CHAPTERV.EMOTIONAL AND IMITATIVE LANGUAGE.
Element of directly expressive Sound in Language—Test by independent correspondence in distinct languages—Constituent processes of Language—Gesture—Expression of feature, &c.—Emotional Tone—Articulate sounds, vowels determined by musical quality and pitch, consonants—Emphasis and Accent—Phrase-melody, Recitative—Sound-Words—Interjections—Calls to Animals—Emotional Cries—Sense-Words formed from Interjections—Affirmative and Negative particles, &c.
In carrying on the enquiry into the development of culture, evidence of some weight is to be gained from an examination of Language. Comparing the grammars and dictionaries of races at various grades of civilization, it appears that, in the great art of speech, the educated man at this day substantially uses the method of the savage, only expanded and improved in the working out of details. It is true that the languages of the Tasmanian and the Chinese, of the Greenlander and the Greek, differ variously in structure; but this is a secondary difference, underlaid by a primary similarity in method, namely, the expression of ideas by articulate sounds habitually allotted to them. Now all languages are found on inspection to contain some articulate sounds of a directly natural and directly intelligible kind. These are sounds of interjectional or imitative character, which have their meaning not by inheritance from parents or adoption from foreigners, but by being taken up directly from the world of sound into the world of sense. Like pantomimic gestures, they are capable of conveying their meaning of themselves, without reference to the particularlanguage they are used in connexion with. From the observation of these, there have arisen speculations as to the origin of language, treating such expressive sounds as the fundamental constituents of language in general, and considering those of them which are still plainly recognizable as having remained more or less in their original state, long courses of adaptation and variation having produced from such the great mass of words in all languages, in which no connexion between idea and sound can any longer be certainly made out. Thus grew up doctrines of a ‘natural’ origin of language, which, dating from classic times, were developed in the eighteenth century into a system by that powerful thinker, the President Charles de Brosses, and in our own time have been expanded and solidified by a school of philologers, among whom Mr. Hensleigh Wedgwood is the most prominent.[247]These theories have no doubt been incautiously and fancifully worked. No wonder that students who found in nature real and direct sources of articulate speech, in interjectional sounds likeah!ugh!h’m!sh!and in imitative sounds likepurr,whiz,tomtom,cuckoo, should have thought that the whole secret of language lay within their grasp, and that they had only to fit the keys thus found into one hole after another to open every lock. When a philosopher has a truth in his hands, he is apt to stretch it farther than it will bear. The magic umbrella must spread and spread till it becomes a tent wide enough to shelter the king’s army. But it must be borne in mind that what criticism touches in these opinions is their exaggeration, not their reality. That interjections and imitative words are really taken up to some extent, be it small or large, into the very body and structure of language, no one denies. Such a denial, if anyone offered it, the advocates of the disputed theories might dispose of in the single phrase, that they would neither bepooh-poohednorhooteddown. It may be shown within the limits of the most strict and sober argument, that the theory of the origin of language in natural and directly expressive sounds does account for a considerable fraction of the existing copia verborum, while it raises a presumption that, could we trace the history of words more fully, it would account for far more.
