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]]