That it is not unfair to ask for fuller evidence of a sound being purely interjectional than its appearance in a single family of languages, may be shown by examining another group of interjections, which are found among the remotest tribes, and thus have really considerable claims to rank among the primary sounds of language. These are the simple sibilants, s! sh! h’sh! used especially to scare birds, and among men to express aversion or call for silence. Catlin describes a party of Sioux Indians, when they came to the portrait of a dead chief, each putting his hand over his mouth with a hush-sh; and when he himself wished to approach the sacred ‘medicine’ in a Mandan lodge, he was called to refrain by the same hush-sh! Among ourselves the sibilant interjection passes into two exactly opposite senses, according as it is meant to put the speaker himself to silence, or to command silence for him to be heard; and thus we find the sibilant used elsewhere, sometimes in the one way and sometimes in the other. Among the wild Veddas of Ceylon, iss! is an exclamation of disapproval, as in ancient or modern Europe; and the verb shârak, to hiss, is used in Hebrew with a like sense, ‘they shall hiss him out of his place.’ But in Japan reverence is expressed by a hiss, commanding silence. Captain Cook remarked that the natives of the New Hebrides expressed their admiration by hissing like geese. Casalis says of the Basutos, ‘Hisses are the most unequivocal marks of applause, and are as much courted in the African parliaments as they are dreaded by our candidates for popular favour.’[[281]] Among other sibilant interjections, are Turkish sûsâ! Ossetic ss! sos! ‘silence!’ Fernandian sia! ‘listen!’ ‘tush!’ Yoruba sió! ‘pshaw!’ Thus it appears that these sounds, far from being special to one linguistic family, are very widespread elements of human speech. Nor is there any question as to their passage into fully-formed words, as in our verb to hush, which has passed into the sense of ‘to quiet, put to sleep’ (adjectively, ‘as hush as death’), metaphorically to hush up a matter, or Greek σίζω ‘to hush, say hush! command silence.’ Even Latin silere and Gothic silan, ‘to be silent,’ may with some plausibility be explained as derived from the interjectional s! of silence.
Sanskrit dictionaries recognize several words which explicitly state their own interjectional derivation; such are hûñkâra (hûm-making), ‘the utterance of the mystic religious exclamation hûm!’ and çiççabda (çiç-sound), ‘a hiss.’ Besides these obvious formations, the interjectional element is present to some greater or less degree in the list of Sanskrit radicals, which represent probably better than those of any other language the verb-roots of the ancient Aryan stock. In ru, ‘to roar, cry, wail’ and in kakh, ‘to laugh,’ we have the simpler kind of interjectional derivation, that which merely describes a sound. As to the more difficult kind, which carry the sense into a new stage, Mr. Wedgwood makes out a strong case for the connexion of interjections of loathing and aversion, such as pooh! fie! &c., with that large group of words which are represented in English by foul and fiend, in Sanskrit by the verbs pûy, ‘to become foul, to stink’ and piy, pîy, ‘to revile, to hate.’[[282]] Further evidence may be here adduced in support of this theory. The languages of the lower races use the sound pu to express an evil smell; the Zulu remarks that ‘the meat says pu’ (inyama iti pu), meaning that it stinks; the Timorese has poöp ‘putrid;’ the Quiché language has puh, poh ‘corruption, pus,’ pohir ‘to turn bad, rot,’ puz ‘rottenness, what stinks;’ the Tupi word for nasty, puxi, may be compared with the Latin putidus, and the Columbia River name for the ‘skunk,’ o-pun-pun, with similar names of stinking animals, Sanskrit pûtikâ ‘civet-cat,’ and French putois ‘pole-cat.’ From the French interjection fi! words have long been formed belonging to the language, if not authenticated by the Academy; in mediæval French ‘maistre fi-fi’ was a recognized term for a scavenger, and fi-fi books are not yet extinct.
There has been as yet, unfortunately, too much separation between what may be called generative philology, which examines into the ultimate origins of words, and historical philology, which traces their transmission and change. It will be a great gain to the science of language to bring these two branches of enquiry into closer union, even as the processes they relate to have been going on together since the earliest days of speech. At present the historical philologists of the school of Grimm and Bopp, whose great work has been the tracing of our Indo-European dialects to an early Aryan form of language, have had much the advantage in fulness of evidence and strictness of treatment. At the same time it is evident that the views of the generative philologists, from De Brosses onward, embody a sound principle, and that much of the evidence collected as to emotional and other directly expressive words, is of the highest value in the argument. But in working out the details of such word-formation, it must be remembered that no department of philology lies more open to Augustine’s caustic remark on the etymologists of his time, that like the interpretation of dreams, the derivation of words is set down by each man according to his own fancy. (Ut somniorum interpretatio ita verborum origo pro cujusque ingenio prædicatur.)
