second, they are involuntary interjections. The first theory was very
popular among the philosophers of the eighteenth century, and, as it is
still held by many distinguished scholars and philosophers, we must
examine it more carefully. It is supposed then that man, being as yet
mute, heard the voices of birds and dogs and cows, the thunder of the
clouds, the roaring of the sea, the rustling of the forest, the murmurs of
the brook, and the whisper of the breeze. He tried to imitate these
sounds, and finding his mimicking cries useful as signs of the objects
from which they proceeded, he followed up the idea and elaborated
language. This view was most ably defended by Herder.(328) “Man,” he says,
“shows conscious reflection when his soul acts so freely that it may
separate, in the ocean of sensations which rush into it through the
senses, one single wave, arrest it, regard it, being conscious all the
time of regarding this one single wave. Man proves his conscious
reflection when, out of the dream of images that float past his senses, he
can gather himself up and wake for a moment, dwelling intently on one
image, fixing it with a bright and tranquil glance, and discovering for
himself those signs by which he knows that _this_ is _this_ image and no
other. Man proves his conscious reflection when he not only perceives
vividly and distinctly all the features of an object, but is able to
separate and recognize one or more of them as its distinguishing
features.” For instance, “Man sees a lamb. He does not see it like the
ravenous wolf. He is not disturbed by any uncontrollable instinct. He
wants to know it, but he is neither drawn towards it nor repelled from it
by his senses. The lamb stands before him, as represented by his senses,
white, soft, woolly. The conscious and reflecting soul of man looks for a
distinguishing mark;—the lamb bleats!—the mark is found. The bleating
which made the strongest impression, which stood apart from all other
impressions of sight or touch, remains in the soul. The lamb
returns—white, soft, woolly. The soul sees, touches, reflects, looks for a
mark. The lamb bleats, and now the soul has recognized it. ‘Ah, thou art
the bleating animal,’ the soul says within herself; and the sound of
bleating, perceived as the distinguishing mark of the lamb, becomes the
name of the lamb. It was the comprehended mark, the word. And what is the
whole of our language but a collection of such words?”
Our answer is, that though there are names in every language formed by
mere imitation of sound, yet these constitute a very small proportion of
our dictionary. They are the playthings, not the tools, of language, and
any attempt to reduce the most common and necessary words to imitative
roots ends in complete failure. Herder himself, after having most
strenuously defended this theory of Onomatopoieia, as it is called, and
having gained a prize which the Berlin Academy had offered for the best
essay on the origin of language, renounced it openly towards the latter
years of his life, and threw himself in despair into the arms of those who
looked upon languages as miraculously revealed. We cannot deny the
possibility that _a_ language might have been formed on the principle of
imitation; all we say is, that as yet no language has been discovered that
was so formed. An Englishman in China,(329) seeing a dish placed before
him about which he felt suspicious, and wishing to know whether it was a
duck, said, with an interrogative accent,
_Quack quack?_
He received the clear and straightforward answer,
_Bow-wow!_
This, no doubt, was as good as the most eloquent conversation on the same
subject between an Englishman and a French waiter. But I doubt whether it
deserves the name of language. We do not speak of a _bow-wow_, but of a
dog. We speak of a cow, not of a _moo_. Of a lamb, not of a _baa_. It is
the same in more ancient languages, such as Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit. If
this principle of Onomatopoieia is applicable anywhere, it would be in the
formation of the names of animals. Yet we listen in vain for any
similarity between goose and cackling, hen and clucking, duck and
quacking, sparrow and chirping, dove and cooing, hog and grunting, cat and
mewing, between dog and barking, yelping, snarling, or growling.
There are of course some names, such as _cuckoo_, which are clearly formed
by an imitation of sound. But words of this kind are, like artificial
flowers, without a root. They are sterile, and are unfit to express
anything beyond the one object which they imitate. If you remember the
variety of derivatives that could be formed from the root _spac_, to see,
you will at once perceive the difference between the fabrication of such a
word as _cuckoo_, and the true natural growth of words.
