Though a large part of language has been formed in the way I have named, yet it must be admitted that few words, compared with the whole number, bear upon their face unmistakable traces of their origin. The explanation of this lies in the great changes which phonetic corruption effects in language. No sooner do men coin a word, than they instinctively and unconsciously seek to rid it of its superfluous letters, and in other ways to economize the time and labor expended upon its utterance; and if they are obliged to use a new or strange word, which conveys no intrinsic meaning to them, they try to give it a meaning by so changing it as to remove its arbitrary character. (See [“Words of Illusive Etymology,”] in Chapter on the “Curiosities of Language.”) Thus words, in the course of ages, are rolled and rubbed out of shape, like the pebbles which are rubbed and rounded into smoothness by the sea waves on a shingly beach, until at last, though once plainly imitative, they lose all trace of their sensuous origin. Who, without knowledge of the intermediate diurnus and giorno, would for a moment suspect that jour could be derived from dies; or would suppose, if he had not traced the etymology of “musket,” that it is derived from the onomatope, musso, “I buzz”? But, notwithstanding all this, and though in the progress of scientific culture language becomes more and more abstract,—that is, words having no natural connection with the thoughts are used more and more arbitrarily to represent them, just as algebraic signs represent mathematical relations,—still language never loses wholly its original imitative character. It will always, therefore, be a signal excellence of style when thought and emotion are represented by imitative expressions,—that is, by means of pictures or images of sensible things and events. The sound then points to the external object or event, or some sensible property or characteristic of it, and this, again, to the mental state or thought which it is taken to represent. It is for this reason that the poets, from Homer to Tennyson, abound in onomatopes,—in words and combinations of words in which the sound is an echo to the sense. These words are not only the most vivid, the most passionate, and the most picturesque, but they are the only ones which are instantly intelligible, and which possess an inherently graphic power. The power of poetry lies largely in the fact that, as Bunsen says, it “reproduces the original process of the mind in which language originates. The coinage of words is the primitive poem of humanity, and the imagery of poetry and oratory is possible and effective only because it is a continuation of that primitive process which is itself a reproduction of creation.”
Dyer, in his “Ruins of Rome,” thus exemplifies, in a passage quoted with praise by Johnson, the beauty and force imparted to style by the adaptation of the sounds to the object described:
“The pilgrim oft
At dead of night, ’mid his oraison, hears
Aghast the voice of time; disparting towers
Tumbling all precipitate down dashed,
Rattling around, loud thundering to the moon.”
Not only single words, but an entire sentence, or a series of sentences, may resemble the sound represented; as in the following description of the abode of Sleep, in Spenser:
“And more to lull him in his slumbers soft,