‘The bird who bears the name of Parôdars, O holy Zarathustra;
Upon whom evil-speaking men impose the name Kabrkataç.’[[287]]
The crowing of the cock (Malay kâluruk, kukuk) serves to mark a point of time, cockcrow. Other words originally derived from such imitation of crowing have passed into other curiously transformed meanings: Old French cocart ‘vain;’ modern French coquet ‘strutting like a cock, coquetting, a coxcomb;’ cocarde ‘a cockade’ (from its likeness to a cock’s comb); one of the best instances is coquelicot, a name given for the same reason to the wild poppy, and even more distinctly in Languedoc, where cacaracá means both the crowing and the flower. The hen in some languages has a name corresponding to that of the cock, as in Kussa kukuduna ‘cock,’ kukukasi ‘hen;’ Ewe koklo-tsu ‘cock,’ koklo-no ‘hen;’ and her cackle (whence she has in Switzerland the name of gugel, güggel) has passed into language as a term for idle gossip and chatter of women, caquet, caqueter, gackern, much as the noise of a very different creature seems to have given rise not only to its name, Italian cicala, but to a group of words represented by cicalar ‘to chirp, chatter, talk sillily.’ The pigeon is a good example of this kind, both for sound and sense. It is Latin pipio, Italian pippione, piccione, pigione, modern Greek πιπίνιον, French pipion (old), pigeon; its derivation is from the young bird’s peep, Latin pipire, Italian pipiare, pigiolare, modern Greek πιπινίζω, to chirp; by an easy metaphor, a pigeon comes to mean ‘a silly young fellow easily caught,’ to pigeon ‘to cheat,’ Italian pipione ‘a silly gull, one that is soon caught and trepanned,’ pippionare ‘to pigeon, to gull one.’ In an entirely different family of languages, Mr. Wedgwood points out a curiously similar process of derivation; Magyar pipegni, pipelni ‘to peep or cheep;’ pipe, pipök ‘a chicken, gosling;’ pipe-ember (chicken-man), ‘a silly young fellow, booby.’[[288]] The derivation of Greek βοῦς, Latin bos, Welsh bu, from the ox’s lowing, or booing as it is called in the north country, has been much debated. With an excessive desire to make Sanskrit answer as a general Indo-European type, Bopp connected Sanskrit go, old German chuo, English cow, with these words, on the unusual and forced assumption of a change from guttural to labial.[[289]] The direct derivation from sound, however, is favoured by other languages, Cochin-Chinese bo, Hottentot bou. The beast may almost answer for himself in the words of that Spanish proverb which remarks that people talk according to their nature: ‘Habló el buey, y dijó bu!’ ‘The ox spoke, and he said boo!’
Among musical instruments with imitative names are the following:—the shee-shee-quoi, the mystic rattle of the Red Indian medicine-man, an imitative word which reappears in the Darien Indian shak-shak, the shook-shook of the Arawaks, the Chinook shugh (whence shugh-opoots, rattletail, i.e., ‘rattlesnake;’)—the drum, called ganga in Haussa, gañgañ in the Yoruba country, gunguma by the Gallas, and having its analogue in the Eastern gong;—the bell, called in Yakama (N. Amer.) kwa-lal-kwa-lal, in Yalof (W. Afr.) walwal, in Russian kolokol. The sound of the horn is imitated in English nurseries as toot-toot, and this is transferred to express the ‘omnibus’ of which the bugle is the signal: with this nursery word is to be classed the Peruvian name for the ‘shell-trumpet,’ pututu, and the Gothic thuthaurn (thut-horn), which is even used in the Gothic Bible for the last trumpet of the day of judgement,—‘In spêdistin thuthaúrna, thuthaúrneith auk jah daúthans ustandand’ (I Cor. xv. 52). How such imitative words, when thoroughly taken up into language, suffer change of pronunciation in which the original sound-meaning is lost, may be seen in the English word tabor, which we might not recognize as a sound-word at all, did we not notice that it is French tabour, a word which in the form tambour obviously belongs to a group of words for drums, extending from the small rattling Arabic tubl to the Indian dundhubi and the tombe, the Moqui drum made of a hollowed log. The same group shows the transfer of such imitative words to objects which are like the instrument, but have nothing to do with its sound; few people who talk of tambour-work, and fewer still who speak of a footstool as a tabouret, associate these words with the sound of a drum, yet the connexion is clear enough. When these two processes go on together, and a sound-word changes its original sound on the one hand, and transfers its meaning to something else on the other, the result may soon leave philological analysis quite helpless, unless by accident historical evidence is forthcoming. Thus with the English word pipe. Putting aside the particular pronunciation which we give the word, and referring it back to its mediæval Latin or French sound in pipa, pipe, we have before us an evident imitative name of a musical instrument, derived from a familiar sound used also to represent the chirping of chickens, Latin pipire, English to peep, as in the translation of Isaiah viii. 19: ‘Seek ... unto wizards that peep, and that mutter.’ The Algonquin Indians appear to have formed from this sound pib (with a grammatical suffix) their name for the pib-e-gwun or native flute. Now just as tuba, tubus, ‘a trumpet’ (itself very likely an imitative word) has given a name for any kind of tube, so the word pipe has been transferred from the musical instrument to which it first belonged, and is used to describe tubes of various sorts, gas-pipes, water-pipes, and pipes in general. There is nothing unusual in these transitions of meaning, which are in fact rather the rule than the exception. The chibouk was originally a herdsman’s pipe or flute in Central Asia. The calumet, popularly ranked with the tomahawk and the mocassin among characteristic Red Indian words, is only the name for a shepherd’s pipe (Latin calamus) in the dialect of Normandy, corresponding with the chalumeau of literary French; for when the early colonists in Canada saw the Indians performing the strange operation of smoking, ‘with a hollow piece of stone or wood like a pipe,’ as Jacques Cartier has it, they merely gave to the native tobacco-pipe the name of the French musical instrument it resembled. Now changes of sound and of sense like this of the English word pipe must have been in continual operation in hundreds of languages where we have no evidence to follow them by, and where we probably may never obtain such evidence. But what little we do know must compel us to do justice to the imitation of sound as a really existing process, capable of furnishing an indefinitely large supply of words for things and actions which have no necessary connexion at all with that sound. Where the traces of the transfer are lost, the result is a stock of words which are the despair of philologists, but are perhaps none the less fitted for the practical use of men who simply want recognized symbols for recognized ideas.
The claim of the Eastern tomtom to have its name from a mere imitation of its sound seems an indisputable one; but when it is noticed in what various languages the beating of a resounding object is expressed by something like tum, tumb, tump, tup, as in Javan tumbuk, Coptic tmno, ‘to pound in a mortar,’ it becomes evident that the admission involves more than at first sight appears. In Malay, timpa, tampa, is ‘to beat out, hammer, forge;’ in the Chinook Jargon tum-tum is ‘the heart,’ and by combining the same sound with the English word ‘water,’ a name is made for ‘waterfall,’ tum-wâta. The Gallas of East Africa declare that a box on the ear seems to them to make a noise like tub, for they call its sound tubdjeda, that is, ‘to say tub.’ In the same language, tuma is ‘to beat,’ whence tumtu, ‘a workman, especially one who beats, a smith.’ With the aid of another imitative word, bufa ‘to blow,’ the Gallas can construct this wholly imitative sentence, tumtun bufa bufti, ‘the smith blows with bellows,’ as an English child might say, ‘the tumtum puffs the puffer.’ This imitative sound seems to have obtained a footing among the Aryan verb-roots, as in Sanskrit tup, tubh ‘to smite,’ while in Greek, tup, tump, has the meaning of ‘to beat, to thump,’ producing for instance τύμπανον, tympanum, ‘a drum or tomtom.’ Again, the verb to crack has become in modern English as thorough a root-word as the language possesses. The mere imitation of the sound of breaking has passed into a verb to break; we speak of a cracked cup or a cracked reputation without a thought of imitation of sound; but we cannot yet use the German krachen or French craquer in this way, for they have not developed in meaning as our word has, but remain in their purely imitative stage. There are two corresponding Sanskrit words for the saw, kra-kara, kra-kacha, that is to say, the ‘kra-maker, kra-crier;’ and it is to be observed that all such terms, which expressly state that they are imitations of sound, are particularly valuable evidence in these enquiries, for whatever doubt there may be as to other words being really derived from imitative sound, there can, of course, be none here. Moreover, there is evidence of the same sound having given rise to imitative words in other families of language, Dahoman kra-kra, ‘a watchman’s rattle;’ Grebo grikâ ‘a saw;’ Aino chacha ‘to saw;’ Malay graji ‘a saw,’ karat ‘to gnash the teeth,’ karot ‘to make a grating noise;’ Coptic khrij ‘to gnash the teeth,’ khrajrej ‘to grate.’ Another form of the imitation is given in the descriptive Galla expression cacakdjeda, i.e., ‘to say cacak,’ ‘to crack, krachen.’ With this sound corresponds a whole family of Peruvian words, of which the root seems to be the guttural cca, coming from far back in the throat; ccallani, ‘to break,’ ccatatani, ‘to gnash the teeth,’ ccacñiy, ‘thunder,’ and the expressive words for ‘a thunder-storm,’ ccaccaccahay, which carries the imitative process so much farther than such European words as thunder-clap, donner-klapf. In Maori, pata is ‘to patter as water dropping, drops of rain.’ The Manchu language describes the noise of fruits falling from the trees as pata pata (so Hindustani bhadbhad); this is like our word pat, and we should say in the same manner that the fruit comes pattering down, while French patatra is a recognized imitation of something falling. Coptic potpt is ‘to fall,’ and the Australian badbadin (or patpatin) is translated into almost literal English as pitpatting. On the strength of such non-Aryan languages, are we to assign an imitative origin to the Sanskrit verb-root pat, ‘to fall,’ and to Greek πίπτω?
Wishing rather to gain a clear survey of the principles of language-making than to plunge into obscure problems, it is not necessary for me to discuss here questions of intricate detail. The point which continually arises is this,—granted that a particular kind of transition from sound to sense is possible in the abstract, may it be safely claimed in a particular case? In looking through the vocabularies of the world, it appears that most languages offer words which, by obvious likeliness or by their correspondence with similar forms elsewhere, may put forward a tolerable claim to be considered imitative. Some languages, as Aztec or Mohawk, offer singularly few examples, while in others they are much more numerous. Take Australian cases: walle, ‘to wail;’ bung-bung-ween, ‘thunder;’ wirriti, ‘to blow, as wind;’ wirrirriti, ‘to storm, rage, as in fight;’ wirri, bwirri, ‘the native throwing club,’ seemingly so called from its whir through the air; kurarriti, ‘to hum, buzz;’ kurrirrurriri, ‘round about, unintelligible,’ &c.; pitata, ‘to knock, pelt, as rain,’ pitapitata, ‘to knock;’ wiiti, ‘to laugh, rejoice’—as in our own ‘Turnament of Tottenham’:—
‘“We te he!” quoth Tyb, and lugh,
“Ye er a dughty man!”’
The so-called Chinook Jargon of British Columbia is a language crowded with imitative words, sometimes adopted from the native Indian languages, sometimes made on the spot by the combined efforts of the white man and the Indian to make one another understand. Samples of its quality are hóh-hoh, ‘to cough,’ kó-ko, ‘to knock,’ kwa-lal-kwa-lal, ‘to gallop,’ muck-a-muck, ‘to eat,’ chak-chak, ‘the bald eagle’ (from its scream), mamook tsish (make tsish), ‘to sharpen on the grindstone.’ It has been remarked by Prof. Max Müller that the peculiar sound made in blowing out a candle is not a favourite in civilized languages, but it seems to be recognized here, for no doubt it is what the compiler of the vocabulary is doing his best to write down when he gives mamook poh (make poh) as the Chinook expression for ‘to blow out or extinguish as a candle.’ This jargon is in great measure of new growth within the last seventy or eighty years, but its imitative words do not differ in nature from those of the more ordinary and old-established languages of the world. Thus among Brazilian tribes there appear Tupi cororóng, cururuc, ‘to snore’ (compare Coptic kherkher, Quichua ccorcuni (ccor)), whence it appears that an imitation of a snore may perhaps serve the Carajás Indians to express ‘to sleep’ as arourou-cré, as well as the related idea of ‘night,’ roou. Again Pimenteira ebaung, ‘to bruise, beat,’ compares with Yoruba gba, ‘to slap,’ gbã (gbang) ‘to sound loudly, to bang,’ and so forth. Among African languages, the Zulu seems particularly rich in imitative words. Thus bibiza, ‘to dribble like children, drivel in speaking’ (compare English bib); babala, ‘the larger bush-antelope’ (from the baa of the female); boba, ‘to babble, chatter, be noisy,’ bobi, ‘a babbler;’ boboni, ‘a throstle’ (cries bo! bo! compare American bobolink); bomboloza, ‘to rumble in the bowels, to have a bowel-complaint;’ bubula, ‘to buzz like bees,’ bubulela, ‘a swarm of bees, a buzzing crowd of people;’ bubuluza, ‘to make a blustering noise, like frothing beer or boiling fat.’ These examples, from among those given under one initial letter in one dictionary of one barbaric language, may give an idea of the amount of the evidence from the languages of the lower races bearing on the present problem.
