. i. p. 313; Bowen, ‘Yoruba Gr.
and Dic.’ p. 5; see J. L. Wilson, ‘W. Afr.,’ p. 461.
Footnote 254:
C. W., in ‘London and Westminster Review,’ Oct. 1837.
Footnote 255:
‘Accentus est etiam in dicendo cantus obscurior.’—Cic. de Orat.
Footnote 256:
Helmholtz, p. 364.
Footnote 257:
Caswell, in Bastian, ‘Berlin. Akad.’ l.c.
Footnote 258:
Horne Tooke, ‘Diversions of Purley,’ 2nd ed. London, 1798, pt. i. pp.
60-3.
Footnote 259:
R. F. Burton, ‘Lake Regions of Central Africa,’ vol. ii. p. 333;
Livingstone, ‘Missionary Tr. in S. Africa,’ p. 298; ‘Gr. of Mpongwe
lang,’ A. B. C. F. Missions, Rev. J. L. Wilson, p. 27. See Callaway,
‘Zulu Tales,’ vol. i. p. 59.
Footnote 260:
Arroyo de la Cuesta, ‘Gr. of Mutsun Lang.’ p. 39, in Smithsonian
Contr., vol. iii.; Neapolitan _mamma mia!_ exclamation of wonder, &c.,
Liebrecht in Götting. Gel. Anz. 1872, p. 1287.
Footnote 261:
Shaw, ‘Travels in Barbary,’ in Pinkerton, vol. xv. p. 669.
Footnote 262:
Some of the examples here cited, will be found in Grimm, ‘Deutsche
Gr.’ vol. iii. p. 308; Pott, ‘Doppelung.’ p. 27; Wedgwood, ‘Origin of
Language.’
Footnote 263:
See Pictet, ‘Origines Indo-Europ.’ part i. p. 382; Caldwell, ‘Gr. of
Dravidian Langs.’ p. 465; Wedgwood, Dic. s.v. ‘puss,’ &c.; Mariner,
‘Tonga Is. (Vocab.)’; Gibbs, ‘Dic. of Chinook Jargon,’ Smithsonian
Coll. No. 161; Pandosy, ‘Gr. and Dic. of Yakama,’ Smithson. Contr.
vol. iii.; compare J. L. Wilson, ‘Mpongwe Gr.’ p. 57. The Hindu
child’s call to the cat _mun mun!_ may be from Hindust. _mâno_ = cat.
It. _micio_, Fr. _mite_, _minon_, Ger. _mieze_, &c. = ‘cat,’ and Sp.
_miz!_ Ger. _minz!_ &c. = ‘puss!’ are from imitations of a _mew_.
Footnote 264:
For lists of drivers’ words, see Grimm, l.c.; Pott, ‘Zählmethode,’ p.
261; Halliwell, ‘Dic. of Archaic and Provincial English,’ s.v. ‘ree;’
Brand, vol. ii. p. 15; Pictet, part ii. p. 489.
Footnote 265:
‘Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire Raisonné des Sciences, &c.’ Recueil de
Planches, Paris, 1763, art. ‘Chasses.’ The traditional cries are still
more or less in use. See ‘A Week in a French Country-house.’
Footnote 266:
Aldrete, ‘Lengua Castellana,’ Madrid, 1673, s.vv. _harre_, _exe_.
Footnote 267:
‘There prevailed in those days an indecent custom; when the preacher
touched any favourite topick in a manner that delighted his audience,
their approbation was expressed by a loud hum, continued in proportion
to their zeal or pleasure. When Burnet preached, part of his
congregation hummed so loudly and so long, that he sat down to enjoy
it, and rubbed his face with his handkerchief. When Sprat preached, he
likewise was honoured with the like animating hum, but he stretched
out his hand to the congregation, and cried, “Peace, peace; I pray
you, peace.”’ Johnson, ‘Life of Sprat.’
Footnote 268:
Cranz, ‘Grönland,’ p. 279.
Footnote 269:
D. Wilson, ‘Prehistoric Man,’ p. 65.
Footnote 270:
Compare, in the same district, Camé _ii_, Cotoxó _biebie_, _eubiähiä_,
multus, -a, -um.
Footnote 271:
J. H. Donker Curtius, ‘Essai de Grammaire Japonaise,’ p. 34, &c. 199.
In former editions of the present work, the directly interjectional
character of the _o_ is held in an unqualified manner. Reference to
the grammars of Prof. B. H. Chamberlain and others, where this
particle (_on_, _o_) is connected with other forms implying a common
root, leaves the argument to depend wholly or partly on the
supposition of an interjectional source for this root. [Note to 3rd
ed.]
Footnote 272:
Bruyas, ‘Mohawk Lang.,’ p. 16, in Smithson. Contr. vol. iii.
Schoolcraft, ‘Indian Tribes,’ Part iii. p. 328, 502, 507. Charlevoix,
‘Nouv. France,’ vol. i. p. 350.
Footnote 273:
The _arre!_ may have been introduced into Europe by the Moors, as it
is used in Arabic, and its use in Europe corresponds nearly with the
limits of the Moorish conquest, in Spain _arre!_ in Provence _arri!_
Footnote 274:
Wedgwood, ‘Origin of Language,’ p. 92.
Footnote 275:
Ibid., p. 72.
Footnote 276:
De Brosses, vol. i. p. 203. See Wedgwood.
Footnote 277:
Also Oraon _hae_—_ambo_; Micmac _é_—_mw_.
Footnote 278:
A double contradiction in Carib _anhan!_ = ‘yes!’ _oua!_ = ‘no!’
Single contradictions in Catoquina _hang!_ Tupi _eém!_ Botocudo
_hemhem!_ Yoruba _eñ!_ for ‘yes!’ Culino _aiy!_ Australian _yo!_ for
‘no!’ &c. How much these sounds depend on peculiar intonation, we, who
habitually use _h’m!_ either for ‘yes!’ or ‘no!’ can well understand.
Footnote 279:
(Charles de Brosses) ‘Traité de la Formation Mécanique des Langues,
&c.’ Paris, An. ix., vol. i. p. 238; vol. ii. p. 313. Lazarus and
Steinthal, ‘Zeitschrift für Völkerpsychologie,’ &c., vol. i. p. 421.
Heyse, ‘System der Sprachwissenschaft,’ p. 73. Farrar, ‘Chapters on
Language,’ p. 202.
Footnote 280:
Similar sounds are used to command silence, to stop speaking as well
as to stop going. English _husht!_ _whist!_ _hist!_ Welsh _ust!_
French _chut!_ Italian _zitto!_ Swedish _tyst!_ Russian _st’!_ and the
Latin _st!_ so well described in the curious old line quoted by Mr.
Farrar, which compares it with the gesture of the finger on the lips:—
‘Isis, et Harpocrates digito qui significat _st!_’
This group of interjections, again, has not been proved to be in use
outside Aryan limits.
Footnote 281:
Catlin, ‘North American Indians,’ vol. i. pp. 221, 39, 151, 162.
Bailey in ‘Tr. Eth. Soc.,’ vol. ii. p. 318. Job xxvii. 23. (The verb
_shârak_ also signifies to call by a hiss, ‘and he will hiss unto them
from the end of the earth, and behold, they shall come with speed,’
Is. v. 26; Jer. xix. 8.) Alcock, ‘The Capital of the Tycoon,’ vol. i.
p. 394. Cook, ‘2nd Voy.’ vol. ii. p. 36. Casalis, ‘Basutos,’ p. 234.
Footnote 282:
Wedgwood, ‘Origin of Language,’ p. 83, ‘Dictionary,’ Introd. p. xlix.
and s.v. ‘foul.’ Prof. Max Müller, ‘Lectures,’ 2nd series, p. 92,
protests against the indiscriminate derivation of words directly from
such cries and interjections, without the intervention of determinate
roots. As to the present topic, he points out that Latin _pus_,
_putridus_, Gothic _fuls_, English _foul_, follow Grimm’s law as if
words derived from a single root. Admitting this, however, the
question has to be raised, how far pure interjections and their direct
derivatives, being self-expressive and so to speak living sounds, are
affected by phonetic changes such as that of Grimm’s law, which act on
articulate sounds no longer fully expressive in themselves, but handed
down by mere tradition. Thus _p_ and _f_ occur in one and the same
dialect in interjections of disgust and aversion, _puh!_ _fi!_ being
used in Venice or Paris, just as similar sounds would be in London. In
tracing this group of words from early Aryan forms, it must also be
noticed that Sanskrit is a very imperfect guide, for its alphabet has
no _f_, and it can hardly give the rule in this matter to languages
possessing both _p_ and _f_, and thus capable of nicer appreciation of
this class of interjections.
CHAPTER VI.
EMOTIONAL AND IMITATIVE LANGUAGE (_continued_).
Imitative Words—Human actions named from sound—Animals’ names from
cries, &c.—Musical Instruments—Sounds reproduced—Words modified to
adapt sound to sense—Reduplication—Graduation of vowels to express
distance and difference—Children’s Language—Sound-words as related
to Sense-words—Language an original product of the lower Culture.