CHAPTER VI.
EMOTIONAL AND IMITATIVE LANGUAGE (continued).
Imitative Words—Human actions named from sound—Animals’ names from cries, &c.—Musical Instruments—Sounds reproduced—Words modified to adapt sound to sense—Reduplication—Graduation of vowels to express distance and difference—Children’s Language—Sound-words as related to Sense-words—Language an original product of the lower Culture.
From the earliest times of language to our own day, it is unlikely that men ever quite ceased to be conscious that some of their words were derived from imitation of the common sounds heard about them. In our own modern English, for instance, results of such imitation are evident; flies buzz, bees hum, snakes hiss, a cracker or a bottle of ginger-beer pops, a cannon or a bittern booms. In the words for animals and for musical instruments in the various languages of the world, the imitation of their cries and tones is often to be plainly heard, as in the names of the hoopoe, the ai-ai sloth, the kaka parrot, the Eastern tomtom, which is a drum, the African ulule, which is a flute, the Siamese khong-bong, which is a wooden harmonicon, and in like manner through a host of other words. But these evident cases are far from representing the whole effects of imitation on the growth of language. They form, indeed, the easy entrance to a philological region, which becomes less penetrable the farther it is explored.
The operations of which we see the results before us in the actual languages of the world seem to have been somewhat as follows. Men have imitated their own emotional utterances or interjections, the cries of animals, the tones of musical instruments, the sounds of shouting, howling, stamping, breaking, tearing, scraping, with others which are all day coming to their ears, and out of these imitations many current words indisputably have their source. But these words, as we find them in use, differ often widely, often beyond all recognition, from the original sounds they sprang from. In the first place, man’s voice can only make a very rude copy of most sounds his ear receives; his possible vowels are very limited in their range compared with natural tones, and his possible consonants still more helpless as a means of imitating natural noises. Moreover, his voice is only allowed to use a part even of this imperfect imitative power, seeing that each language for its own convenience restricts it to a small number of set vowels and consonants, to which the imitative sounds have to conform, thus becoming conventionalized into articulate words with further loss of imitative accuracy. No class of words have a more perfect imitative origin than those which simply profess to be vocal imitations of sound. How ordinary alphabets to some extent succeed and to some extent fail in writing down these sounds may be judged from a few examples. Thus, the Australian imitation of a spear or bullet striking is given as toop; to the Zulu, when a calabash is beaten, it says boo; the Karens hear the flitting ghosts of the dead call in the wailing voice of the wind, re, re, ro, ro; the old traveller, Pietro della Valle, tells how the Shah of Persia sneered at Timur and his Tartars, with their arrows that went ter ter; certain Buddhist heretics maintained that water is alive, because when it boils it says chichitá, chitichita, a symptom of vitality which occasioned much theological controversy as to drinking cold and warm water. Lastly, sound-words taken up into the general inventory of a language have to follow its organic changes, and in the course of phonetic transition, combination, decay, and mutilation, to lose ever more and more their original shape. To take a single example, the French huer ‘to shout’ (Welsh hwa) may be a perfect imitative verb; yet when it passes into modern English hue and cry, our changed pronunciation of the vowel destroys all imitation of the call. Now to the language-makers all this was of little account. They merely wanted recognized words to express recognized thought, and no doubt arrived by repeated trials at systems which were found practically to answer this purpose. But to the modern philologist, who is attempting to work out the converse of the problem, and to follow backward the course of words to original imitative sound, the difficulty is most embarrassing. It is not only that thousands of words really derived from such imitation may now by successive change have lost all safe traces of their history; such mere deficiency of knowledge is only a minor evil. What is far worse is that the way is thrown open to an unlimited number of false solutions, which yet look on the face of them fully as like truth as others which we know historically to be true. One thing is clear, that it is of no use to resort to violent means, to rush in among the words of language, explaining them away right and left as derived each from some remote application of an imitative noise. The advocate of the Imitative Theory