In here examining interjectional and imitative sounds with their derivative words, as well as certain other parts of language of a more or less cognate character, I purpose to bring forward as far as possible new evidence derived from the languages of savage and barbarous races. By so doing it becomes practicable to use a check which in great measure stops the main source of uncertainty and error in such enquiries, the habit of etymologizing words off-hand from expressive sounds, by the unaided and often flighty fancy of a philologer. By simply enlarging the survey of language, the province of the imagination is brought within narrower limits. If several languages, which cannot be classed as distinctly of the same family, unite in expressing some notion by a particular sound which may fairly claim to be interjectional or imitative, their combined authority will go far to prove the claim a just one. For if it be objected that such words may have passed into the different languages from a common source, of which the trace is for the most part lost, this may be answered by the question, Why is there not a proportionate agreement between the languages in question throughout the far larger mass of words which cannot pretend to be direct sound-words? If several languages have independently chosen like words to express like meanings, then we may reasonably suppose that we are not deluding ourselves in thinking such words highly appropriate to their purpose. They are words which answered the conditions of original language, conforming as they do to the saying of Thomas Aquinas, that the names of things ought to agree with their natures,‘nomina debent naturis rerum congruere.’Applied in such comparison, the languagesof the lower races contribute evidence of excellent quality to the problem. It will at the same time and by the same proofs appear, that savages possess in a high degree the faculty of uttering their minds directly in emotional tones and interjections, of going straight to nature to furnish themselves with imitative sounds, including reproductions of their own direct emotional utterances, as means of expression of ideas, and of introducing into their formal language words so produced. They have clearly thus far the means and power of producing language. In so far as the theories under consideration account for the original formation of language, they countenance the view that this formation took place among mankind in a savage state, and even, for anything appearing to the contrary, in a still lower stage of culture than has survived to our day.[248]
The first step in such investigation is to gain a clear idea of the various elements of which spoken language is made up. These may be enumerated as gesture, expression of feature, emotional tone, emphasis, force, speed, &c. of utterance, musical rhythm and intonation, and the formation of the vowels and consonants which are the skeleton of articulate speech.
In the common intercourse of men, speech is habitually accompanied by gesture, the hands, head, and body aiding and illustrating the spoken phrase. So far as we can judge, the visible gesture and the audible word have been thus used in combination since times of most remote antiquityin the history of our race. It seems, however, that in the daily intercourse of the lower races, gesture holds a much more important place than we are accustomed to see it fill, a position even encroaching on that which articulate speech holds among ourselves. Mr. Bonwick confirms by his experience Dr. Milligan’s account of the Tasmanians as using ‘signs to eke out the meaning of monosyllabic expressions, and to give force, precision, and character to vocal sounds.’ Captain Wilson remarks on the use of gesticulation in modifying words in the Chinook Jargon. There is confirmation to Spix and Martius’ description of low Brazilian tribes completing by signs the meaning of their scanty sentences, thus making the words ‘wood-go’ serve to say ‘I will go into the wood,’ by pointing the mouth like a snout in the direction meant. The Rev. J. L. Wilson, describing the Grebo language of West Africa, remarks that they have personal pronouns, but seldom use them in conversation, leaving it to gesture to determine whether a verb is to be taken in the first or second person; thus the words ‘ni ne’ will mean ‘I do it,’ or ‘you do it,’ according to the significant gestures of the speaker.[249]Beside such instances, it will hereafter be noticed that the lower races, in counting, habitually use gesture-language for a purpose to which higher races apply word-language. To this prominent condition of gesture as a means of expression among rude tribes, and to the development of pantomime in public show and private intercourse among such peoples as the Neapolitans of our own day, the most extreme contrast may be found in England, where, whether for good or ill, suggestive pantomime is now reduced to so small a compass in social talk, and even in public oratory.
Changes of the bodily attitude, corresponding in their fine gradations with changes of the feelings, comprise conditionsof the surface of the body, postures of the limbs, and also especially those expressive attitudes of the face to which our attention is particularly directed when we notice one another. The visible expression of the features is a symptom which displays the speaker’s state of mind, his feelings of pleasure or disgust, of pride or humility, of faith or doubt, and so forth. Not that there is between the emotion and its bodily expression any originally intentional connexion. It is merely that a certain action of our physical machinery shows symptoms which we have learnt by experience to refer to a mental cause, as we judge by seeing a man sweat or limp that he is hot or footsore. Blushing is caused by certain emotions, and among Europeans it is a visible expression or symptom of them; not so among South American Indians, whose blushes, as Mr. David Forbes points out, may be detected by the hand or a thermometer, but being concealed by the dark skin cannot serve as a visible sign of feeling.[250]By turning these natural processes to account, men contrive to a certain extent to put on particular physical expressions, frowning or smiling for instance, in order to simulate the emotions which would naturally produce such expressions, or merely to convey the thought of such emotions to others. Now it is well known to every one that physical expression by feature, &c., forming a part of the universal gesture-language, thus serves as an important adjunct to spoken language. It is not so obvious, but on examination will prove to be true, that such expression by feature itself acts as a formative power in vocal language. Expression of countenance has an action beyond that of mere visible gesture. The bodily attitude brought on by a particular state of mind affects the position of the organs of speech, both the internal larynx, &c., and the external features whose change can be watched by the mere looker-on. Even though the expression of the speaker’s face may not be seen by the hearer, the effect of the whole bodily attitude ofwhich it forms part is not thereby done away with. For on the position thus taken by the various organs concerned in speech, depends what I have here called ‘emotional tone,’ whereby the voice carries direct expression of the speaker’s feeling.