For the present purpose of giving a brief series of examples of the sort of words in which imitative sound seems fairly traceable, the strongest and most manageable evidence is of course found among such words as directly describe sounds or what produces them, such as cries of and names for animals, the terms for action accompanied by sound, and the materials and objects so acted upon. In further investigation it becomes more and more requisite to isolate the sound-type or root from the modifications and additions to which it has been subjected for grammatical and phonetical adaptation. It will serve to give an idea of the extent and intricacy of this problem, to glance at a group of words in one European language, and notice the etymological network which spreads round the German word klapf, in Grimm’s dictionary, klappen, klippen, klopfen, kläffen, klimpern, klampern, klateren, kloteren, klitteren, klatzen, klacken, and more, to be matched with allied forms in other languages. Setting aside the consideration of grammatical inflexion, it belongs to the present subject to notice that man’s imitative faculty in language is by no means limited to making direct copies of sound and shaping them into words. It seizes upon ready-made terms of whatever origin, alters and adapts them to make their sound fitting to their sense, and pours into the dictionaries a flood of adapted words of which the most difficult to analyse are those which are neither altogether etymological nor altogether imitative, but partly both. How words, while preserving, so to speak, the same skeleton, may be made to follow the variation of sound, of force, of duration, of size, an imitative group more or less connected with the last will show—crick, creak, crack, crash, crush, crunch, craunch, scrunch, scraunch. It does not at all follow that because a word suffers such imitative and symbolic changes it must be, like this, directly imitative in its origin. What, for instance, could sound more imitative than the name of that old-fashioned cannon for throwing grape-shot, the patterero? Yet the etymology of the word appears in the Spanish form pedrero, French perrier; it means simply an instrument for throwing stones (piedra, pierre), and it was only when the Spanish word was adopted in England that the imitative faculty caught and transformed it into an apparent sound-word, resembling the verb to patter. The propensity of language, especially in slang, to make sense of strange words by altering them into something with an appropriate meaning has been often dwelt upon by philologists, but the propensity to alter words into something with an appropriate sound has produced results immensely more important. The effects of symbolic change of sound acting upon verb-roots seem almost boundless. The verb to waddle has a strong imitative appearance, and so in German we can hardly resist the suggestion that imitative sound has to do with the difference between wandern and wandeln; but all these verbs belong to a family represented by Sanskrit vad, to go, Latin vado, and to this root there seems no sufficient ground for assigning an imitative origin, the traces of which it has at any rate lost if it ever had them. Thus, again, to stamp with the foot, which has been claimed as an imitation of sound, seems only a ‘coloured’ word. The root sta, ‘to stand,’ Sanskrit sthâ, forms a causative stap, Sanskrit sthâpay, ‘to make to stand,’ English to stop, and a foot-step is when the foot comes to a stand, a foot-stop. But we have Anglo-Saxon stapan, stæpan, steppan, English to step, varying to express its meaning by sound in to staup, to stamp, to stump, and to stomp, contrasting in their violence or clumsy weight with the foot on the Dorset cottage-sill in Barnes’s poem:—