From the earliest times of language to our own day, it is unlikely that
men ever quite ceased to be conscious that some of their words were
derived from imitation of the common sounds heard about them. In our own
modern English, for instance, results of such imitation are evident;
flies _buzz_, bees _hum_, snakes _hiss_, a cracker or a bottle of
ginger-beer _pops_, a cannon or a bittern _booms_. In the words for
animals and for musical instruments in the various languages of the
world, the imitation of their cries and tones is often to be plainly
heard, as in the names of the _hoopoe_, the _ai-ai_ sloth, the _kaka_
parrot, the Eastern _tomtom_, which is a drum, the African _ulule_,
which is a flute, the Siamese _khong-bong_, which is a wooden
harmonicon, and in like manner through a host of other words. But these
evident cases are far from representing the whole effects of imitation
on the growth of language. They form, indeed, the easy entrance to a
philological region, which becomes less penetrable the farther it is
explored.
The operations of which we see the results before us in the actual
languages of the world seem to have been somewhat as follows. Men have
imitated their own emotional utterances or interjections, the cries of
animals, the tones of musical instruments, the sounds of shouting,
howling, stamping, breaking, tearing, scraping, with others which are
all day coming to their ears, and out of these imitations many current
words indisputably have their source. But these words, as we find them
in use, differ often widely, often beyond all recognition, from the
original sounds they sprang from. In the first place, man’s voice can
only make a very rude copy of most sounds his ear receives; his possible
vowels are very limited in their range compared with natural tones, and
his possible consonants still more helpless as a means of imitating
natural noises. Moreover, his voice is only allowed to use a part even
of this imperfect imitative power, seeing that each language for its own
convenience restricts it to a small number of set vowels and consonants,
to which the imitative sounds have to conform, thus becoming
conventionalized into articulate words with further loss of imitative
accuracy. No class of words have a more perfect imitative origin than
those which simply profess to be vocal imitations of sound. How ordinary
alphabets to some extent succeed and to some extent fail in writing down
these sounds may be judged from a few examples. Thus, the Australian
imitation of a spear or bullet striking is given as _toop_; to the Zulu,
when a calabash is beaten, it says _boo_; the Karens hear the flitting
ghosts of the dead call in the wailing voice of the wind, _re, re, ro,
ro_; the old traveller, Pietro della Valle, tells how the Shah of Persia
sneered at Timur and his Tartars, with their arrows that went _ter ter_;
certain Buddhist heretics maintained that water is alive, because when
it boils it says _chichitá, chitichita_, a symptom of vitality which
occasioned much theological controversy as to drinking cold and warm
water. Lastly, sound-words taken up into the general inventory of a
language have to follow its organic changes, and in the course of
phonetic transition, combination, decay, and mutilation, to lose ever
more and more their original shape. To take a single example, the French
_huer_ ‘to shout’ (Welsh _hwa_) may be a perfect imitative verb; yet
when it passes into modern English _hue_ and cry, our changed
pronunciation of the vowel destroys all imitation of the call. Now to
the language-makers all this was of little account. They merely wanted
recognized words to express recognized thought, and no doubt arrived by
repeated trials at systems which were found practically to answer this
purpose. But to the modern philologist, who is attempting to work out
the converse of the problem, and to follow backward the course of words
to original imitative sound, the difficulty is most embarrassing. It is
not only that thousands of words really derived from such imitation may
now by successive change have lost all safe traces of their history;
such mere deficiency of knowledge is only a minor evil. What is far
worse is that the way is thrown open to an unlimited number of false
solutions, which yet look on the face of them fully as like truth as
others which we know historically to be true. One thing is clear, that
it is of no use to resort to violent means, to rush in among the words
of language, explaining them away right and left as derived each from
some remote application of an imitative noise. The advocate of the
Imitative Theory who attempts this, trusting in his own powers of
discernment, has indeed taken in hand a perilous task, for, in fact, of
all judges of the question at issue, he has nourished and trained
himself up to become the very worst. His imagination is ever suggesting
to him what his judgment would like to find true; like a witness
answering the questions of the counsel on his own side, he answers in
good faith, but with what bias we all know. It was thus with De Brosses,
to whom this department of philology owes so much. It is nothing to say
that he had a keen ear for the voice of Nature; she must have positively
talked to him in alphabetic language, for he could hear the sound of
hollowness in the _sk_ of σκάπτω ‘to dig,’ of hardness in the _cal_ of
_callosity_, the noise of insertion of a body between two others in the
_tr_ of _trans_, _intra_. In enquiries so liable to misleading fancy, no
pains should be spared in securing impartial testimony, and it
fortunately happens that there are available sources of such evidence,
which, when thoroughly worked, will give to the theory of imitative
words as near an approach to accuracy as has been attained to in any
other wide philological problem. By comparing a number of languages,
widely apart in their general system and materials, and whose agreement
as to the words in question can only be accounted for by similar
formation of words from similar suggestion of sound, we obtain groups of
words whose imitative character is indisputable. The groups here
considered consist in general of imitative words of the simpler kind,
those directly connected with the special sound they are taken from, but
their examination to some extent admits of words being brought in, where
the connexion of the idea expressed with the sound imitated is more
remote. This, lastly, opens the far wider and more difficult problem,
how far imitation of sounds is the primary cause of the great mass of
words in the vocabularies of the world, between whose sound and sense no
direct connexion appears.
Words which express human actions accompanied with sound form a very
large and intelligible class. In remote and most different languages, we
find such forms as _pu_, _puf_, _bu_, _buf_, _fu_, _fuf_, in use with
the meaning of _puffing_, _fuffing_; or blowing; Malay _puput_; Tongan
_buhi_; Maori _pupui_; Australian _bobun_, _bwa-bun_; Galla _bufa_,
_afufa_; Zulu _futa_, _punga_, _pupuza_ (_fu_, _pu_, used as expressive
particles); Quiché _puba_; Quichua _puhuni_; Tupi _ypeû_; Finnish
_puhkia_; Hebrew _puach_; Danish _puste_; Lithuanian _púciu_; and in
numbers of other languages;[283] here, grammatical adjuncts apart, the
significant force lies in the imitative syllable. Savages have named the
European musket when they saw it, by the sound _pu_, describing not the
report, but the puff of smoke issuing from the muzzle. The Society
Islanders supposed at first that the white men blew through the barrel
of the gun, and they called it accordingly _pupuhi_, from the verb
_puhi_ to blow, while the New Zealanders more simply called it a _pu_.
So the Amaxosa of South Africa call it _umpu_, from the imitative sound
_pu!_ The Chinook Jargon of North-West America uses the phrase _mamook
poo_ (make _poo_) for a verb ‘to shoot,’ and a six-chambered revolver is
called _tohum poo_, _i.e._, a ‘six-_poo_.’ When a European uses the word
_puff_ to denote the discharge of a gun, he is merely referring to the
smoke blown out, as he would speak of a _puff_ of wind, or even a
powder-_puff_ or a _puff_-ball; and when a pistol is called in
colloquial German a _puffer_, the meaning of the word matches that used
for it in French Argot, a ‘soufflant.’ It has often been supposed that
the _puff_ imitates the actual sound, the _bang_ of the gun, and this
has been brought forward to show by what extremely different words one
and the same sound may be imitated, but this is a mistake.[284] These
derivations of the name of the gun from the notion of blowing correspond
with those which give names to the comparatively noiseless blow-tube of
the bird-hunter, called by the Indians of Yucatan a _pub_, in South
America by the Chiquitos a _pucuna_, by the Cocamas a _puna_. Looking
into vocabularies of languages which have such verbs ‘to blow,’ it is
usual to find with them other words apparently related to them, and
expressing more or less distant ideas. Thus Australian _poo-yu_, _puyu_
‘smoke;’ Quichua _puhucuni_ ‘to light a fire,’ _punquini_ ‘to swell,’
_puyu_, _puhuyu_ ‘a cloud;’ Maori _puku_ ‘to pant,’ _puka_ ‘to swell;’
Tupi _púpú_, _pupúre_ ‘to boil;’ Galla _bube_ ‘wind,’ _bubiza_ ‘to cool
by blowing;’ Kanuri (root _fu_) _fungin_ ‘to blow, swell,’ _furúdu_ ‘a
stuffed pad or bolster,’ &c., _bubute_ ‘bellows’ (_bubute fungin_ ‘I
blow the bellows’); Zulu (dropping the prefixes) _puku_, _pukupu_
‘frothing, foam,’ whence _pukupuku_ ‘an empty frothy fellow,’ _pupuma_
‘to bubble, boil,’ _fu_ ‘a cloud,’ _fumfu_ ‘blown about like high grass
in the wind,’ whence _fumfuta_ ‘to be confused, thrown into disorder,’
_futo_ ‘bellows,’ _fuba_ ‘the breast, chest,’ then figuratively ‘bosom,
conscience.’