Let us compare two words such as _cuckoo_ and _raven_. _Cuckoo_ in English
is clearly a mere imitation of the cry of that bird, even more so than the
corresponding terms in Greek, Sanskrit, and Latin. In these languages the
imitative element has received the support of a derivative suffix; we have
_kokila_ in Sanskrit, and _kokkyx_ in Greek, _cuculus_ in Latin.(330)
_Cuckoo_ is, in fact, a modern word, which has taken the place of the
Anglo-Saxon _geac_, the German _Gauch_, and, being purely onomatopoëtic,
it is of course not liable to the changes of Grimm’s Law. As the word
_cuckoo_ predicates nothing but the sound of a particular bird, it could
never be applied for expressing any general quality in which other animals
might share; and the only derivatives to which it might give rise are
words expressive of a metaphorical likeness with the bird. The same
applies to _cock_, the Sanskrit _kukkuṭa_. Here, too, Grimm’s Law does not
apply, for both words were intended to convey merely the cackling sound of
the bird; and, as this intention continued to be felt, phonetic change was
less likely to set in. The Sanskrit _kukkuṭa_ is not derived from any
root, it simply repeats the cry of the bird, and the only derivatives to
which it gives rise are metaphorical expressions, such as the French
_coquet_, originally strutting about like a cock; _coquetterie_; _cocart_,
conceited; _cocarde_, a cockade; _coquelicot_, originally a cock’s comb,
then the wild red poppy, likewise so called from its similarity with a
cock’s comb.
Let us now examine the word _raven_. It might seem at first, as if this
also was merely onomatopoëtic. Some people imagine they perceive a kind of
similarity between the word _raven_ and the cry of that bird. This seems
still more so if we compare the Anglo-Saxon _hrafn_, the German _Rabe_,
Old High-German _hraban_. The Sanskrit _kârava_ also, the Latin _corvus_,
and the Greek _korōnē_, all are supposed to show some similarity with the
unmelodious sound of _Maître Corbeau_. But as soon as we analyze the word
we find that it is of a different structure from _cuckoo_ or _cock_. It is
derived from a root which has a general predicative power. The root _ru_
or _kru_ is not a mere imitation of the cry of the raven; it embraces many
cries, from the harshest to the softest, and it might have been applied to
the nightingale as well as to the raven. In Sanskrit this root exists as
_ru_, a verb which is applied to the murmuring sound of rivers as well as
to the barking of dogs and the mooing of cows. From it are derived
numerous words in Sanskrit. In Latin we find _raucus_, hoarse; _rumor_, a
whisper; in German _rûnen_, to speak low, and _runa_, mystery. The Latin
_lamentum_ stands for an original _ravimentum_ or _cravimentum_. This root
_ru_ has several secondary forms, such as the Sanskrit _rud_, to cry; the
Latin _rug_ in _rugire_, to howl; the Greek _kru_ or _klu_, in _klaiō_,
_klausomai_; the Sanskrit _kruś_, to shout; the Gothic _hrukjan_, to crow,
and _hropjan_, to cry; the German _rufen_. Even the common Aryan word for
hearing is closely allied to this root. It is _śru_ in Sanskrit, _klyō_ in
Greek, _cluo_ in Latin; and before it took the recognized meaning of
hearing, it meant to sound, to ring. When a noise was to be heard in a far
distance, the man who first perceived it might well have said I ring, for
his ears were sounding and ringing; and the same verb, if once used as a
transitive, expressed exactly what we mean by I hear a noise.
You will have perceived thus that the process which led to the formation
of the word _kârava_ in Sanskrit is quite distinct from that which
produced _cuckoo_. _Kârava_(331) means a shouter, a caller, a crier. It
might have been applied to many birds; but it became the traditional and
recognized name for the crow. Cuckoo could never mean anything but the
cuckoo, and while a word like _raven_ has ever so many relations from a
_rumor_ down to _a row_, cuckoo stands by itself like a stick in a living
hedge.
