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]]