The group of words belonging to the closed lips, of which _mum_,
_mumming_, _mumble_ are among the many forms belonging to European
languages,[285] are worked out in like manner among the lower races—Vei
_mu mu_ ‘dumb’; Mpongwe _imamu_ ‘dumb’; Zulu _momata_ (from _moma_, ‘a
motion with the mouth as in mumbling’) ‘to move the mouth or lips,’
_mumata_ ‘to close the lips as with a mouthful of water,’ _mumuta_,
_mumuza_ ‘to eat mouthfuls of corn, &c., with the lips shut;’ Tahitian
_mamu_ ‘to be silent,’ _omumu_ ‘to murmur;’ Fijian, _nomo_, _nomo-nomo_
‘to be silent;’ Chilian, _ñomn_ ‘to be silent;’ Quiché, _mem_ ‘mute,’
whence _memer_ ‘to become mute;’ Quichua, _amu_ ‘dumb, silent,’
_amullini_ ‘to have something in the mouth,’ _amul-layacuni simicta_ ‘to
mutter, to grumble.’ The group represented by Sanskrit _t’hût’hû_ ‘the
sound of spitting,’ Persian _thu kerdan_ (make _thu_) ‘to spit,’ Greek
πτύω, may be compared with Chinook _mamook toh_, _tooh_, (make _toh_,
_tooh_); Chilian _tuvcùtun_ (make _tuv_); Tahitian _tutua_; Galla _twu_;
Yoruba _tu_. Among the Sanskrit verb-roots, none carries its imitative
nature more plainly than _kshu_ ‘to sneeze;’ the following analogous
forms are from South America:—Chilian, _echiun_; Quichua, _achhini_; and
from various languages of Brazilian tribes, _techa-ai_, _haitschu_,
_atchian_, _natschun_, _aritischune_, &c. Another imitative verb is well
shown in the Negro-English dialect of Surinam, _njam_ ‘to eat’ (pron.
_nyam_), _njam-njam_ ‘food’ (‘en hem _njanjam_ ben de sprinkhan nanga
boesi-honi’—‘and his meat was locusts and wild honey’). In Australia the
imitative verb ‘to eat’ reappears as _g’nam-ang_. In Africa the Susu
language has _nimnim_, ‘to taste,’ and a similar formation is observed
in the Zulu _nambita_ ‘to smack the lips after eating or tasting, and
thence to be tasteful, to be pleasant to the mind.’ This is an excellent
instance of the transition of mere imitative sound to the expression of
mental emotion, and it corresponds with the imitative way in which the
Yakama language, in speaking of little children or pet animals,
expresses the verb ‘to love’ as _nem-no-sha_ (to make _n’m-n’_). In more
civilized countries these forms are mostly confined to baby-language.
The Chinese child’s word for eating is _nam_, in English nurseries _nim_
is noticed as answering the same purpose, and the Swedish dictionary
even recognizes _namnam_ ‘a tid-bit.’
As for imitative names of animals derived from their cries or noises,
they are to be met with in every language from the Australian _twonk_
‘frog,’ the Yakama _rol-rol_ ‘lark,’ to the Coptic _eeiō_ ‘ass,’ the
Chinese _maou_ ‘cat,’ and the English _cuckoo_ and _peewit_. Their
general principle of formation being acknowledged, their further
philological interest turns mostly on cases where corresponding words
have thus been formed independently in distant regions, and those where
the imitative name of the creature, or its habitual sound, passes to
express some new idea suggested by its character. The Sanskrit name of
the _kâka_ crow reappears in the name of a similar bird in British
Columbia, the _káh-káh_; a fly is called by the natives of Australia a
_bumberoo_, like Sanskrit _bambharâli_ ‘fly,’ Greek βομ-βύλιος, and our
_bumble_-bee. Analogous to the name of the _tse-tse_ fly, the terror of
African travellers, is _ntsintsi_, the word for ‘fly’ among the Basutos,
which also, by a simple metaphor, serves to express the idea of ‘a
parasite.’ Mr. H. W. Bates’s description seems to settle the dispute
among naturalists, whether the _toucan_ had its name from its cry or
not. He speaks of its loud, shrill, yelping cries having ‘a vague
resemblance to the syllables _tocáno, tocáno_, and hence the Indian name
of this genus of birds.’ Granting this, we can trace this sound-word
into a very new meaning; for it appears that the bird’s monstrous bill
has suggested a name for a certain large-nosed tribe of Indians, who are
accordingly called _Tucanos_.[286] The cock, gallo _quiquiriqui_, as the
Spanish nursery-language calls him, has a long list of names from
various languages which in various ways imitate his crowing; in Yoruba
he is called _koklo_, in Ibo _okoko_, _akoka_, in Zulu _kuku_, in
Finnish _kukko_, in Sanskrit _kukkuta_, and so on. He is mentioned in
the Zend-Avesta in a very curious way, by a name which elaborately
imitates his cry, but which the ancient Persians seem to have held
disrespectful to their holy bird, who rouses men from sleep to good
thought, word, and work:—
‘The bird who bears the name of Parôdars, O holy Zarathustra;
Upon whom evil-speaking men impose the name _Kabrkataç_.’[287]
The crowing of the cock (Malay _kâluruk_, _kukuk_) serves to mark a
point of time, cockcrow. Other words originally derived from such
imitation of crowing have passed into other curiously transformed
meanings: Old French _cocart_ ‘vain;’ modern French _coquet_ ‘strutting
like a _cock_, _coquetting_, a _coxcomb_;’ _cocarde_ ‘a _cockade_’ (from
its likeness to a cock’s comb); one of the best instances is
_coquelicot_, a name given for the same reason to the wild poppy, and
even more distinctly in Languedoc, where _cacaracá_ means both the
crowing and the flower. The hen in some languages has a name
corresponding to that of the cock, as in Kussa _kukuduna_ ‘cock,’
_kukukasi_ ‘hen;’ Ewe _koklo-tsu_ ‘cock,’ _koklo-no_ ‘hen;’ and her
_cackle_ (whence she has in Switzerland the name of _gugel_, _güggel_)
has passed into language as a term for idle gossip and chatter of women,
_caquet_, _caqueter_, _gackern_, much as the noise of a very different
creature seems to have given rise not only to its name, Italian
_cicala_, but to a group of words represented by _cicalar_ ‘to chirp,
chatter, talk sillily.’ The _pigeon_ is a good example of this kind,
both for sound and sense. It is Latin _pipio_, Italian _pippione_,
_piccione_, _pigione_, modern Greek πιπίνιον, French _pipion_ (old),
_pigeon_; its derivation is from the young bird’s _peep_, Latin
_pipire_, Italian _pipiare_, _pigiolare_, modern Greek πιπινίζω, to
chirp; by an easy metaphor, a _pigeon_ comes to mean ‘a silly young
fellow easily caught,’ to _pigeon_ ‘to cheat,’ Italian _pipione_ ‘a
silly gull, one that is soon caught and trepanned,’ _pippionare_ ‘to
pigeon, to gull one.’ In an entirely different family of languages, Mr.
Wedgwood points out a curiously similar process of derivation; Magyar
_pipegni_, _pipelni_ ‘to _peep_ or cheep;’ _pipe_, _pipök_ ‘a chicken,
gosling;’ _pipe-ember_ (chicken-man), ‘a silly young fellow,
booby.’[288] The derivation of Greek βοῦς, Latin _bos_, Welsh _bu_, from
the ox’s lowing, or _booing_ as it is called in the north country, has
been much debated. With an excessive desire to make Sanskrit answer as a
general Indo-European type, Bopp connected Sanskrit _go_, old German
_chuo_, English _cow_, with these words, on the unusual and forced
assumption of a change from guttural to labial.[289] The direct
derivation from sound, however, is favoured by other languages,
Cochin-Chinese _bo_, Hottentot _bou_. The beast may almost answer for
himself in the words of that Spanish proverb which remarks that people
talk according to their nature: ‘Habló el _buey_, y dijó _bu!_’ ‘The ox
spoke, and he said _boo!_’
Among musical instruments with imitative names are the following:—the
_shee-shee-quoi_, the mystic rattle of the Red Indian medicine-man, an
imitative word which reappears in the Darien Indian _shak-shak_, the
_shook-shook_ of the Arawaks, the Chinook _shugh_ (whence
_shugh-opoots_, rattletail, _i.e._, ‘rattlesnake;’)—the drum, called
_ganga_ in Haussa, _gañgañ_ in the Yoruba country, _gunguma_ by the
Gallas, and having its analogue in the Eastern _gong_;—the bell, called
in Yakama (N. Amer.) _kwa-lal-kwa-lal_, in Yalof (W. Afr.) _walwal_, in
Russian _kolokol_. The sound of the horn is imitated in English
nurseries as _toot-toot_, and this is transferred to express the
‘omnibus’ of which the bugle is the signal: with this nursery word is to
be classed the Peruvian name for the ‘shell-trumpet,’ _pututu_, and the
Gothic _thuthaurn_ (_thut_-horn), which is even used in the Gothic Bible
for the last trumpet of the day of judgement,—‘In spêdistin thuthaúrna,
thuthaúrneith auk jah daúthans ustandand’ (I Cor. xv. 52). How such
imitative words, when thoroughly taken up into language, suffer change
of pronunciation in which the original sound-meaning is lost, may be
seen in the English word _tabor_, which we might not recognize as a
sound-word at all, did we not notice that it is French _tabour_, a word
which in the form _tambour_ obviously belongs to a group of words for
drums, extending from the small rattling Arabic _tubl_ to the Indian
_dundhubi_ and the _tombe_, the Moqui drum made of a hollowed log. The
same group shows the transfer of such imitative words to objects which
are like the instrument, but have nothing to do with its sound; few
people who talk of _tambour_-work, and fewer still who speak of a
footstool as a _tabouret_, associate these words with the sound of a
drum, yet the connexion is clear enough. When these two processes go on
together, and a sound-word changes its original sound on the one hand,
and transfers its meaning to something else on the other, the result may
soon leave philological analysis quite helpless, unless by accident
historical evidence is forthcoming. Thus with the English word _pipe_.