It is curious to observe how apt we are to deceive ourselves when we once
adopt this system of Onomatopoieia. Who does not imagine that he hears in
the word “thunder” an imitation of the rolling and rumbling noise which
the old Germans ascribed to their God Thor playing at nine-pins? Yet
_thunder_ is clearly the same word as the Latin _tonitru_. The root is
_tan_, to stretch. From this root _tan_, we have in Greek _tonos_, our
tone, _tone_ being produced by the stretching and vibrating of cords. In
Sanskrit the sound thunder is expressed by the same root _tan_, but in the
derivatives _tanyu_, _tanyatu_, and _tanayitnu_, thundering, we perceive
no trace of the rumbling noise which we imagined we perceived in the Latin
_tonitru_ and the English _thunder_. The very same root _tan_, to stretch,
yields some derivatives which are anything but rough and noisy. The
English _tender_, the French _tendre_, the Latin _tener_, are derived from
it. Like _tenuis_, the Sanskrit _tanu_, the English _thin_, _tener_ meant
originally what was extended over a larger surface, then _thin_, then
_delicate_. The relationship betwixt _tender_, _thin_, and _thunder_ would
be hard to establish if the original conception of thunder had really been
its rumbling noise.
Who does not imagine that he hears something sweet in the French _sucre_,
_sucré_? Yet sugar came from India, and it is there called _śarkhara_,
which is anything but sweet sounding. This _śarkhara_ is the same word as
_sugar_; it was called in Latin _saccharum_, and we still speak of
_saccharine_ juice, which is sugar juice.
In _squirrel_ again some people imagine they hear something of the
rustling and whirling of the little animal. But we have only to trace the
name back to Greek, and there we find that _skiouros_ is composed of two
distinct words, the one meaning shade, the other tail; the animal being
called shade-tail by the Greeks.
Thus the word _cat_, the German _katze_, is supposed to be an imitation of
the sound made by a cat spitting. But if the spitting were expressed by
the sibilant, that sibilant does not exist in the Latin _catus_, nor in
_cat_, or _kitten_, nor in the German _kater_.(332) The Sanskrit
_mârjâra_, cat, might seem to imitate the purring of the cat; but it is
derived from the root _mṛij_, to clean, _mârjâra_, meaning the animal that
always cleans itself.
Many more instances might be given to show how easily we are deceived by
the constant connection of certain sounds and certain meanings in the
words of our own language, and how readily we imagine that there is
something in the sound to tell us the meaning of the words. “The sound
must seem an echo to the sense.”
Most of these Onomatopoieias vanish as soon as we trace our own names back
to Anglo-Saxon and Gothic, or compare them with their cognates in Greek,
Latin, or Sanskrit. The number of names which are really formed by an
imitation of sound dwindle down to a very small quotum if cross-examined
by the comparative philologist, and we are left in the end with the
conviction that though _a_ language might have been made out of the
roaring, fizzing, hissing, gobbling, twittering, cracking, banging,
slamming, and rattling sounds of nature, the tongues with which _we_ are
acquainted point to a different origin.(333)
And so we find many philosophers, and among them Condillac, protesting
against a theory which would place man even below the animal. Why should
man be supposed, they say, to have taken a lesson from birds and beasts?
Does he not utter cries, and sobs, and shouts himself, according as he is
affected by fear, pain, or joy? These cries or interjections were
represented as the natural and real beginnings of human speech. Everything
else was supposed to have been elaborated after their model. This is what
I call the Interjectional, or Pooh-pooh, Theory.
Our answer to this theory is the same as to the former. There are no doubt
in every language interjections, and some of them may become traditional,
and enter into the composition of words. But these interjections are only
the outskirts of real language. Language begins where interjections end.
There is as much difference between a real word, such as “to laugh,” and
the interjection ha, ha! between “I suffer,” and oh! as there is between
the involuntary act and noise of sneezing, and the verb “to sneeze.” We
sneeze, and cough, and scream, and laugh in the same manner as animals,
but if Epicurus tells us that we speak in the same manner as dogs bark,
moved by nature,(334) our own experience will tell us that this is not the
case.
An excellent answer to the interjectional theory has been given by Horne
Tooke.
