We see now the emotional value of some ‘mouth-filling’ words, some of which may be considered symbolical expansions of existing words (what H. Schröder terms ‘streckformen’), though others cannot be thus explained; not unfrequently the effect of length is combined with some of the phonetic effects mentioned above. Such words are, e.g., slubberdegullion ‘dirty fellow,’ rumbustious ‘boisterous,’ rumgumption, rumfustian, rumbullion (cf. rumpuncheon ‘cask of rum’ as a term of abuse in Stevenson, Treas. Isl. 48, “the cowardly son of a rum-puncheon”), rampallion ‘villain,’ rapscallion, ragamuffin; sculduddery ‘obscenity’; cantankerous ‘quarrelsome,’ U.S. also rantankerous (cf. cankerous, rancorous); skilligalee ‘miserable gruel,’ flabbergast ‘confound,’ catawampous (or -ptious) ‘fierce’ (“a high-sounding word with no very definite meaning,” NED); Fr. hurluberlu ‘crazy’ and the synonymous Dan. tummelumsk, Norw. tullerusk.
In this connexion one may mention the natural tendency to lengthen and to strengthen single sounds under the influence of strong feeling and in order to intensify the effect of the spoken word; thus, in ‘it’s very cold’ both the diphthong [ou] and the [l] may be pronounced extremely long, in ‘terribly dull’ the [l] is lengthened, in ‘extremely long’ either the vowel [ɔ] or the [ŋ] (or both) may be lengthened. In Fr. ‘c’était horrible’ the trill of the [r] becomes very long and intense (while the same effect is not generally possible in the corresponding English word, because the English [r] is not trilled, but pronounced by one flap of the tip). In some cases a lengthening due to such a psychological cause may permanently alter a word, as when Lat. totus in It. has become tutto (Fr. tout, toute goes back to the same form, while Sp. todo has preserved the form corresponding to the Lat. single consonant). An interesting collection of such cases from the Romanic tongues has been published by A. J. Carnoy (Mod. Philol. 15. 31, July 1917), who justly emphasizes the symbolic value of the change and the special character of the words in which it occurs (pet-names, children’s words, ironic or derisive words, imitative words ...). He says: “While to a phonetician the phenomenon would seem capricious, its apportionment in the vocabulary is quite natural to a psychologist. In fact, reduplication, be it of syllables or of consonants, generally has that character in languages. One finds it in perfective tenses, in intensive or frequentative verbs, in the plural, and in collectives. In most cases it is a reduplication of syllables, but a lengthening of vowels is not rare and the reinforcement of consonants is also found. In Chinook, for instance, the emotional words, both diminutive and augmentative, are expressed by increasing the stress of consonants. It is, of course, also well known that in Semitic the intensive radical of verbs is regularly formed by a reduplication of consonants. To a stem qatal, e.g., answers an intensive: Eth. qattala, Hebr. qittel. Cf. Hebr. shibbar ‘to cut in small pieces’ [cf. below], hillech ‘to walk,’ qibber ‘to bury many,’ etc. Cf. Brockelmann, Vergl. Gramm., p. 244.”
I add a few more examples from Misteli (428 f.) of this Semitic strengthening: the first vowel is lengthened to express a tendency or an attempt: qatala jaqtulu ‘kill’ (in the third person masc., the former in the prefect-aorist, the latter in the imperfect-durative, where ja, ju is the sign of the third person m.), qātala juqātilu ‘try to kill, fight’; faXara jufXaru ‘excel in fame,’ fāXara jufāXiru ‘try to excel, vie.’ Through lengthening (doubling) of a consonant an intensification of the action is denoted: Hebr. šāβar jišbōr ‘zerbrechen,’ šibbēr jẹšabbēr ‘zerschmettern,’ Arab. ḍaraba jaḍrubu ‘strike,’ ḍarraba juḍarribu ‘beat violently, or repeatedly’; sometimes the change makes a verb into a causative or transitive, etc.