Putting aside the particular pronunciation which we give the word, and
referring it back to its mediæval Latin or French sound in _pipa_,
_pipe_, we have before us an evident imitative name of a musical
instrument, derived from a familiar sound used also to represent the
chirping of chickens, Latin _pipire_, English to _peep_, as in the
translation of Isaiah viii. 19: ‘Seek ... unto wizards that _peep_, and
that mutter.’ The Algonquin Indians appear to have formed from this
sound _pib_ (with a grammatical suffix) their name for the _pib-e-gwun_
or native flute. Now just as _tuba_, _tubus_, ‘a trumpet’ (itself very
likely an imitative word) has given a name for any kind of _tube_, so
the word _pipe_ has been transferred from the musical instrument to
which it first belonged, and is used to describe tubes of various sorts,
gas-pipes, water-pipes, and pipes in general. There is nothing unusual
in these transitions of meaning, which are in fact rather the rule than
the exception. The _chibouk_ was originally a herdsman’s pipe or flute
in Central Asia. The _calumet_, popularly ranked with the tomahawk and
the mocassin among characteristic Red Indian words, is only the name for
a shepherd’s pipe (Latin _calamus_) in the dialect of Normandy,
corresponding with the _chalumeau_ of literary French; for when the
early colonists in Canada saw the Indians performing the strange
operation of smoking, ‘with a hollow piece of stone or wood like a
pipe,’ as Jacques Cartier has it, they merely gave to the native
tobacco-pipe the name of the French musical instrument it resembled. Now
changes of sound and of sense like this of the English word _pipe_ must
have been in continual operation in hundreds of languages where we have
no evidence to follow them by, and where we probably may never obtain
such evidence. But what little we do know must compel us to do justice
to the imitation of sound as a really existing process, capable of
furnishing an indefinitely large supply of words for things and actions
which have no necessary connexion at all with that sound. Where the
traces of the transfer are lost, the result is a stock of words which
are the despair of philologists, but are perhaps none the less fitted
for the practical use of men who simply want recognized symbols for
recognized ideas.
The claim of the Eastern _tomtom_ to have its name from a mere imitation
of its sound seems an indisputable one; but when it is noticed in what
various languages the beating of a resounding object is expressed by
something like _tum_, _tumb_, _tump_, _tup_, as in Javan _tumbuk_,
Coptic _tmno_, ‘to pound in a mortar,’ it becomes evident that the
admission involves more than at first sight appears. In Malay, _timpa_,
_tampa_, is ‘to beat out, hammer, forge;’ in the Chinook Jargon
_tum-tum_ is ‘the heart,’ and by combining the same sound with the
English word ‘water,’ a name is made for ‘waterfall,’ _tum-wâta_. The
Gallas of East Africa declare that a box on the ear seems to them to
make a noise like _tub_, for they call its sound _tubdjeda_, that is,
‘to say _tub_.’ In the same language, _tuma_ is ‘to beat,’ whence
_tumtu_, ‘a workman, especially one who beats, a smith.’ With the aid of
another imitative word, _bufa_ ‘to blow,’ the Gallas can construct this
wholly imitative sentence, _tumtun bufa bufti_, ‘the smith blows with
bellows,’ as an English child might say, ‘the _tumtum puffs_ the
_puffer_.’ This imitative sound seems to have obtained a footing among
the Aryan verb-roots, as in Sanskrit _tup_, _tubh_ ‘to smite,’ while in
Greek, _tup_, _tump_, has the meaning of ‘to beat, to _thump_,’
producing for instance τύμπανον, _tympanum_, ‘a drum or _tomtom_.’
Again, the verb to _crack_ has become in modern English as thorough a
root-word as the language possesses. The mere imitation of the sound of
breaking has passed into a verb to break; we speak of a _cracked_ cup or
a _cracked_ reputation without a thought of imitation of sound; but we
cannot yet use the German _krachen_ or French _craquer_ in this way, for
they have not developed in meaning as our word has, but remain in their
purely imitative stage. There are two corresponding Sanskrit words for
the saw, _kra-kara_, _kra-kacha_, that is to say, the ‘_kra_-maker,
_kra_-crier;’ and it is to be observed that all such terms, which
expressly state that they are imitations of sound, are particularly
valuable evidence in these enquiries, for whatever doubt there may be as
to other words being really derived from imitative sound, there can, of
course, be none here. Moreover, there is evidence of the same sound
having given rise to imitative words in other families of language,
Dahoman _kra-kra_, ‘a watchman’s rattle;’ Grebo _grikâ_ ‘a saw;’ Aino
_chacha_ ‘to saw;’ Malay _graji_ ‘a saw,’ _karat_ ‘to gnash the teeth,’
_karot_ ‘to make a _grating_ noise;’ Coptic _khrij_ ‘to gnash the
teeth,’ _khrajrej_ ‘to _grate_.’ Another form of the imitation is given
in the descriptive Galla expression _cacakdjeda_, _i.e._, ‘to say
_cacak_,’ ‘to _crack_, _krachen_.’ With this sound corresponds a whole
family of Peruvian words, of which the root seems to be the guttural
_cca_, coming from far back in the throat; _ccallani_, ‘to break,’
_ccatatani_, ‘to gnash the teeth,’ _ccacñiy_, ‘thunder,’ and the
expressive words for ‘a thunder-storm,’ _ccaccaccahay_, which carries
the imitative process so much farther than such European words as
thunder-_clap_, donner-_klapf_. In Maori, _pata_ is ‘to _patter_ as
water dropping, drops of rain.’ The Manchu language describes the noise
of fruits falling from the trees as _pata pata_ (so Hindustani
_bhadbhad_); this is like our word _pat_, and we should say in the same
manner that the fruit comes _pattering_ down, while French _patatra_ is
a recognized imitation of something falling. Coptic _potpt_ is ‘to
fall,’ and the Australian _badbadin_ (or _patpatin_) is translated into
almost literal English as _pitpatting_. On the strength of such
non-Aryan languages, are we to assign an imitative origin to the
Sanskrit verb-root _pat_, ‘to fall,’ and to Greek πίπτω?
Wishing rather to gain a clear survey of the principles of
language-making than to plunge into obscure problems, it is not
necessary for me to discuss here questions of intricate detail. The
point which continually arises is this,—granted that a particular kind
of transition from sound to sense is possible in the abstract, may it be
safely claimed in a particular case? In looking through the vocabularies
of the world, it appears that most languages offer words which, by
obvious likeliness or by their correspondence with similar forms
elsewhere, may put forward a tolerable claim to be considered imitative.
Some languages, as Aztec or Mohawk, offer singularly few examples, while
in others they are much more numerous. Take Australian cases: _walle_,
‘to _wail_;’ _bung-bung-ween_, ‘thunder;’ _wirriti_, ‘to blow, as wind;’
_wirrirriti_, ‘to storm, rage, as in fight;’ _wirri_, _bwirri_, ‘the
native throwing club,’ seemingly so called from its _whir_ through the
air; _kurarriti_, ‘to hum, buzz;’ _kurrirrurriri_, ‘round about,
unintelligible,’ &c.; _pitata_, ‘to knock, pelt, as rain,’ _pitapitata_,
‘to knock;’ _wiiti_, ‘to laugh, rejoice’—as in our own ‘Turnament of
Tottenham’:—
‘“_We te he!_” quoth Tyb, and lugh,
“Ye er a dughty man!”’
The so-called Chinook Jargon of British Columbia is a language crowded
with imitative words, sometimes adopted from the native Indian
languages, sometimes made on the spot by the combined efforts of the
white man and the Indian to make one another understand. Samples of its
quality are _hóh-hoh_, ‘to cough,’ _kó-ko_, ‘to knock,’
_kwa-lal-kwa-lal_, ‘to gallop,’ _muck-a-muck_, ‘to eat,’ _chak-chak_,
‘the bald eagle’ (from its scream), _mamook tsish_ (make _tsish_), ‘to
sharpen on the grindstone.’ It has been remarked by Prof. Max Müller
that the peculiar sound made in blowing out a candle is not a favourite
in civilized languages, but it seems to be recognized here, for no doubt
it is what the compiler of the vocabulary is doing his best to write
down when he gives _mamook poh_ (make _poh_) as the Chinook expression
for ‘to blow out or extinguish as a candle.’ This jargon is in great
measure of new growth within the last seventy or eighty years, but its
imitative words do not differ in nature from those of the more ordinary
and old-established languages of the world. Thus among Brazilian tribes
there appear Tupi _cororóng_, _cururuc_, ‘to snore’ (compare Coptic
_kherkher_, Quichua _ccorcuni_ (_ccor_)), whence it appears that an
imitation of a snore may perhaps serve the Carajás Indians to express
‘to sleep’ as _arourou-cré_, as well as the related idea of ‘night,’
_roou_. Again Pimenteira _ebaung_, ‘to bruise, beat,’ compares with
Yoruba _gba_, ‘to slap,’ _gbã_ (gbang) ‘to sound loudly, to _bang_,’ and
so forth. Among African languages, the Zulu seems particularly rich in
imitative words. Thus _bibiza_, ‘to dribble like children, drivel in
speaking’ (compare English _bib_); _babala_, ‘the larger bush-antelope’
(from the _baa_ of the female); _boba_, ‘to _babble_, chatter, be
noisy,’ _bobi_, ‘a _babbler_;’ _boboni_, ‘a throstle’ (cries _bo! bo!_
compare American _bobolink_); _bomboloza_, ‘to rumble in the bowels, to
have a bowel-complaint;’ _bubula_, ‘to _buzz_ like bees,’ _bubulela_, ‘a
swarm of bees, a buzzing crowd of people;’ _bubuluza_, ‘to make a
blustering noise, like frothing beer or boiling fat.’ These examples,
from among those given under one initial letter in one dictionary of one
barbaric language, may give an idea of the amount of the evidence from
the languages of the lower races bearing on the present problem.