who attempts this, trusting in his own powers of discernment, has indeed taken in hand a perilous task, for, in fact, of all judges of the question at issue, he has nourished and trained himself up to become the very worst. His imagination is ever suggesting to him what his judgment would like to find true; like a witness answering the questions of the counsel on his own side, he answers in good faith, but with what bias we all know. It was thus with De Brosses, to whom this department of philology owes so much. It is nothing to say that he had a keen ear for the voice of Nature; she must have positively talked to him in alphabetic language, for he could hear the sound of hollowness in the sk of σκάπτω ‘to dig,’ of hardness in the cal of callosity, the noise of insertion of a body between two others in the tr of trans, intra. In enquiries so liable to misleading fancy, no pains should be spared in securing impartial testimony, and it fortunately happens that there are available sources of such evidence, which, when thoroughly worked, will give to the theory of imitative words as near an approach to accuracy as has been attained to in any other wide philological problem. By comparing a number of languages, widely apart in their general system and materials, and whose agreement as to the words in question can only be accounted for by similar formation of words from similar suggestion of sound, we obtain groups of words whose imitative character is indisputable. The groups here considered consist in general of imitative words of the simpler kind, those directly connected with the special sound they are taken from, but their examination to some extent admits of words being brought in, where the connexion of the idea expressed with the sound imitated is more remote. This, lastly, opens the far wider and more difficult problem, how far imitation of sounds is the primary cause of the great mass of words in the vocabularies of the world, between whose sound and sense no direct connexion appears.
Words which express human actions accompanied with sound form a very large and intelligible class. In remote and most different languages, we find such forms as pu, puf, bu, buf, fu, fuf, in use with the meaning of puffing, fuffing; or blowing; Malay puput; Tongan buhi; Maori pupui; Australian bobun, bwa-bun; Galla bufa, afufa; Zulu futa, punga, pupuza (fu, pu, used as expressive particles); Quiché puba; Quichua puhuni; Tupi ypeû; Finnish puhkia; Hebrew puach; Danish puste; Lithuanian púciu; and in numbers of other languages;[[283]] here, grammatical adjuncts apart, the significant force lies in the imitative syllable. Savages have named the European musket when they saw it, by the sound pu, describing not the report, but the puff of smoke issuing from the muzzle. The Society Islanders supposed at first that the white men blew through the barrel of the gun, and they called it accordingly pupuhi, from the verb puhi to blow, while the New Zealanders more simply called it a pu. So the Amaxosa of South Africa call it umpu, from the imitative sound pu! The Chinook Jargon of North-West America uses the phrase mamook poo (make poo) for a verb ‘to shoot,’ and a six-chambered revolver is called tohum poo, i.e., a ‘six-poo.’ When a European uses the word puff to denote the discharge of a gun, he is merely referring to the smoke blown out, as he would speak of a puff of wind, or even a powder-puff or a puff-ball; and when a pistol is called in colloquial German a puffer, the meaning of the word matches that used for it in French Argot, a ‘soufflant.’ It has often been supposed that the puff imitates the actual sound, the bang of the gun, and this has been brought forward to show by what extremely different words one and the same sound may be imitated, but this is a mistake.[[284]] These derivations of the name of the gun from the notion of blowing correspond with those which give names to the comparatively noiseless blow-tube of the bird-hunter, called by the Indians of Yucatan a pub, in South America by the Chiquitos a pucuna, by the Cocamas a puna. Looking into vocabularies of languages which have such verbs ‘to blow,’ it is usual to find with them other words apparently related to them, and expressing more or less distant ideas. Thus Australian poo-yu, puyu ‘smoke;’ Quichua puhucuni ‘to light a fire,’ punquini ‘to swell,’ puyu, puhuyu ‘a cloud;’ Maori puku ‘to pant,’ puka ‘to swell;’ Tupi púpú, pupúre ‘to boil;’ Galla bube ‘wind,’ bubiza ‘to cool by blowing;’ Kanuri (root fu) fungin ‘to blow, swell,’ furúdu ‘a stuffed pad or bolster,’ &c., bubute ‘bellows’ (bubute fungin ‘I blow the bellows’); Zulu (dropping the prefixes) puku, pukupu ‘frothing, foam,’ whence pukupuku ‘an empty frothy fellow,’ pupuma ‘to bubble, boil,’ fu ‘a cloud,’ fumfu ‘blown about like high grass in the wind,’ whence fumfuta ‘to be confused, thrown into disorder,’ futo ‘bellows,’ fuba ‘the breast, chest,’ then figuratively ‘bosom, conscience.’
