Of vowels and consonants capable of being employed in language, man is able to pronounce and distinguish an enormous variety. But this great stock of possible sounds is nowhere brought into use altogether. Each language or dialect of the world is found in practice to select a limited series of definite vowels and consonants, keeping with tolerable exactness to each, and thus choosing what we may call its phonetic alphabet. Neglecting such minor differences as occur in the speech of individuals or small communities, each dialect of the world may be said to have its own phonetic system, and these phonetic systems vary widely. Our vowels, for instance, differ much from those of French and Dutch. French knows nothing of either of the sounds which we write as th in thin and that, while the Castilian lisped c, the so-called ceceo, is a third consonant which we must again make shift to write as th, though it is quite distinct in sound from both our own. It is quite a usual thing for us to find foreign languages wanting letters even near in sound to some of ours, while possessing others unfamiliar to ourselves. Among such cases are the Chinese difficulty in pronouncing r, and the want of s and f in Australian dialects. When foreigners tried to teach the Mohawks, who have no labials in their language, to pronounce words with p and b in them, they protested that it was too ridiculous to expect people to shut their mouths to speak; and the Portuguese discoverers of Brazil, remarking that the natives had neither f, l, nor r in their language, neatly described them as a people with neither fé, ley, nor rey, neither faith, law, nor king. It may happen, too, that sounds only used by some nations as interjectional noises, unwritten and unwriteable, shall be turned to account by others in their articulate language. Something of this kind occurs with the noises called ‘clicks.’ Such sounds are familiar to us as interjections; thus the lateral click made in the cheek (and usually in the left cheek) is continually used in driving horses, while varieties of the dental and palatal click made with the tongue against the teeth and the roof of the mouth, are common in the nursery as expressions of surprise, reproof, or satisfaction. Thus, too, the natives of Tierra del Fuego express ‘no’ by a peculiar cluck, as do also the Turks, who accompany it with the gesture of throwing back the head; and it appears from the accounts of travellers that the clicks of surprise and admiration among the natives of Australia are much like those we hear at home. But though here these clicking noises are only used interjectionally, it is well known that South African races have taken such sounds up into their articulate speech and have made, as we may say, letters of them. The very name of Hottentots, applied to the Namaquas and other kindred tribes, appears to be not a native name (as Peter Kolb thought) but a rude imitative word coined by the Dutch to express the clicking ‘hot en tot,’ and the term Hottentotism has been thence adopted as a medical description of one of the varieties of stammering. North-West America is another district of the world distinguished for the production of strange clucking, gurgling, and grunting letters, difficult or impossible to European voices. Moreover, there are many sounds capable of being used in articulate speech, varieties of chirping, whistling, blowing, and sucking noises, of which some are familiar to our own use as calls to animals, or interjectional noises of contempt or surprise, but which no tribe is known to have brought into their alphabet. With all the vast phonetic variety of known languages, the limits of possible utterance are far from being reached.
Up to a certain point we can understand the reasons which have guided the various tribes of mankind in the selection of their various alphabets; ease of utterance to the speaker, combined with distinctness of effect to the hearer, have been undoubtedly among the principal of the selecting causes. We may fairly connect with the close uniformity of men’s organs of speech all over the world, the general similarity which prevails in the phonetic systems of the most different languages, and which gives us the power of roughly writing down so large a proportion of any one language by means of an alphabet intended for any other. But while we thus account by physical similarity for the existence of a kind of natural alphabet common to mankind, we must look to other causes to determine the selection of sounds used in different languages, and to account for those remarkable courses of change which go on in languages of a common stock, producing in Europe such variations of one original word as pater, father, vater, or in the islands of Polynesia offering us the numeral 5 under the strangely-varied forms of lima, rima, dima, nima, and hima. Changes of this sort have acted so widely and regularly, that since the enunciation of Grimm’s law their study has become a main part of philology. Though their causes are as yet so obscure, we may at least argue that such wide and definite operations cannot be due to chance or arbitrary fancy, but must be the result of laws as wide and definite as themselves.
Let us now suppose a book to be written with a tolerably correct 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]]