For the present purpose of giving a brief series of examples of the sort
of words in which imitative sound seems fairly traceable, the strongest
and most manageable evidence is of course found among such words as
directly describe sounds or what produces them, such as cries of and
names for animals, the terms for action accompanied by sound, and the
materials and objects so acted upon. In further investigation it becomes
more and more requisite to isolate the sound-type or root from the
modifications and additions to which it has been subjected for
grammatical and phonetical adaptation. It will serve to give an idea of
the extent and intricacy of this problem, to glance at a group of words
in one European language, and notice the etymological network which
spreads round the German word _klapf_, in Grimm’s dictionary, _klappen_,
_klippen_, _klopfen_, _kläffen_, _klimpern_, _klampern_, _klateren_,
_kloteren_, _klitteren_, _klatzen_, _klacken_, and more, to be matched
with allied forms in other languages. Setting aside the consideration of
grammatical inflexion, it belongs to the present subject to notice that
man’s imitative faculty in language is by no means limited to making
direct copies of sound and shaping them into words. It seizes upon
ready-made terms of whatever origin, alters and adapts them to make
their sound fitting to their sense, and pours into the dictionaries a
flood of adapted words of which the most difficult to analyse are those
which are neither altogether etymological nor altogether imitative, but
partly both. How words, while preserving, so to speak, the same
skeleton, may be made to follow the variation of sound, of force, of
duration, of size, an imitative group more or less connected with the
last will show—_crick_, _creak_, _crack_, _crash_, _crush_, _crunch_,
_craunch_, _scrunch_, _scraunch_. It does not at all follow that because
a word suffers such imitative and symbolic changes it must be, like
this, directly imitative in its origin. What, for instance, could sound
more imitative than the name of that old-fashioned cannon for throwing
grape-shot, the _patterero_? Yet the etymology of the word appears in
the Spanish form _pedrero_, French _perrier_; it means simply an
instrument for throwing stones (_piedra_, _pierre_), and it was only
when the Spanish word was adopted in England that the imitative faculty
caught and transformed it into an apparent sound-word, resembling the
verb to _patter_. The propensity of language, especially in slang, to
make sense of strange words by altering them into something with an
appropriate meaning has been often dwelt upon by philologists, but the
propensity to alter words into something with an appropriate sound has
produced results immensely more important. The effects of symbolic
change of sound acting upon verb-roots seem almost boundless. The verb
to _waddle_ has a strong imitative appearance, and so in German we can
hardly resist the suggestion that imitative sound has to do with the
difference between _wandern_ and _wandeln_; but all these verbs belong
to a family represented by Sanskrit _vad_, to go, Latin _vado_, and to
this root there seems no sufficient ground for assigning an imitative
origin, the traces of which it has at any rate lost if it ever had them.
Thus, again, to _stamp_ with the foot, which has been claimed as an
imitation of sound, seems only a ‘coloured’ word. The root _sta_, ‘to
stand,’ Sanskrit _sthâ_, forms a causative _stap_, Sanskrit _sthâpay_,
‘to make to stand,’ English to _stop_, and a foot-_step_ is when the
foot comes to a stand, a foot-_stop_. But we have Anglo-Saxon _stapan_,
_stæpan_, _steppan_, English to _step_, varying to express its meaning
by sound in to _staup_, to _stamp_, to _stump_, and to _stomp_,
contrasting in their violence or clumsy weight with the foot on the
Dorset cottage-sill in Barnes’s poem:—
‘Where love do seek the maïden’s evenèn vloor,
Wi’ _stip-step light_, an tip-tap slight
Ageän the door.’
By expanding, modifying, or, so to speak, colouring, sound is able to
produce effects closely like those of gesture-language, expressing
length or shortness of time, strength or weakness of action, and then
passing into a further stage to describe greatness or smallness of size
or of distance, and thence making its way into the widest fields of
metaphor. And it does all this with a force which is surprising when we
consider how childishly simple are the means employed. Thus the Bachapin
of Africa call a man with the cry _héla!_ but according as he is far or
farther off the sound of the _hêela!_ _hê-ê-la!_ is lengthened out. Mr.
Macgregor in his ‘Rob Roy on the Jordan,’ graphically describes this
method of expression, ‘“But where is Zalmouda?”... Then with rough
eagerness the strongest of the Dowana faction pushes his long forefinger
forward, pointing straight enough—but whither? and with a volley of
words ends, _Ah-ah-a-a-a——a-a_. This strange expression had long before
puzzled me when first heard from a shepherd in Bashan.... But the simple
meaning of this long string of “_ah’s_” shortened, and quickened, and
lowered in tone to the end, is merely that the place pointed to is a
“very great way off.”’ The Chinook Jargon, as usual representing
primitive developments of language, uses a similar device in lengthening
the sound of words to indicate distance. The Siamese can, by varying the
tone-accent, make the syllable _non_, ‘there,’ express a near,
indefinite, or far distance, and in like manner can modify the meaning
of such a word as _ny_, ‘little.’ In the Gaboon, the strength with which
such a word as _mpolu_, ‘great,’ is uttered serves to show whether it is
great, very great, or very very great, and in this way, as Mr. Wilson
remarks in his Mpongwe Grammar, ‘the comparative degrees of greatness,
smallness, hardness, rapidity, and strength, &c., may be conveyed with
more accuracy and precision than could readily be conceived.’ In
Madagascar _ratchi_ means ‘bad,’ but _râtchi_ is ‘very bad.’ The natives
of Australia, according to Oldfield, show the use of this process in
combination with that of symbolic reduplication: among the Watchandie
tribe _jir-rie_ signifies ‘already or past,’ _jir-rie jir-rie_ indicates
‘a long time ago,’ while _jie-r-rie jirrie_ (the first syllable being
dwelt on for some time) signifies ‘an immense time ago.’ Again,
_boo-rie_ is ‘small,’ _boo-rie-boo-rie_ ‘very small,’ and _b-o-rie
boorie_ ‘exceedingly small.’ Wilhelm von Humboldt notices the habit of
the southern Guarani dialect of South America of dwelling more or less
time on the suffix of the perfect tense, _yma_, _y—ma_, to indicate the
length or shortness of the distance of time at which the action took
place; and it is curious to observe that a similar contrivance is made
use of among the aboriginal tribes of India, where the Ho language forms
a future tense by adding _á_ to the root, and prolonging its sound,
_kajee_ ‘to speak,’ Amg _kajēēá_ ‘I will speak.’ As might be expected,
the languages of very rude tribes show extremely well how the results of
such primitive processes pass into the recognized stock of language.
Nothing could be better for this than the words by which one of the
rudest of living races, the Botocudos of Brazil, express the sea. They
have a word for a stream, _ouatou_, and an adjective which means great,
_ijipakijiou_; thence the two words ‘stream-great,’ a little
strengthened in the vowels, will give the term for a river,
_ouatou-ijiipakiiijou_, as it were, ‘stream-grea-at,’ and this,
to express the immensity of the ocean, is amplified into
_ouatou-iijipakiijou-ou-ou-ou-ou-ou_. Another tribe of the same family
works out the same result more simply; the word _ouatou_, ‘stream,’
becomes _ouatou-ou-ou-ou_, ‘the sea.’ The Chavantes very naturally
stretch the expression _rom-o-wodi_, ‘I go a long way,’ into
_rom-o-o-o-o-wodi_, ‘I go a very long way indeed,’ and when they are
called upon to count beyond five they say it is _ka-o-o-oki_, by which
they evidently mean it is a very great many. The Cauixanas in one
vocabulary are described as saying _lawauugabi_ for four, and drawling
out the same word for five, as if to say ‘a long four,’ in somewhat the
same way as the Aponegicrans, whose word for six is _itawuna_, can
expand this into a word for seven, _itawuūna_, obviously thus meaning a
‘long six.’ In their earlier and simpler stages nothing can be more easy
to comprehend than these, so to speak, pictorial modifications of words.
It is true that writing, even with the aid of italics and capitals,
ignores much of this symbolism in spoken language, but every child can
see its use and meaning, in spite of the efforts of book-learning and
school-teaching to set aside whatever cannot be expressed by their
imperfect symbols, nor controlled by their narrow rules. But when we try
to follow out to their full results these methods, at first so easy to
trace and appreciate, we soon find them passing out of our grasp. The
language of the Sahaptin Indians shows us a process of modifying words
which is far from clear, and yet not utterly obscure. These Indians have
a way of making a kind of disrespectful diminutive by changing the _n_
in a word to _l_; thus _twinwt_ means ‘tailless,’ but to indicate
particular smallness, or to express contempt, they make this into
_twilwt_, pronounced with an appropriate change of tone; and again,
_wana_ means ‘river,’ but this is made into a diminutive _wala_ by
‘changing _n_ into _l_, giving the voice a different tone, putting the
lips out in speaking, and keeping them suspended around the jaw.’ Here
we are told enough about the change of pronunciation to guess at least
how it could convey the notions of smallness and contempt. But it is
less easy to follow the process by which the Mpongwe language turns an
affirmative into a negative verb by ‘an intonation upon, or prolongation
of the radical vowel,’ _tŏnda_, to love, _tŏnda_, not to love; _tŏndo_,
to be loved, _tŏndo_, not to be loved. So Yoruba, _bába_, ‘a great
thing,’ _bàba_, ‘a small thing,’ contrasted in a proverb, ‘_Baba_ bo,
_baba_ molle’—‘A great matter puts a smaller out of sight.’ Language is,
in fact, full of phonetic modifications which justify a suspicion that
symbolic sound had to do with their production, though it may be hard to
say exactly how.