“The dominion of speech,” he says,(335) “is erected upon the downfall of
interjections. Without the artful contrivances of language, mankind would
have had nothing but interjections with which to communicate, orally, any
of their feelings. The neighing of a horse, the lowing of a cow, the
barking of a dog, the purring of a cat, sneezing, coughing, groaning,
shrieking, and every other involuntary convulsion with oral sound, have
almost as good a title to be called parts of speech, as interjections
have. Voluntary interjections are only employed where the suddenness and
vehemence of some affection or passion returns men to their natural state;
and makes them for a moment forget the use of speech; or when, from some
circumstance, the shortness of time will not permit them to exercise it.”
As in the case of Onomatopoieia, it cannot be denied that with
interjections, too, some kind of language might have been formed; but not
a language like that which we find in numerous varieties among all the
races of men. One short interjection may be more powerful, more to the
point, more eloquent than a long speech. In fact, interjections, together
with gestures, the movements of the muscles of the mouth, and the eye,
would be quite sufficient for all purposes which language answers with the
majority of mankind. Lucian, in his treatise on dancing, mentions a king
whose dominions bordered on the Euxine. He happened to be at Rome in the
reign of Nero, and, having seen a pantomime perform, begged him of the
emperor as a present, in order that he might employ him as an interpreter
among the nations in his neighborhood with whom he could hold no
intercourse on account of the diversity of language. A pantomime meant a
person who could mimic everything, and there is hardly anything which
cannot be thus expressed. We, having language at our command, have
neglected the art of speaking without words; but in the south of Europe
that art is still preserved. If it be true that one look may speak
volumes, it is clear that we might save ourselves much of the trouble
entailed by the use of discursive speech. Yet we must not forget that
_hum!_ _ugh!_ _tut!_ _pooh!_ are as little to be called words as the
expressive gestures which usually accompany these exclamations.
As to the attempts at deriving some of our words etymologically from mere
interjections, they are apt to fail from the same kind of misconception
which leads us to imagine that there is something expressive in the sounds
of words. Thus it is said “that the idea of disgust takes its rise in the
senses of smell and taste, in the first instance probably in smell alone;
that in defending ourselves from a bad smell we are instinctively impelled
to screw up the nose, and to expire strongly through the compressed and
protruded lips, giving rise to a sound represented by the interjections
faugh! foh! fie! From this interjection it is proposed to derive, not only
such words as _foul_ and _filth_, but, by transferring it from natural to
moral aversion, the English _fiend_, the German _Feind_.” If this were
true, we should suppose that the expression of contempt was chiefly
conveyed by the aspirate f, by the strong emission of the breathing with
half-opened lips. But _fiend_ is a participle from a root _fian_, to hate;
in Gothic _fijan_; and as a Gothic aspirate always corresponds to a tenuis
in Sanskrit, the same root in Sanskrit would at once lose its expressive
power. It exists in fact in Sanskrit as _pîy_, to hate, to destroy; just
as _friend_ is derived from a root which in Sanskrit is _prî_, to
delight.(336)
There is one more remark which I have to make about the Interjectional and
the Onomatopoëtic theories, namely this: If the constituent elements of
human speech were either mere cries, or the mimicking of the cries of
nature, it would be difficult to understand why brutes should be without
language. There is not only the parrot, but the mocking-bird and others,
which can imitate most successfully both articulate and inarticulate
sounds; and there is hardly an animal without the faculty of uttering
interjections, such as huff, hiss, baa, &c. It is clear also that if what
puts a perfect distinction betwixt man and brutes is the having of general
ideas, language which arises from interjections and from the imitation of
the cries of animals could not claim to be the outward sign of that
distinctive faculty of man. All words, in the beginning at least (and this
is the only point which interests us), would have been the signs of
individual impressions and individual perceptions, and would only
gradually have been adapted to the expression of general ideas.
The theory which is suggested to us by an analysis of language carried out
according to the principles of comparative philology is the very opposite.
We arrive in the end at roots, and every one of these expresses a general,
not an individual, idea. Every name, if we analyze it, contains a
predicate by which the object to which the name applies was known.
