In E. little the symbolic vowel i is regularly developed from OE. y, lytel, whose y is a mutated u, as seen in OSax. luttil; u also appears in other related languages, and the word thus originally had nothing symbolical about it. But in Gothic the word is leitils (ei, sounded [i·]) and in ON. lítinn, and here the vowel is so difficult to account for on ordinary principles that the NED in despair thinks that the two words are “radically unconnected.” I have no hesitation in supposing that the vowel i is due to sound symbolism, exactly as the smaller change introduced in modern E. ‘leetle,’ with narrow instead of wide (broad) . In the word for the opposite meaning, much, the phonetic development may also have been influenced by the tendency to get an adequate vowel, for normally we should expect the vowel as in Sc. mickle, from OE. micel. In E. quick the vowel best adapted to the idea has prevailed instead of the one found in the old nom. forms cwucu, cucu from cwicu (inflected cwicne, cwices, etc.), while in the word widu, wudu, which is phonetically analogous, there was no such inducement, and the vowel has been preserved: wood. The same prevalence of the symbolic i is noticed in the Dan. adj. kvik, MLG. quik, while the same word as subst. has become Dan. kvæg, MLG. quek, where there was no symbolism at work, as it has come to mean ‘cattle.’ I even see symbolism in the preservation of the k in the Dan. adj. (as against the fricative in kvæg), because the notion of ‘quick’ is best expressed by the short , interrupted by a stop; and may not the same force have been at work in this adjective at an earlier period? The second k in OE. cwicu, ON. kvikr as against Goth. qius, Lat. vivus, has not been sufficiently explained. An , symbolic of smallness, has been introduced in some comparatively recent E. words: tip from top, trip ‘small flock’ from troop, sip ‘drink in small quantities’ from sup, sop.
Through changes in meaning, too, some words have become symbolically more expressive than they were formerly; thus the agreement between sound and sense is of late growth in miniature, which now, on account of the i, has come to mean ‘a small picture,’ while at first it meant ‘image painted with minium or vermilion,’ and in pittance, now ‘a scanty allowance,’ formerly any pious donation, whether great or small. Cf. what has been said above of sullen, moody, catch.
XX.—§ 11. Importance of Suggestiveness.
The suggestiveness of some words as felt by present-day speakers is a fact that must be taken into account if we are to understand the realities of language. In some cases it may have existed from the very first: these words sprang thus into being because that shape at once expressed the idea the speaker wished to communicate. In other cases the suggestive element is not original: these words arose in the same way as innumerable others whose sound has never carried any suggestion. But if the sound of a word of this class was, or came to be, in some way suggestive of its signification—say, if a word containing the vowel in a prominent place meant ‘small’ or something small—then the sound exerted a strong influence in gaining popular favour to the word; it was an inducement to people to choose and to prefer that particular word and to cease to use words for the same notion that were not thus favoured. Sound symbolism, we may say, makes some words more fit to survive and gives them considerable help in their struggle for existence. If we want to denote a little child by a word for some small animal, we take some word like kid, chick, kitten, rather than bat or pug or slug, though these may in themselves be smaller than the animal chosen.
It is quite true that Fr. rouler, our roll, is derived from Lat. rota ‘wheel’ + a diminutive ending -ul-, but the word would never have gained its immense popularity, extending as it does through English, Dutch, German and the Scandinavian languages, if the sound had not been eminently suggestive of the sense, so suggestive that it seems to us now the natural expression for that idea, and we have difficulty in realizing that the word has not existed from the very dawn of speech. Or let me take another example, in which the connexion between sound and sense is even more ‘fortuitous.’ About a hundred years ago a member of Congress, Felix Walker, from Buncombe County, North Carolina, made a long and tedious speech. “Many members left the hall. Very naïvely he told those who remained that they might go too; he should speak for some time, but ‘he was only talking for Buncombe,’ to please his constituents.” Now buncombe (buncome, bunkum) has become a widely used word, not only in the States, but all over the English-speaking world, for political speaking or action not resting on conviction, but on the desire of gaining the favour of electors, or for any kind of empty ‘clap-trap’ oratory; but does anybody suppose that the name of Mr. Walker’s constituency would have been thus used if he had happened to hail from Annapolis or Philadelphia, or some other place with a name incapable of tickling the popular fancy in the same way as Buncombe does? (Cf. above, p. [401] on the suggestiveness of the short u.) In a similar way hullaballoo seems to have originated from the Irish village Ballyhooly (see P. W. Joyce, English as we speak it in Ireland) and to have become popular on account of its suggestive sound.
In loan-words we can often see that they have been adopted less on account of any cultural necessity (see above, p. [209]) than because their sound was in some way or other suggestive. Thus the Algonkin (Natick) word for ‘chief,’ mugquomp, is used in the United States in the form of mugwump for a ‘great man’ or ‘boss,’ and especially, in political life, for a man independent of parties and thinking himself superior to parties. Now, no one would have thought of going to an Indian language to express such a notion, had not an Indian word presented itself which from its uncouth sound lent itself to purposes of ridicule. Among other words whose adoption has been favoured by their sounds I may mention jungle (from Hindi jangal, associated more or less closely with jumble, tumble, bundle, bungle); bobbery, in slang ‘noise, squabble,’ “the Anglo-Indian colloquial representation of a common exclamation of Hindus when in surprise or grief—Bap-rē! or Bap-rē Bap ‘O Father!’” (Hobson-Jobson); amuck; and U.S. bunco ‘swindling game, to swindle,’ from It. banco.
XX.—§ 12. Ancient and Modern Times.
It will be seen that our conception of echoism and related phenomena does not carry us back to an imaginary primitive period: these forces are vital in languages as we observe them day by day. Linguistic writers, however, often assume that sound symbolism, if existing at all, must date back to the earliest times, and therefore can have no reality nowadays. Thus Benfey (Gesch 288) turns upon de Brosse, who had found rudeness in Fr. rude and gentleness in Fr. doux, and says: “As if the sounds of such words, which are distant by an infinite length of time from the time when language originated, were able to contribute ever so little to explain the original designation of things.” (But Benfey is right in saying that the impression made by those two French words may be imaginary; as examples they are not particularly well chosen.) Sütterlin (WW 14) says: “It is bold to search for such correspondence as still existing in detail in the language of our own days. For words like liebe, süss on the one hand, and zorn, hass, hart on the other, which are often alleged by dilettanti, prove nothing to the scholar, because their form is young and must have had totally different sounds in the period when language was created.”
Similarly de Saussure (LG 104) gives as one of the main principles of our science that the tie between sound and sense is arbitrary or rather motiveless (immotivé), and to those who would object that onomatopoetic words are not arbitrary he says that “they are never organic elements of a linguistic system. Besides, they are much less numerous than is generally supposed. Such words as Fr. fouet and glas may strike some ears with a suggestive ring;[106] but they have not had that character from the start, as is sufficiently proved if we go back to their Latin forms (fouet derived from fagus ‘beech,’ glas = classicum); the quality possessed by, or rather attributed to, their actual sounds is a fortuitous result of phonetic development.”
Here we see one of the characteristics of modern linguistic science: it is so preoccupied with etymology, with the origin of words, that it pays much more attention to what words have come from than to what they have come to be. If a word has not always been suggestive on account of its sound, then its actual suggestiveness is left out of account and may even be declared to be merely fanciful. I hope that this chapter contains throughout what is psychologically a more true and linguistically a more fruitful view.