Again, there is the familiar process of reduplication, simple or
modified, which produces such forms as _murmur_, _pitpat_,
_helterskelter_. This action, though much restricted in literary
dialects, has such immense scope in the talk of children and savages
that Professor Pott’s treatise on it[290] has become incidentally one of
the most valuable collections of facts ever made with relation to early
stages of language. Now up to a certain point any child can see how and
why such doubling is done, and how it always adds something to the
original idea. It may make superlatives or otherwise intensify words, as
in Polynesia _loa_ ‘long,’ _lololoa_ ‘very long’; Mandingo _ding_ ‘a
child,’ _dingding_ ‘a very little child.’ It makes plurals, as Malay
_raja-raja_ ‘princes,’ _orang-orang_ ‘people.’ It adds numerals, as
Mosquito _walwal_ ‘four’ (two-two), or distributes them, as Coptic _ouai
ouai_ ‘singly’ (one-one). These are cases where the motive of doubling
is comparatively easy to make out. As an example of cases much more
difficult to comprehend may be taken the familiar reduplication of the
perfect tense, Greek γέγραφα from γράφω, Latin _momordi_ from _mordeo_,
Gothic _haihald_ from _haldan_, ‘to hold.’ Reduplication is habitually
used in imitative words to intensify them, and still more, to show that
the sound is repeated or continuous. From the immense mass of such words
we may take as instances the Botocudo _hou-hou-hou-gitcha_ ‘to suck’
(compare Tongan _hūhū_ ‘breast’), _kiaku-käck-käck_, ‘a butterfly’;
Quichua _chiuiuiuiñichi_ ‘wind whistling in the trees’; Maori _haruru_
‘noise of wind’; _hohoro_ ‘hurry’; Dayak _kakakkaka_ ‘to go on laughing
loud’; Aino _shiriushiriukanni_ ‘a rasp’; Tamil _murumuru_ ‘to
_murmur_’; Akra _ewiewiewiewie_ ‘he spoke repeatedly and continually’;
and so on, throughout the whole range of the languages of the world.
The device of conveying different ideas of distance by the use of a
graduated scale of vowels seems to me one of great philological
interest, from the suggestive hint it gives of the proceedings of the
language-makers in most distant regions of the world, working out in
various ways a similar ingenious contrivance of expression by sound. A
typical series is the Javan: _iki_ ‘this’ (close by) _ika_ ‘that’ (at
some distance); _iku_ ‘that’ (farther off). It is not likely that the
following list nearly exhausts the whole number of cases in the
languages of the world, for about half the number have been incidentally
noted down by myself without any especial search, but merely in the
course of looking over vocabularies of the lower races.[291]
Javan ... _iki_, this; _ika_, that (intermediate); _iku_, that.
Malagasy ... _ao_, there (at a short distance); _eo_, there (at a
shorter distance); _io_, there (close at hand). _atsy_, there (not
far off); _etsy_, there (nearer); _itsy_, this or these.
Japanese ... _ko_, here; _ka_, there. _korera_, these; _karera_,
they (those).
Canarese ... _ivanu_, this; _uvanu_, that (intermediate); _avanu_,
that.
Tamul ... _î_, this; _â_, that.
Rajmahali ... _îh_, this; _âh_, that.
Dhimal ... _isho_, _ita_, here; _usho_, _uta_, there. _iti_,
_idong_, this; _uti_, _udong_, that (of things and persons
respectively).
Abchasian ... _abri_, this; _ubri_, that.
Ossetic ... _am_, here; _um_, there.
Magyar ... _ez_, this; _az_, that.
Zulu ... _apa_, here; _apo_, there. _lesi_, _leso_, _lesiya_; _abu_,
_abo_, _abuya_; &c. = this, that, that (in the distance).
Yoruba ... _na_, this; _ni_, that.
Fernandian ... _olo_, this; _ole_, that.
Tumale ... _re_, this; _ri_, that. _ngi_, I; _ngo_, thou; _ngu_, he.
Greenlandish ... _uv_, here, there (where one points to); _iv_,
there, up there.
Sujelpa (Coleville Ind.) ... _aa_, this; _ii_, that.
Sahaptin ... _kina_, here; _kuna_, there.
Mutsun ... _ne_, here; _nu_, there.
Tarahumara ... _ibe_, here; _abe_, there.
Guarani ... _nde_, _ne_, thou; _ndi_, _ni_, he.
Botocudo ... _ati_, I; _oti_, thou, you, (prep.) to.
Carib ... _ne_, thou; _ni_, he.
Chilian ... _tva_, _vachi_, this; _tvey_, _veychi_, that.
It is obvious on inspection of this list of pronouns and adverbs that
they have in some way come to have their vowels contrasted to match the
contrast of here and there, this and that. Accident may sometimes
account for such cases. For instance it is well known to philologists
that our own _this_ and _that_ are pronouns partly distinct in their
formation, _thi-s_ being probably two pronouns run together, but yet the
Dutch neuters _dit_ ‘this,’ and _dat_ ‘that,’ have taken the appearance
of a single form with contrasted vowels.[292] But accident cannot
account for the frequency of such words in pairs, and even in sets of
three, in so many different languages. There must have been some common
intention at work, and there is evidence that some of these languages do
resort to a change of sound as a means of expressing change of distance.
Thus the language of Fernando Po can not only express ‘this’ and ‘that’
by _olo_, _ole_, but it can even make a change of the pronunciation of
the vowel distinguish between _o boehe_ ‘this month,’ and _oh boehe_,
‘that month.’ In the same way the Grebo can make the difference between
‘I’ and ‘thou,’ ‘we,’ and ‘you,’ ‘solely by the intonation of the voice,
which the final _h_ of the second persons _mâh_ and _ăh_ is intended to
express.’
_mâ_ di, I eat; _mâh_ di, thou eatest;
_ă_ di, we eat; _ăh_ di, ye eat.
The set of Zulu demonstratives which express the three distances of
near, farther, farthest, are very complex, but a remark as to their use
shows how thoroughly symbolic sound enters into their nature. The Zulus
not only say _nansi_, ‘here is,’ _nanso_, ‘there is,’ _nansiya_, ‘there
is in the distance,’ but they even express the greatness of this
distance by the emphasis and prolongation of the _ya_. If we could
discern a similar gradation of the vowels to express a corresponding
gradation of distance throughout our list, the whole matter would be
easier to explain; but it is not so, the _i_-words for instance, are
sometimes nearer and sometimes farther off than the _a_-words. We can
only judge that, as even children can see that a scale of vowels makes a
most expressive scale of distances, many pronouns and adverbs in use in
the world have probably taken their shape under the influence of this
simple device, and thus there have arisen sets of what we may call
contrasted or ‘differential’ words.
How the differencing of words by change of vowels may be used to
distinguish between the sexes, is well put in a remark of Professor Max
Müller’s: ‘The distinction of gender ... is sometimes expressed in such
a manner that we can only explain it by ascribing an expressive power to
the more or less obscure sound of vowels. _Ukko_, in Finnic, is an old
man; _akka_, an old woman.... In Mandshu _chacha_ is mas. ... _cheche_,
femina. Again, _ama_, in Mandshu, is father; _eme_, mother; _amcha_,
father-in-law, _emche_, mother-in-law.’[293] The Coretú language of
Brazil has another curiously contrasted pair of words _tsáackö_,
‘father,’ _tsaacko_ ‘mother,’ while the Carib has _baba_ for father, and
_bibi_ for mother, and the Ibu of Africa has _nna_ for father and _nne_
for mother. This contrivance of distinguishing the male from the female
by a difference of vowels is however but a small part of the process of
formation which can be traced among such words as those for father and
mother. Their consideration leads into a very interesting philological
region, that of ‘Children’s language.’
If we set down a few of the pairs of words which stand for ‘father’ and
‘mother’ in very different and distant languages—_papa_ and _mama_;
Welsh, _tad_ (_dad_) and _mam_; Hungarian, _atya_ and _anya_; Mandingo,
_fa_ and _ba_; Lummi (N. America), _man_ and _tan_; Catoquina (S.
America), _payú_ and _nayú_; Watchandie (Australia), _amo_ and
_ago_—their contrast seems to lie in their consonants, while many other
pairs differ totally, like Hebrew _ab_ and _im_; Kuki, _p’ha_ and _noo_;
Kayan, _amay_ and _inei_; Tarahumara, _nono_ and _jeje_. Words of the
class of _papa_ and _mama_, occurring in remote parts of the world, were
once freely used as evidence of a common origin of the languages in
which they were found alike. But Professor Buschmann’s paper on
‘Nature-Sound,’ published in 1853,[294] effectually overthrew this
argument, and settled the view that such coincidence might arise again
and again by independent production. It was clearly of no use to argue
that Carib and English were allied because the word _papa_, ‘father,’
belongs to both, or Hottentot and English because both use _mama_ for
‘mother,’ seeing that these childish articulations may be used in just
the opposite way, for the Chilian word for mother is _papa_, and the
Tlatskanai for father is _mama_. Yet the choice of easy little words for
‘father’ and ‘mother’ does not seem to have been quite indiscriminate.
