‘Where love do seek the maïden’s evenèn vloor,
Wi’ stip-step light, an tip-tap slight
Ageän the door.’
By expanding, modifying, or, so to speak, colouring, sound is able to produce effects closely like those of gesture-language, expressing length or shortness of time, strength or weakness of action, and then passing into a further stage to describe greatness or smallness of size or of distance, and thence making its way into the widest fields of metaphor. And it does all this with a force which is surprising when we consider how childishly simple are the means employed. Thus the Bachapin of Africa call a man with the cry héla! but according as he is far or farther off the sound of the hêela! hê-ê-la! is lengthened out. Mr. Macgregor in his ‘Rob Roy on the Jordan,’ graphically describes this method of expression, ‘“But where is Zalmouda?”... Then with rough eagerness the strongest of the Dowana faction pushes his long forefinger forward, pointing straight enough—but whither? and with a volley of words ends, Ah-ah-a-a-a——a-a. This strange expression had long before puzzled me when first heard from a shepherd in Bashan.... But the simple meaning of this long string of “ah’s” shortened, and quickened, and lowered in tone to the end, is merely that the place pointed to is a “very great way off.”’ The Chinook Jargon, as usual representing primitive developments of language, uses a similar device in lengthening the sound of words to indicate distance. The Siamese can, by varying the tone-accent, make the syllable non, ‘there,’ express a near, indefinite, or far distance, and in like manner can modify the meaning of such a word as ny, ‘little.’ In the Gaboon, the strength with which such a word as mpolu, ‘great,’ is uttered serves to show whether it is great, very great, or very very great, and in this way, as Mr. Wilson remarks in his Mpongwe Grammar, ‘the comparative degrees of greatness, smallness, hardness, rapidity, and strength, &c., may be conveyed with more accuracy and precision than could readily be conceived.’ In Madagascar ratchi means ‘bad,’ but râtchi is ‘very bad.’ The natives of Australia, according to Oldfield, show the use of this process in combination with that of symbolic reduplication: among the Watchandie tribe jir-rie signifies ‘already or past,’ jir-rie jir-rie indicates ‘a long time ago,’ while jie-r-rie jirrie (the first syllable being dwelt on for some time) signifies ‘an immense time ago.’ Again, boo-rie is ‘small,’ boo-rie-boo-rie ‘very small,’ and b-o-rie boorie ‘exceedingly small.’ Wilhelm von Humboldt notices the habit of the southern Guarani dialect of South America of dwelling more or less time on the suffix of the perfect tense, yma, y—ma, to indicate the length or shortness of the distance of time at which the action took place; and it is curious to observe that a similar contrivance is made use of among the aboriginal tribes of India, where the Ho language forms a future tense by adding á to the root, and prolonging its sound, kajee ‘to speak,’ Amg kajēēá ‘I will speak.’ As might be expected, the languages of very rude tribes show extremely well how the results of such primitive processes pass into the recognized stock of language. Nothing could be better for this than the words by which one of the rudest of living races, the Botocudos of Brazil, express the sea. They have a word for a stream, ouatou, and an adjective which means great, ijipakijiou; thence the two words ‘stream-great,’ a little strengthened in the vowels, will give the term for a river, ouatou-ijiipakiiijou, as it were, ‘stream-grea-at,’ and this, to express the immensity of the ocean, is amplified into ouatou-iijipakiijou-ou-ou-ou-ou-ou. Another tribe of the same family works out the same result more simply; the word ouatou, ‘stream,’ becomes ouatou-ou-ou-ou, ‘the sea.’ The Chavantes very naturally stretch the expression rom-o-wodi, ‘I go a long way,’ into rom-o-o-o-o-wodi, ‘I go a very long way indeed,’ and when they are called upon to count beyond five they say it is ka-o-o-oki, by which they evidently mean it is a very great many. The Cauixanas in one vocabulary are described as saying lawauugabi for four, and drawling out the same word for five, as if to say ‘a long four,’ in somewhat the same way as the Aponegicrans, whose word for six is itawuna, can expand this into a word for seven, itawuūna, obviously thus meaning a ‘long six.’ In their earlier and simpler stages nothing can be more easy to comprehend than these, so to speak, pictorial modifications of words. It is true that writing, even with the aid of italics and capitals, ignores much of this symbolism in spoken language, but every child can see its use and meaning, in spite of the efforts of book-learning and school-teaching to set aside whatever cannot be expressed by their imperfect symbols, nor controlled by their narrow rules. But when we try to follow out to their full results these methods, at first so easy to trace and appreciate, we soon find them passing out of our grasp. The language of the Sahaptin Indians shows us a process of modifying words which is far from clear, and yet not utterly obscure. These Indians have a way of making a kind of disrespectful diminutive by changing the n in a word to l; thus twinwt means ‘tailless,’ but to indicate particular smallness, or to express contempt, they make this into twilwt, pronounced with an appropriate change of tone; and again, wana means ‘river,’ but this is made into a diminutive wala by ‘changing n into l, giving the voice a different tone, putting the lips out in speaking, and keeping them suspended around the jaw.’ Here we are told enough about the change of pronunciation to guess at least how it could convey the notions of smallness and contempt. But it is less easy to follow the process by which the Mpongwe language turns an affirmative into a negative verb by ‘an intonation upon, or prolongation of the radical vowel,’ tŏnda, to love, tŏnda, not to love; tŏndo, to be loved, tŏndo, not to be loved. So Yoruba, bába, ‘a great thing,’ bàba, ‘a small thing,’ contrasted in a proverb, ‘Baba bo, baba molle’—‘A great matter puts a smaller out of sight.’ Language is, in fact, full of phonetic modifications which justify a suspicion that symbolic sound had to do with their production, though it may be hard to say exactly how.
Again, there is the familiar process of reduplication, simple or modified, which produces such forms as murmur, pitpat, helterskelter. This action, though much restricted in literary dialects, has such immense scope in the talk of children and savages that Professor Pott’s treatise on it[[290]] has become incidentally one of the most valuable collections of facts ever made with relation to early stages of language. Now up to a certain point any child can see how and why such doubling is done, and how it always adds something to the original idea. It may make superlatives or otherwise intensify words, as in Polynesia loa ‘long,’ lololoa ‘very long’; Mandingo ding ‘a child,’ dingding ‘a very little child.’ It makes plurals, as Malay raja-raja ‘princes,’ orang-orang ‘people.’ It adds numerals, as Mosquito walwal ‘four’ (two-two), or distributes them, as Coptic ouai ouai ‘singly’ (one-one). These are cases where the motive of doubling is comparatively easy to make out. As an example of cases much more difficult to comprehend may be taken the familiar reduplication of the perfect tense, Greek γέγραφα from γράφω, Latin momordi from mordeo, Gothic haihald from haldan, ‘to hold.’ Reduplication is habitually used in imitative words to intensify them, and still more, to show that the sound is repeated or continuous. From the immense mass of such words we may take as instances the Botocudo hou-hou-hou-gitcha ‘to suck’ (compare Tongan hūhū ‘breast’), kiaku-käck-käck, ‘a butterfly’; Quichua chiuiuiuiñichi ‘wind whistling in the trees’; Maori haruru ‘noise of wind’; hohoro ‘hurry’; Dayak kakakkaka ‘to go on laughing loud’; Aino shiriushiriukanni ‘a rasp’; Tamil murumuru ‘to murmur’; Akra ewiewiewiewie ‘he spoke repeatedly and continually’; and so on, throughout the whole range of the languages of the world.
The device of conveying different ideas of distance by the use of a graduated scale of vowels seems to me one of great philological interest, from the suggestive hint it gives of the proceedings of the language-makers in most distant regions of the world, working out in various ways a similar ingenious contrivance of expression by sound. A typical series is the Javan: iki ‘this’ (close by) ika ‘that’ (at some distance); iku ‘that’ (farther off). It is not likely that the following list nearly exhausts the whole number of cases in the languages of the world, for about half the number have been incidentally noted down by myself without any especial search, but merely in the course of looking over vocabularies of the lower races.[[291]]
Javan ... iki, this; ika, that (intermediate); iku, that.
Malagasy ... ao, there (at a short distance); eo, there (at a shorter distance); io, there (close at hand). atsy, there (not far off); etsy, there (nearer); itsy, this or these.
Japanese ... ko, here; ka, there. korera, these; karera, they (those).
Canarese ... ivanu, this; uvanu, that (intermediate); avanu, that.