XIX.—§ 19. Final Considerations.
The ending -a serves to denote not only female beings, but also abstracts, and if in later usage it is also applied to males, as in Latin nauta ‘sailor,’ auriga ‘charioteer,’ this is only a derived use of the abstracts denoting an activity, sailoring, driving, etc., just as G. die wache, besides the activity of watching, comes to mean the man on guard, or as justice (Sp. el justicia) comes to mean ‘judge.’ The original sense of Antonius collega fuit Ciceronis was ‘A. was the co-election of C.’ (Osthoff, Verbum in d. Nominal-compos., 1878, 263 ff., Delbrück, Synt. Forsch. 4. 6).
The same -a is finally used as the plural ending of most neuters, but, as is now universally admitted (see especially Johannes Schmidt, Die Pluralbildungen der indogerm. Neutra, 1889), the ending here was originally neither neuter nor plural, but, on the contrary, feminine and singular. The forms in -a are properly collective formations like those found, for instance, in Lat. opera, gen. operæ, ‘work,’ comp. opus ‘(a piece of) work’; Lat. terra ‘earth,’ comp. Oscan terum ‘plot of ground’; pugna ‘boxing, fight,’ comp. pugnus ‘fist.’ This explains among other things the peculiar syntactic phenomenon, which is found regularly in Greek and sporadically in Sanskrit and other languages, that a neuter plural subject takes the verb in the singular. Greek toxa is often used in speaking of a single bow; and the Latin poetic use of guttura, colla, ora, where only one person’s throat, neck or face is meant, points similarly to a period of the past when these words did not denote the plural. We can now see the reason of this -a being in some cases also the plural sign of masculine substantives: Lat. loca from locus, joca from jocus, etc.; Gr. sita from sitos. Joh. Schmidt refers to similar plural formations in Arabic; and as we have seen (Ch. XIX § [9]), the Bantu plural prefixes had probably a similar origin. And we are thus constantly reminded that languages must often make the most curious détours to arrive at a grammatical expression for things which appear to us so self-evident as the difference between he and she, or that between one and more than one. Expressive simplicity in linguistic structure is not a primitive, but a derived quality.
[CHAPTER XX]
SOUND SYMBOLISM
§ 1. Sound and Sense. § 2. Instinctive Feeling. § 3. Direct Imitation. § 4. Originator of the Sound. § 5. Movement. § 6. Things and Appearances. § 7. States of Mind. § 8. Size and Distance. § 9. Length and Strength of Words and Sounds. § 10. General Considerations. § 11. Importance of Suggestiveness. § 12. Ancient and Modern Times.
XX.—§ 1. Sound and Sense.
The idea that there is a natural correspondence between sound and sense, and that words acquire their contents and value through a certain sound symbolism, has at all times been a favourite one with linguistic dilettanti, the best-known examples being found in Plato’s Kratylos. Greek and Latin grammarians indulge in the wildest hypotheses to explain the natural origin of such and such a word, as when Nigidius Figulus said that in pronouncing vos one puts forward one’s lips and sends out breath in the direction of the other person, while this is not the case with nos. With these early writers, to make guesses at sound symbolism was the only way to etymologize; no wonder, therefore, that we with our historical methods and our wider range of knowledge find most of their explanations ridiculous and absurd. But this does not justify us in rejecting any idea of sound symbolism: abusus non tollit usum!
Humboldt (Versch 79) says that “language chooses to designate objects by sounds which partly in themselves, partly in comparison with others, produce on the ear an impression resembling the effect of the object on the mind; thus stehen, stätig, starr, the impression of firmness, Sanskrit lī ‘to melt, diverge,’ that of liquidity or solution (des zerfliessenden).... In this way objects that produce similar impressions are denoted by words with essentially the same sounds, thus wehen, wind, wolke, wirren, wunsch, in all of which the vacillating, wavering motion with its confused impression on the senses is expressed through ... w.” Madvig’s objection (1842, 13 = Kl 64) that we need only compare four of the words Humboldt quotes with the corresponding words in the very nearest sister-language, Danish blæse, vind, sky, ønske, to see how wrong this is, seems to me a little cheap: Humboldt himself expressly assumes that much of primitive sound symbolism may have disappeared in course of time and warns us against making this kind of explanation a ‘constitutive principle,’ which would lead to great dangers (“so setzt man sich grossen gefahren aus und verfolgt einen in jeder rücksicht schlüpfrigen pfad”). Moreover blæse (E. blow, Lat. flare) is just as imitative as wind, vind: no one of course would pretend that there was only one way of expressing the same sense perception. Among Humboldt’s examples wolke and wunsch are doubtful, but I do not see that this affects the general truth of his contention that there is something like sound symbolism in some words.
Nyrop in his treatment of this question (Gr IV § 545 f.) repeats Madvig’s objection that the same name can denote various objects, that the same object can be called by different names, and that the significations of words are constantly changing; further, that the same group of sounds comes to mean different things according to the language in which it occurs. He finally exclaims: “How to explain [by means of sound symbolism] the difference in signification between murus, nurus, durus, purus, etc.?”