The immense list of such words collected by Buschmann shows that the
types _pa_ and _ta_, with the similar forms _ap_ and _at_, preponderate
in the world as names for ‘father,’ while _ma_ and _na, am_ and _an_,
preponderate as names for ‘mother.’ His explanation of this state of
things as affected by direct symbolism choosing the hard sound for the
father, and the gentler for the mother, has very likely truth in it, but
it must not be pushed too far. It cannot be, for instance, the same
principle of symbolism which leads the Welshmen to say _tad_ for
‘father’ and _mam_ for ‘mother,’ and the Indian of British Columbia to
say _maan_, ‘father’ and _taan_, ‘mother,’ or the Georgian to say _mama_
‘father’ and _deda_ ‘mother.’ Yet I have not succeeded in finding
anywhere our familiar _papa_ and _mama_ exactly reversed in one and the
same language; the nearest approach to it that I can give is from the
island of Meang, where _mama_ meant ‘father, man,’ and _babi_, ‘mother,
woman.’[295]
Between the nursery words _papa_ and _mama_ and the more formal _father_
and _mother_ there is an obvious resemblance in sound. What, then, is
the origin of these words _father_ and _mother_? Up to a certain point
their history is clear. They belong to the same group of organized words
with _vater_ and _mutter_, _pater_ and _mater_, πατήρ and μήτηρ, _pitar_
and _mâtar_, and other similar forms through the Indo-European family of
languages. There is no doubt that all these pairs of names are derived
from an ancient and common Aryan source, and when they are traced back
as far as possible towards that source, they appear to have sprung from
a pair of words which may be roughly called _patar_ and _matar_, and
which were formed by adding _tar_, the suffix of the actor, to the
verb-roots _pa_ and _ma_. There being two appropriate Sanskrit verbs
_pâ_ and _mâ_, it is possible to etymologize the two words as _patar_,
‘protector,’ and _matar_, ‘producer.’ Now this pair of Aryan words must
have been very ancient, lying back at the remote common source from
which forms parallel to our English _father_ and _mother_ passed into
Greek and Persian, Norse and Armenian, thus holding fixed type through
the eventful course of Indo-European history. Yet, ancient as these
words are, they were no doubt preceded by simpler rudimentary words of
the children’s language, for it is not likely that the primitive Aryans
did without baby-words for father and mother until they had an organized
system of adding suffixes to verb-roots to express such notions as
‘protector’ or ‘producer.’ Nor can it be supposed that it was by mere
accident that the root-words thus chosen happened to be the very sounds
_pa_ and _ma_, whose types so often occur in the remotest parts of the
world as names for ‘father’ and ‘mother.’ Prof. Adolphe Pictet makes
shift to account for the coincidence thus: he postulates first the pair
of forms _pâ_ and _mâ_ as Aryan verb-roots of unknown origin, meaning
‘to protect’ and ‘to create,’ next another pair of forms _pa_ and _ma_,
children’s words commonly used to denote father and mother, and lastly
he combines the two by supposing that the root-verbs _pâ_ and _mâ_ were
chosen to form the Indo-European words for parents, because of their
resemblance to the familiar baby-words already in use. This circuitous
process at any rate saves those sacred monosyllables, the Sanskrit
verb-roots, from the disgrace of an assignable origin. Yet those who
remember that these verb-roots are only a set of crude forms in use in
one particular language of the world at one particular period of its
development, may account for the facts more simply and more thoroughly.
It is a fair guess that the ubiquitous _pa_ and _ma_ of the children’s
language were the original forms; that they were used in an early period
of Aryan speech as indiscriminately substantive and verb, just as our
modern English, which so often reproduces the most rudimentary
linguistic processes, can form from the noun ‘father’ a verb ‘to
father;’ and that lastly they became verb-roots, whence the words
_patar_ and _matar_ were formed by the addition of the suffix.[296]
The baby-names for parents must not be studied as though they stood
alone in language. They are only important members of a great class of
words, belonging to all times and countries within our experience, and
forming a children’s language, whose common character is due to its
concerning itself with the limited set of ideas in which little children
are interested, and expressing these ideas by the limited set of
articulations suited to the child’s first attempts to talk. This
peculiar language is marked quite characteristically among the low
savage tribes of Australia; _mamman_ ‘father,’ _ngangan_ ‘mother,’ and
by metaphor ‘thumb,’ ‘great toe’ (as is more fully explained in
_jinnamamman_ ‘great toe,’ i.e. foot’s father), _tammin_ ‘grandfather or
grandmother,’ _bab-ba_ ‘bad, foolish, childish,’ _bee-bee_, _beep_
‘breast,’ _pappi_ ‘father,’ _pappa_ ‘young one, _pup_, whelp,’ (whence
is grammatically formed the verb _papparniti_ ‘to become a young one, to
be born.’) Or if we look for examples from India, it does not matter
whether we take them from non-Hindu or Hindu languages, for in
baby-language all races are on one footing. Thus Tamil _appâ_ ‘father,’
_ammâ_ ‘mother,’ Bodo _aphâ_ ‘father,’ _âyâ_ ‘mother;’ the Kocch group
_nânâ_ and _nâni_ ‘paternal grandfather and grandmother,’ _mâmâ_
‘uncle,’ _dâdâ_ ‘cousin,’ may be set beside Sanskrit _tata_ ‘father,’
_nanâ_ ‘mother,’ and the Hindustani words of the same class, of which
some are familiar to the English ear by being naturalized in
Anglo-Indian talk, _bâbâ_ ‘father,’ _bâbû_ ‘child, prince, Mr.,’ _bîbî_
‘lady,’ _dadâ_ ‘nurse’ (_âyâ_ ‘nurse’ seems borrowed from Portuguese).
Such words are continually coming fresh into existence everywhere, and
the law of natural selection determines their fate. The great mass of
the _nana’s_ and _dada’s_ of the nursery die out almost as soon as made.
Some few take more root and spread over large districts as accepted
nursery words, and now and then a curious philologist makes a collection
of them. Of such, many are obvious mutilations of longer words, as
French faire _dodo_ ‘to sleep’ (dormir), Brandenburg _wiwi_, a common
cradle lullaby (wiegen). Others, whatever their origin, fall, in
consequence of the small variety of articulations out of which they must
be chosen, into a curiously indiscriminate and unmeaning mass, as Swiss
_bobo_ ‘a scratch;’ _bambam_ ‘all gone;’ Italian _bobò_ ‘something to
drink,’ _gogo_ ‘little boy,’ for _dede_ ‘to play.’ These are words
quoted by Pott, and for English examples _nana_ ‘nurse,’ _tata!_
‘good-bye!’ may serve. But all _baby_-words, as this very name proves,
do not stop short even at this stage of publicity. A small proportion of
them establish themselves in the ordinary talk of grown-up men and
women, and when they have once made good their place as constituents of
general language, they may pass on by inheritance from age to age. Such
examples as have been here quoted of nursery words give a clue to the
origin of a mass of names in the most diverse languages, for father,
mother, grandmother, aunt, child, breast, toy, doll, &c. The negro of
Fernando Po who uses the word _bubboh_ for ‘a little boy,’ is on equal
terms with the German who uses _bube_; the Congo-man who uses _tata_ for
‘father’ would understand how the same word could be used in classic
Latin for ‘father,’ and in mediæval Latin for ‘pedagogue;’ the Carib and
the Caroline Islander agree with the Englishman that _papa_ is a
suitable word to express ‘father,’ and then it only remains to carry on
the word, and make the baby-language name the priests of the Eastern
Church and the great _Papa_ of the Western. At the same time the
evidence explains the indifference with which, out of the small stock of
available materials, the same sound does duty for the most different
ideas; why _mama_ means here ‘mother,’ there ‘father,’ there ‘uncle,’
_maman_ here ‘mother,’ there ‘father-in-law,’ _dada_ here ‘father,’
there ‘nurse,’ there ‘breast,’ _tata_ here ‘father,’ there ‘son.’ A
single group of words may serve to show the character of this peculiar
region of language: Blackfoot Indian _ninnah_ ‘father;’ Greek νέννος
‘uncle,’ νέννα ‘aunt;’ Zulu _nina_, Sangir _nina_, Malagasy _nini_
‘mother;’ Javan _nini_ ‘grandfather or grandmother;’ Vayu _nini_
‘paternal aunt;’ Darien Indian _ninah_ ‘daughter;’ Spanish _niño_,
_niña_ ‘child;’ Italian _ninna_ ‘little girl;’ Milanese _ninin_ ‘bed;’
Italian _ninnare_ ‘to rock the cradle.’