The ascertaining of the precise physical mode in which certain attitudes of the internal and external face come to correspond to certain moods of mind, is a physiological problem as yet little understood; but the fact that particular expressions of face are accompanied by corresponding and dependent expressions of emotional tone, only requires an observer or a looking-glass to prove it. The laugh made with a solemn, contemptuous, or sarcastic face, is quite different from that which comes from a joyous one; theah! oh! ho! hey!and so on, change their modulations to match the expression of countenance. The effect of the emotional tone does not even require fitness in the meaning of the spoken words, for nonsense or an unknown tongue may be made to convey, when spoken with expressive intonation, the feelings which are displayed upon the speaker’s face. This expression may even be recognized in the dark by noticing the tone it gives forth, while the forced character given by the attempt to bring out a sound not matching even the outward play of the features can hardly be hidden by the most expert ventriloquist, and in such forcing, the sound perceptibly drags the face into the attitude that fits with it. The nature of communication by emotional tone seems to me to be somewhat on this wise. It does not appear that particular tones at all belong directly and of themselves to particular emotions, but that their action depends on the vocal organs of the speaker and hearer. Other animals, having vocal organs different from man’s, have accordingly, as we know, a different code of emotional tones. An alteration in man’s vocal organs would bring a corresponding alteration in the effect of tone in expressing feeling; the tone which to us expresses surprise or anger might come to express pleasure, and so forth. As it is, childrenlearn by early experience that such and such a tone indicates such and such an emotion, and this they make out partly by finding themselves uttering such tones when their feelings have brought their faces to the appropriate attitudes, and partly by observing the expression of voice in others. At three or four years old they are to be seen in the act of acquiring this knowledge, turning round to look at the speaker’s face and gesture to make sure of the meaning of the tone. But in later years this knowledge becomes so familiar that it is supposed to have been intuitive. Then, when men talk together, the hearer receives from each emotional tone an indication, a signal, of the speaker’s attitude of body, and through this of his state of mind. These he can recognize, and even reproduce in himself, as the operator at one end of a telegraphic wire can follow, by noticing his needles, the action of his colleague at the other. In watching the process which thus enables one man to take a copy of another’s emotions through their physical effects on his vocal tone, we may admire the perfection with which a means so simple answers an end so complex, and apparently so remote.
By eliminating from speech all effects of gesture, of expression of face, and of emotional tone, we go far toward reducing it to that system of conventional articulate sounds which the grammarian and the comparative philologist habitually consider as language. These articulate sounds are capable of being roughly set down in signs standing for vowels and consonants, with the aid of accents and other significant marks; and they may then again be read aloud from these written signs, by any one who has learnt to give its proper sound to each letter.
What vowels are, is a matter which has been for some years well understood.[251]They are compound musical tones such as, in the vox humana stop of the organ, are soundedby reeds (vibrating tongues) fitted to organ-pipes of particular construction. The manner of formation of vowels by the voice is shortly this. There are situated in the larynx a pair of vibrating membranes called the vocal chords, which may be rudely imitated by stretching a piece of sheet india-rubber over the open end of a tube, so as to form two half-covers to it, ‘like the parchment of a drum split across the middle;’ when the tube is blown through, the india-rubber flaps will vibrate as the vocal chords do in the larynx, and give out a sound. In the human voice, the musical effect of the vibrating chords is increased by the cavity of the mouth, which acts as a resonator or sounding-box, and which also, by its shape at any moment, modifies the musical ‘quality’ or ‘timbre’ of the sound produced. This, not the less felt because its effects are not registered in musical notation, depends on the harmonic overtones accompanying the fundamental tone which alone musical notation takes account of. It makes the difference between the same note on two instruments, flute and piano for instance, while some instruments, as the violin, can give to one note a wide variation of quality. To such quality the formation of vowels is due. This is perfectly shown by the common Jew’s harp, which when struck can be made to utter the vowelsa, e, i, o, u, &c., by simply putting the mouth in the proper position for speaking these vowels. In this experiment the player’s voice emits no sound, but the vibrating tongue of the Jew’s harp placed in front of the mouth acts as a substitute for the vocal chords, and the vowel-sounds are produced by the various positions of the cavity of the mouth, modifying the quality of the note, by bringing out with different degrees of strength the series of harmonic tones of which it is composed. As to musical theory, emotional tone and vowel-tone are connected. In fact, an emotional tone may be defined as a vowel, whose particular musical quality is that produced by the human vocal organs, when adjusted to a particular state of feeling.
