In describing the natural language of gestures and exclamations, we have as yet only looked at it as used alone where more perfect language is not to be had. It has now to be noticed that fragments of it are found in the midst of ordinary language. A people may speak English, or Chinese, or Choctaw, as their mother-tongue, but nevertheless they will keep up the use of the expressive gestures and interjections and imitations which belong to natural language. Mothers and nurses use these in teaching little children to think and speak. It is needless to print examples of this nursery talk, for unless our readers’ minds have already been struck by it, they are not likely to study philology to much purpose. In the conversation of grown people, the self-expressive or natural sounds become more scanty, yet they are real and unmistakable, as the following examples will serve to show.

As for gestures, many in constant use among our own and other nations must have come down from generation to generation since primitive ages of mankind, as when the orator bows his head, or holds up a threatening hand, or thrusts from him an imaginary intruder, or points to the sky, or counts his friends or enemies on his fingers. Next, as to emotional sounds, a variety of these is actually used in every language. For instances, a few may be cited from among the interjections set down in grammars:

As for imitative words, all languages of mankind, ancient and modern, savage and civilized, contain more or less of them, and any English child can see how the following set of animals and instruments were named by appropriate sound:—

Such words are always springing up afresh in dialect or slang; for instance English pop, meaning ginger-beer; German gaggele, an egg, from the cackle of the hen as she laid it; French “maître fifi,” a scavenger (as it were “master fie-fie”). In the same way many actions are expressed by appropriate sounds. Thus in the Tecuna language of Brazil the verb to sneeze is haitschu, while the Welsh for a sneeze is tis. In the Chinuk jargon, the expressive sound humm means to stink, and the drover’s kish-kish becomes a verb meaning to drive horses or cattle. It is even possible to find a whole sentence made with imitative words, for the Galla of Abyssinia, to express “the smith blows the bellows,” says, tumtun bufa bufti, much as an English child might say “the tumtum puffs the puffer.” Such words being taken direct from nature, it is to be expected that people of quite different language should sometimes hit on nearly the same imitations. Thus the Ibo language of West Africa has the word okoko for the bird we call a cock. The English verbs to pat and to bang seem to come from imitations of sound, much the same being found elsewhere; as when the Japanese say pata-pata to express the sound of flapping or clapping, and the Yoruba negros have the verb gbang, to beat.

Students whose attention is once directed to this class of self-expressive words, will notice them at a glance in each fresh language they master. It takes more careful observation to trace them when the sound has been transferred by the process of metaphor (i.e. carrying over) to some new meaning not close to the original sense, but there are plenty of clear cases to choose illustrations from. In the Chinuk jargon of the West Coast of America, a tavern is called a “heehee-house,” a term which puzzles a foreigner till he understands that among the people who speak this curious dialect the imitative word heehee signifies not only laughter but the amusement which causes it, so that the term in fact means “amusement-house.” It might seem difficult to hit upon an imitative word to denote a courtier, but the Basuto of South Africa do this perfectly; they have a word ntsi-ntsi, which means a fly, being, indeed, an imitation of its buzz, and they simply transfer this word to mean also the flattering parasite who buzzes round the chief like a fly round meat. These instances from uncivilized languages are like those which appear among the most polished nations, as when we English take the imitative verb to puff from its proper sense of blowing, to express the idea of inflated, hollow praise. Now if the pronunciation of such words becomes changed, their origin may be only recognised by old records happening to preserve their first sound. Thus when English woe is traced back to Anglo-Saxon wá, it is found to be an actual groan turned (like German weh) into a substantive expressing sorrow or distress. So an Englishman would hardly guess from the present pronunciation and meaning of the word pipe, what its origin was; yet when he compares it with the Low Latin pipa, French pipe, pronounced more like our word peep, to chirp, and meaning such a reed-pipe as shepherds played on, he then sees how cleverly the very sound of the musical pipe has been made into a word for all kinds of tubes, such as tobacco-pipes and water-pipes. Words like this travel like Indians on the war-path, wiping out their footmarks as they go. For all we know, multitudes of our ordinary words may have thus been made from real sounds, but have now lost beyond recovery the traces of their first expressiveness.

We have not yet come to the end of the intelligible ways in which sound can be made to express sense. When people want to show alteration in the meaning of a word, it is enough to make some change in its pronunciation. It is not difficult to see how, in the Wolof language of West Africa, where dagou means to walk, dâgou signifies to walk proudly; dagana means to ask humbly, but dagâna to demand. In the Mpongwe language the meaning can be actually reversed by changing the pronunciation: as “mi tonda,” I love, but “mi tonda,” I love not. The English reader can manage to do much the same tricks by varying the tones of his own verbs walk, ask, love. This process of expressing difference of sense by difference of sound may be carried much farther. An instructive instance of clear symbolism by sound is to be found in a word coined by the chemist Guyton de Morveau. In his names for chemical compounds he had already the term sulfate (made on a Latin pattern like sulphuratus), but afterwards he wanted a word to denote a sulphur-salt of different proportions, and thereupon, to express the fact that there was an alteration, he changed a vowel and made the term sulfite. He perhaps did not know that he was here resorting to a device found in many rude languages. Thus in Manchu, contrast of sound serves to indicate difference of sex, chacha meaning “male” and cheche “female,” ama “father” and eme “mother.” So distances are often expressed by altering the vowel, as in Malagasy ao means a little way off, eo still nearer, io close at hand. In this way it is easy to make sets of expressive personal pronouns; as in the Tumal language ngi “I,” ngo “thou,” ngu “he.” Another well-known process is reduplication or doubling, which serves a number of different purposes. It shows repetition or strengthening of meaning, as where the Polynesian aka “to laugh,” becomes akaaka “to laugh much,” while loa “long,” becomes lololoa “very long.” Our words haw-haw and bonbon are like these. It is also easy to form plurals by reduplication, as Malay orang “man,” orang-orang “men;” Japanese fito “man,” fito-bito “men.” Among the kinds of reduplication best known to us is that which marks tenses in verbs, like didōmi and tetupha in Greek, momordi in Latin.

These clever but intelligible devices for making the sound follow the sense, show how easily man gets beyond mere imitation. Language is one branch of the great art of sign-making or sign-choosing, and its business is to hit upon some sound as a suitable sign or symbol for each thought. Whenever a sound has been thus chosen there was no doubt a reason for the choice. But it did not follow that each language should choose the same sound. This is well shown by the peculiar class of words belonging to children’s language or baby-language, of which the word baby itself is one. These words are made up all over the world from the few simple syllables which children first utter, chosen almost anyhow to express the nursery ideas of mother, father, nurse, toy, sleep, &c. Thus while we have our way of using papa and mama, the Chilians say papa for “mother,” and the Georgians mama for “father,” while in various languages dada may mean “father,” “cousin,” “nurse;” tata “father,” “son,” “good-bye”! Such children’s words often find their way into the language of grown people, and any slight change makes them look like ordinary words. Thus in English one might hardly suspect pope and abbot of having their origin in baby-words, yet this is evident when they are traced back to Latin papa and Syriac abba, both meaning “father.”