I imagine that we have exactly the same kind of strengthening for psychological (symbolical) reasons in a number of verbs where Danish has pp, tt, kk by the side of b, d, g (spirantic): pippe pibe, stritte stride, snitte snide, skøtte skøde, splitte splide, skrikke skrige, lukke luge, hikke hige, sikke sige, kikke kige, prikke prige (cf. also sprække sprænge). Some of these forms are obsolete, others dialectal, but it would take us too far in this place to deal with the words in detail. It is customary to ascribe this gemination to an old n derivative (see, e.g., Brugmann VG 1. 390, Streitberg Urg pp. 135, 138, Noreen UL 154), but it does not seem necessary to conjure up an n from the dead to make it disappear again immediately, as the mere strengthening of the consonant itself to express symbolically the strengthening of the action has nothing unnatural in it. Cf. also G. placken by the side of plagen. The opposite change, a weakening, may have taken place in E. flag (cf. OFr. flaquir, to become flaccid), flabby, earlier flappy, drib from drip, slab, if from OFr. esclape, clod by the side of clot, and possibly cadge, bodge, grudge, smudge, which had all of them originally -tch. But the common modification in sense is not so easily perceived here as in the cases of strengthening.
I may here, for the curiosity of the thing, mention that in a ‘language’ coined by two English children (a vocabulary of which was communicated to me by one of the inventors through Miss I. C. Ward, of the Department of Phonetics, University College, London) there was a word bal which meant ‘place,’ but the bigger the place the longer the vowel was made, so that with three different quantities it meant ‘village,’ ‘town’ and ‘city’ respectively. The word for ‘go’ was dudu, “the greater the speed of the going, the more quickly the word was said—[dœ·dœ·] walk slowly.” Cf. Humboldt, ed. Steinthal 82: “In the southern dialect of the Guarani language the suffix of the perfect yma is pronounced more or less slowly according to the more or less remoteness of the past to be indicated.”
XX.—§ 10. General Considerations.
Sound symbolism, as we have considered it in this chapter, has a very wide range of application, from direct imitation of perceived natural sounds to such small quantitative changes of existing non-symbolic words as may be used for purely grammatical purposes. But in order to obtain a true valuation of this factor in the life of language it is of importance to keep in view the following considerations:
(1) No language utilizes sound symbolism to its full extent, but contains numerous words that are indifferent to or may even jar with symbolism. To express smallness the vowel is most adequate, but it would be absurd to say that that vowel always implies smallness, or that smallness is always expressed by words containing that vowel: it is enough to mention the words big and small, or to point to the fact that thick and thin have the same vowel, to repudiate such a notion.
(2) Words that have been symbolically expressive may cease to be so in consequence of historical development, either phonetic or semantic or both. Thus the name of the bird crow is not now so good an imitation of the sound made by the bird as OE. crawe was (Dan. krage, Du. kraai). Thus, also, the verbs whine, pipe were better imitations when the vowel was still [i·] (as in Dan. hvine, pibe). But to express the sound of a small bird the latter word is still pronounced with the vowel either long or short (peep, pip), the word having been constantly renewed and as it were reshaped by fresh imitation; cf. on Irish wheen and dialectal peep, XV § [8]. Lat. pipio originally meant any ‘peeping bird,’ but when it came to designate one particular kind of birds, it was free to follow the usual trend of phonetic development, and so has become Fr. pigeon [piʒɔ̃], E. pigeon [pidʒin]. E. cuckoo has resisted the change from to ʌ as in cut, because people have constantly heard the sound and fashioned the name of the bird from it. I once heard a Scotch lady say [kʌku·], but on my inquiry she told me that there were no cuckoos in her native place; hence the word had there been treated as any other word containing the short . The same word is interesting in another way; it has resisted the old Gothonic consonant-shift, and thus has the same consonants as Skt. kōkiláḥ, Gr. kókkux, Lat. cuculus. On the general preservation of significative sounds, cf. Ch. XV § [8].
(3) On the other hand, some words have in course of time become more expressive than they were at first; we have something that may be called secondary echoism or secondary symbolism. The verb patter comes from pater (= paternoster), and at first meant to repeat that prayer, to mumble one’s prayers; but then it was associated with the homophonous verb patter ‘to make a rapid succession of pats’ and came under the influence of echoic words like prattle, chatter, jabber; it now, like these, means ‘to talk rapidly or glibly’ and is to all intents a truly symbolical word; cf. also the substantive patter ‘secret lingo, speechifying, talk.’ Husky may at first have meant only “full of husks, of the nature of a husk” (NED), but it could not possibly from that signification have arrived at the now current sense ‘dry in the throat, hoarse’ if it had not been that the sound of the adjective had reminded one of the sound of a hoarse voice. Dan. pöjt ‘poor drink, vile stuff’ is now felt as expressive of contempt, but it originates in Poitou, an innocent geographical name of a kind of wine, like Bordeaux; it is now connected with other scornful words like spröjt and döjt.