In this way a dozen easy child’s articulations, _ba’s_ and _na’s_,
_ti’s_ and _de’s_, _pa’s_ and _ma’s_, serve almost as indiscriminately
to express a dozen child’s ideas as though they had been shaken in a bag
and pulled out at random to express the notion that came first, doll or
uncle, nurse or grandfather. It is obvious that among words cramped to
such scanty choice of articulate sounds, speculations as to derivation
must be more than usually unsafe. Looked at from this point of view,
children’s language may give a valuable lesson to the philologist. He
has before him a kind of language, formed, under peculiar conditions,
and showing the weak points of his method of philological research, only
exaggerated into extraordinary distinctness. In ordinary language, the
difficulty of connecting sound with sense lies in great measure in the
inability of a small and rigid set of articulations to express an
interminable variety of tones and noises. In children’s language, a
still more scanty set of articulations fails yet more to render these
distinctly. The difficulty of finding the derivation of words lies in
great measure in the use of more or less similar root-sounds for most
heterogeneous purposes. To assume that two words of different meanings,
just because they sound somewhat alike, must therefore have a common
origin, is even in ordinary language the great source of bad etymology.
But in children’s language the theory of root-sounds fairly breaks down.
Few would venture to assert, for instance, that _papa_ and _pap_ have a
common derivation or a common root. All that we can safely say of
connexion between them is that they are words related by common
acceptance in the nursery language. As such, they are well marked in
ancient Rome as in modern England: _papas_ ‘nutricius, nutritor,’
_pappus_ ‘senex;’ ‘cum cibum et potum _buas_ ac _papas_ dicunt, et
matrem _mammam_, patrem _tatam_ (or _papam_).’[297]
From children’s language, moreover, we have striking proof of the power
of consensus of society, in establishing words in settled use without
their carrying traces of inherent expressiveness. It is true that
children are intimately acquainted with the use of emotional and
imitative sound, and their vocal intercourse largely consists of such
expression. The effects of this are in some degree discernible in the
class of words we are considering. But it is obvious that the leading
principle of their formation is not to adopt words distinguished by the
expressive character of their sound, but to choose somehow a fixed word
to answer a given purpose. To do this, different languages have chosen
similar articulations to express the most diverse and opposite ideas.
Now in the language of grown-up people, it is clear that social
consensus has worked in the same way. Even if the extreme supposition be
granted, that the ultimate origin of every word of language lies in
inherently expressive sound, this only partly affects the case, for it
would have to be admitted that, in actual languages, most words have so
far departed in sound or sense from this originally expressive stage,
that to all intents and purposes they might at first have been
arbitrarily chosen. The main principle of language has been, not to
preserve traces of original sound-signification for the benefit of
future etymologists, but to fix elements of language to serve as
counters for practical reckoning of ideas. In this process much original
expressiveness has no doubt disappeared beyond all hope of recovery.
Such are some of the ways in which vocal sounds seem to have commended
themselves to the mind of the word-maker as fit to express his meaning,
and to have been used accordingly. I do not think that the evidence here
adduced justifies the setting-up of what is called the Interjectional
and Imitative Theory as a complete solution of the problem of original
language. Valid as this theory proves itself within limits, it would be
incautious to accept a hypothesis which can perhaps satisfactorily
account for a twentieth of the crude forms in any language, as a certain
and absolute explanation of the nineteen-twentieths whose origin remains
doubtful. A key must unlock more doors than this, to be taken as the
master-key. Moreover, some special points which have come under
consideration in these chapters tend to show the positive necessity of
such caution in theorizing. Too narrow a theory of the application of
sound to sense may fail to include the varied devices which the
languages of different regions turn to account. It is thus with the
distinction in meaning of a word by its musical accent, and the
distinction of distance by graduated vowels. These are ingenious and
intelligible contrivances, but they hardly seem directly emotional or
imitative in origin. A safer way of putting the theory of a natural
origin of language is to postulate the original utterance of ideas in
what may be called self-expressive sounds, without defining closely
whether their expression lay in emotional tone, imitative noise,
contrast of accent or vowel or consonant, or other phonetic quality.
Even here, exception of unknown and perhaps enormous extent must be made
for sounds chosen by individuals to express some notion, from motives
which even their own minds failed to discern, but which sounds
nevertheless made good their footing in the language of the family, the
tribe, and the nation. There may be many modes even of recognizable
phonetic expression, unknown to us as yet. So far, however, as I have
been able to trace them here, such modes have in common a claim to
belong not exclusively to the scheme of this or that particular dialect,
but to wide-ranging principles of formation of language. Their examples
are to be drawn with equal cogency from Sanskrit or Hebrew, from the
nursery-language of Lombardy, or the half-Indian, half-European jargon
of Vancouver’s Island; and wherever they are found, they help to furnish
groups of sound-words—words which have not lost the traces of their
first expressive origin, but still carry their direct significance
plainly stamped upon them. In fact, the time has now come for a
substantial basis to be laid for Generative Philology. A classified
collection of words with any strong claim to be self-expressive should
be brought together out of the thousand or so of recognized languages
and dialects of the world. In such a Dictionary of Sound-Words, half the
cases cited might very likely be worthless, but the collection would
afford the practical means of expurgating itself; for it would show on a
large scale what particular sounds have manifested their fitness to
convey particular ideas, by having been repeatedly chosen among
different races to convey them.
Attempts to explain as far as may be the primary formation of speech, by
tracing out in detail such processes as have been here described, are
likely to increase our knowledge by sure and steady steps wherever
imagination does not get the better of sober comparison of facts. But
there is one side of this problem of the Origin of Language on which
such studies have by no means an encouraging effect. Much of the popular
interest in such matters is centred in the question, whether the known
languages of the world have their source in one or many primæval
tongues. On this subject the opinions of the philologists who have
compared the greatest number of languages are utterly at variance, nor
has any one brought forward a body of philological evidence strong and
direct enough to make anything beyond mere vague opinion justifiable.
Now such processes as the growth of imitative or symbolic words form a
part, be it small or large, of the Origin of Language, but they are by
no means restricted to any particular place or period, and are indeed
more or less in activity now. Their operation on any two dialects of one
language will be to introduce in each a number of new and independent
words, and words even suspected of having been formed in this direct way
become valueless as proof of genealogical connexion between the
languages in which they are found. The test of such genealogical
connexion must, in fact, be generally narrowed to such words or
grammatical forms as have become so far conventional in sound and sense,
that we cannot suppose two tribes to have arrived at them independently,
and therefore consider that both must have inherited them from a common
source. Thus the introduction of new sound-words tends to make it
practically of less and less consequence to a language what its original
stock of words at starting may have been; and the philologist’s
extension of his knowledge of such direct formations must compel him to
strip off more and more of any language, as being possibly of later
growth, before he can set himself to argue upon such a residuum as may
have come by direct inheritance from times of primæval speech.
In concluding this survey, some general considerations suggest
themselves as to the nature and first beginnings of language. In
studying the means of expression among men in stages of mental culture
far below our own, one of our first needs is to clear our minds of the
kind of superstitious veneration with which articulate speech has so
commonly been treated, as though it were not merely the principal but
the sole means of uttering thought. We must cease to measure the
historical importance of emotional exclamations, of gesture-signs, and
of picture-writing, by their comparative insignificance in modern
civilized life, but must bring ourselves to associate the articulate
words of the dictionary in one group with cries and gestures and
pictures, as being all of them means of manifesting outwardly the inward
workings of the mind. Such an admission, it must be observed, is far
from being a mere detail of scientific classification. It has really a
most important bearing on the problem of the Origin of Language. For as
the reasons are mostly dark to us, why particular words are currently
used to express particular ideas, language has come to be looked upon as
a mystery, and either occult philosophical causes have been called in to
explain its phenomena, or else the endowment of man with the faculties
of thought and utterance has been deemed insufficient, and a special
revelation has been demanded to put into his mouth the vocabulary of a
particular language. In the debate which has been carried on for ages
over this much-vexed problem, the saying in the ‘Kratylos’ comes back to
our minds again and again, where Sokrates describes the etymologists who
release themselves from their difficulties as to the origin of words by
saying that the first words were divinely made, and therefore right,
just as the tragedians, when they are in perplexity, fly to their
machinery and bring in the gods.[298] Now I think that those who soberly
contemplate the operation of cries, groans, laughs, and other emotional
utterances, as to which some considerations have been here brought
forward, will admit that, at least, our present crude understanding of
this kind of expression would lead us to class it among the natural
actions of man’s body and mind. Certainly, no one who understands
anything of the gesture-language or of picture-writing would be
justified in regarding either as due to occult causes, or to any
supernatural interference with the course of man’s intellectual
development. Their cause evidently lies in natural operations of the
human mind, not such as were effective in some long-past condition of
humanity and have since disappeared, but in processes existing amongst
us, which we can understand and even practise for ourselves. When we
study the pictures and gestures with which savages and the deaf-and-dumb
express their minds, we can mostly see at a glance the direct relation
between the outward sign and the inward thought which it makes manifest.
We may see the idea of ‘sleep’ shown in gesture by the head with shut
eyes, leant heavily against the open hand; or the idea of ‘running’ by
the attitude of the runner, with chest forward, mouth half open, elbows
and shoulders well back; or ‘candle’ by the straight forefinger held up,
and as it were blown out; or ‘salt’ by the imitated act of sprinkling it
with thumb and finger. The figures of the child’s picture-book, the
sleeper and the runner, the candle and the salt-cellar, show their
purport by the same sort of evident relation between thought and sign.
We so far understand the nature of these modes of utterance, that we are
ready ourselves to express thought after thought by such means, so that
those who see our signs shall perceive our meaning.