There is an old controversy among philosophers, whether language
originated in general appellations, or in proper names.(337) It is the
question of the _primum cognitum_, and its consideration will help us
perhaps in discovering the true nature of the root, or the _primum
appellatum_.
Some philosophers, among whom I may mention Locke, Condillac, Adam Smith,
Dr. Brown, and with some qualification Dugald Stewart, maintain that all
terms, as at first employed, are expressive of individual objects. I quote
from Adam Smith. “The assignation,” he says, “of particular names to
denote particular objects, that is, the institution of nouns substantive,
would probably be one of the first steps towards the formation of
language. Two savages who had never been taught to speak, but had been
bred up remote from the societies of men, would naturally begin to form
that language by which they would endeavor to make their mutual wants
intelligible to each other by uttering certain sounds whenever they meant
to denote certain objects. Those objects only which were most familiar to
them, and which they had most frequent occasion to mention, would have
particular names assigned to them. The particular cave whose covering
sheltered them from the weather, the particular tree whose fruit relieved
their hunger, the particular fountain whose water allayed their thirst,
would first be denominated by the words _cave_, _tree_, _fountain_, or by
whatever other appellations they might think proper, in that primitive
jargon, to mark them. Afterwards, when the more enlarged experience of
these savages had led them to observe, and their necessary occasions
obliged them to make mention of, other caves, and other trees, and other
fountains, they would naturally bestow upon each of those new objects the
same name by which they had been accustomed to express the similar object
they were first acquainted with. The new objects had none of them any name
of its own, but each of them exactly resembled another object which had
such an appellation. It was impossible that those savages could behold the
new objects without recollecting the old ones; and the name of the old
ones, to which the new bore so close a resemblance. When they had
occasion, therefore, to mention or to point out to each other any of the
new objects, they would naturally utter the name of the correspondent old
one, of which the idea could not fail, at that instant, to present itself
to their memory in the strongest and liveliest manner. And thus those
words, which were originally the proper names of individuals, became the
common name of a multitude. A child that is just learning to speak calls
every person who comes to the house its papa or its mamma; and thus
bestows upon the whole species those names which it had been taught to
apply to two individuals. I have known a clown who did not know the proper
name of the river which ran by his own door. It was _the river_, he said,
and he never heard any other name for it. His experience, it seems, had
not led him to observe any other river. The general word _river_ therefore
was, it is evident, in his acceptance of it, a proper name signifying an
individual object. If this person had been carried to another river, would
he not readily have called it _a river_? Could we suppose any person
living on the banks of the Thames so ignorant as not to know the general
word _river_, but to be acquainted only with the particular word _Thames_,
if he were brought to any other river, would he not readily call it a
_Thames_? This, in reality, is no more than what they who are well
acquainted with the general word are very apt to do. An Englishman,
describing any great river which he may have seen in some foreign country,
naturally says that it is another Thames.... It is this application of the
name of an individual to a great multitude of objects, whose resemblance
naturally recalls the idea of that individual, and of the name which
expresses it, that seems originally to have given occasion to the
formation of those classes and assortments which, in the schools, are
called _genera_ and _species_.”
This extract from Adam Smith will give a clear idea of one view of the
formation of thought and language. I shall now read another extract,
representing the diametrically opposite view. It is taken from
Leibniz,(338) who maintains that general terms are necessary for the
essential constitution of languages. He likewise appeals to children.
“Children,” he says, “and those who know but little of the language which
they attempt to speak, or little of the subject on which they would employ
it, make use of general terms, as _thing_, _plant_, _animal_, instead of
using proper names, of which they are destitute. And it is certain that
all proper or individual names have been originally appellative or
general.” And again: “Thus I would make bold to affirm that almost all
words have been originally general terms, because it would happen very
rarely that man would invent a name, expressly and without a reason, to
denote this or that individual. We may, therefore, assert that the names
of individual things were names of species, which were given _par
excellence_, or otherwise, to some individual; as the name _Great Head_ to
him of the whole town who had the largest, or who was the man of the most
consideration of the great heads known.”