The group of words belonging to the closed lips, of which mum, mumming, mumble are among the many forms belonging to European languages,[[285]] are worked out in like manner among the lower races—Vei mu mu ‘dumb’; Mpongwe imamu ‘dumb’; Zulu momata (from moma, ‘a motion with the mouth as in mumbling’) ‘to move the mouth or lips,’ mumata ‘to close the lips as with a mouthful of water,’ mumuta, mumuza ‘to eat mouthfuls of corn, &c., with the lips shut;’ Tahitian mamu ‘to be silent,’ omumu ‘to murmur;’ Fijian, nomo, nomo-nomo ‘to be silent;’ Chilian, ñomn ‘to be silent;’ Quiché, mem ‘mute,’ whence memer ‘to become mute;’ Quichua, amu ‘dumb, silent,’ amullini ‘to have something in the mouth,’ amul-layacuni simicta ‘to mutter, to grumble.’ The group represented by Sanskrit t’hût’hû ‘the sound of spitting,’ Persian thu kerdan (make thu) ‘to spit,’ Greek πτύω, may be compared with Chinook mamook toh, tooh, (make toh, tooh); Chilian tuvcùtun (make tuv); Tahitian tutua; Galla twu; Yoruba tu. Among the Sanskrit verb-roots, none carries its imitative nature more plainly than kshu ‘to sneeze;’ the following analogous forms are from South America:—Chilian, echiun; Quichua, achhini; and from various languages of Brazilian tribes, techa-ai, haitschu, atchian, natschun, aritischune, &c. Another imitative verb is well shown in the Negro-English dialect of Surinam, njam ‘to eat’ (pron. nyam), njam-njam ‘food’ (‘en hem njanjam ben de sprinkhan nanga boesi-honi’—‘and his meat was locusts and wild honey’). In Australia the imitative verb ‘to eat’ reappears as g’nam-ang. In Africa the Susu language has nimnim, ‘to taste,’ and a similar formation is observed in the Zulu nambita ‘to smack the lips after eating or tasting, and thence to be tasteful, to be pleasant to the mind.’ This is an excellent instance of the transition of mere imitative sound to the expression of mental emotion, and it corresponds with the imitative way in which the Yakama language, in speaking of little children or pet animals, expresses the verb ‘to love’ as nem-no-sha (to make n’m-n’). In more civilized countries these forms are mostly confined to baby-language. The Chinese child’s word for eating is nam, in English nurseries nim is noticed as answering the same purpose, and the Swedish dictionary even recognizes namnam ‘a tid-bit.’
As for imitative names of animals derived from their cries or noises, they are to be met with in every language from the Australian twonk ‘frog,’ the Yakama rol-rol ‘lark,’ to the Coptic eeiō ‘ass,’ the Chinese maou ‘cat,’ and the English cuckoo and peewit. Their general principle of formation being acknowledged, their further philological interest turns mostly on cases where corresponding words have thus been formed independently in distant regions, and those where the imitative name of the creature, or its habitual sound, passes to express some new idea suggested by its character. The Sanskrit name of the kâka crow reappears in the name of a similar bird in British Columbia, the káh-káh; a fly is called by the natives of Australia a bumberoo, like Sanskrit bambharâli ‘fly,’ Greek βομ-βύλιος, and our bumble-bee. Analogous to the name of the tse-tse fly, the terror of African travellers, is ntsintsi, the word for ‘fly’ among the Basutos, which also, by a simple metaphor, serves to express the idea of ‘a parasite.’ Mr. H. W. Bates’s description seems to settle the dispute among naturalists, whether the toucan had its name from its cry or not. He speaks of its loud, shrill, yelping cries having ‘a vague resemblance to the syllables tocáno, tocáno, and hence the Indian name of this genus of birds.’ Granting this, we can trace this sound-word into a very new meaning; for it appears that the bird’s monstrous bill has suggested a name for a certain large-nosed tribe of Indians, who are accordingly called Tucanos.[[286]] The cock, gallo quiquiriqui, as the Spanish nursery-language calls him, has a long list of names from various languages which in various ways imitate his crowing; in Yoruba he is called koklo, in Ibo okoko, akoka, in Zulu kuku, in Finnish kukko, in Sanskrit kukkuta, and so on. He is mentioned in the Zend-Avesta in a very curious way, by a name which elaborately imitates his cry, but which the ancient Persians seem to have held disrespectful to their holy bird, who rouses men from sleep to good thought, word, and work:—