Europeans, while using modulation of musical pitch asaffecting the force of words in a sentence, know nothing of making it alter the dictionary-meaning of a word. But this device is known elsewhere, especially in South-East Asia, where rises and falls of tone, to some extent like those which serve us in conveying emphasis, question and answer, &c., actually give different signification. Thus in Siamese,há=to seek,hã=pestilence,hà=five. The consequence of this elaborate system of tone-accentuation is the necessity of an accumulation of expletive particles, to supply the place of the oratorical or emphatic intonation, which being thus given over to the dictionary is lost for the grammar. Another consequence is, that the system of setting poetry to music becomes radically different from ours; to sing a Siamese song to a European tune makes the meaning of the syllables alter according to their rise and fall in pitch, and turns their sense into the wildest nonsense.[252]In West Africa, again, the same device appears: thus in Dahomanso=stick,só=horse,sò=thunder; Yoruba,bá=with,bà=bend.[253]For practical purposes, this linguistic music is hardly to be commended, but theoretically it is interesting, as showing that man does not servilely follow an intuitive or inherited scheme of language, but works out in various ways the resources of sound as a means of expression.
The theory of consonants is much more obscure than that of vowels. They are not musical vibrations as vowels are, but noises accompanying them. To the musician such noises as the rushing of the wind from the organ-pipe, the scraping of the violin, the sputtering of the flute, are simply troublesome as interfering with his musical tones, and he takes pains to diminish them as much as may be. But in the art of language noises of this kind, far from being avoided, are turned to immense account by being used asconsonants, in combination with the musical vowels. As to the positions and movements of the vocal organs in producing consonants, an excellent account with anatomical diagrams is given in Professor Max Müller’s second series of Lectures. For the present purpose of passing in review the various devices by which the language-maker has contrived to make sound a means of expressing thought, perhaps no better illustration of their nature can be mentioned than Sir Charles Wheatstone’s account of his speaking machine;[254]for one of the best ways of studying difficult phenomena is to see them artificially imitated. The instrument in question pronounced Latin, French, and Italian words well: it could say,‘Je vous aime de tout mon cœur,’‘Leopoldus Secundus Romanorum Imperator,’and so forth, but it was not so successful with German. As to the vowels, they were of course simply sounded by suitable reeds and pipes. To affect them with consonants, contrivances were arranged to act like the human organs. Thuspwas made by suddenly removing the operator’s hand from the mouth of the figure, andbin the same way, except that the mouth was not quite covered, while an outlet like the nostrils was used in formingm;fandvwere rendered by modifying the shape of the mouth by a hand; air was made to rush through small tubes to produce the sibilantssandsh; and the liquidsrandlwere sounded by the action of tremulous reeds. As Wheatstone remarks, the most important use of such ingenious mechanical imitations of speech may be to fix and preserve an accurate register of the pronunciation of different languages. A perfectly arranged speaking machine would in fact represent for us that framework of language which consists of mere vowels and consonants, though without most of those expressive adjuncts which go to make up the conversation of speaking men.
Of vowels and consonants capable of being employed in language, man is able to pronounce and distinguish anenormous variety. But this great stock of possible sounds is nowhere brought into use altogether. Each language or dialect of the world is found in practice to select a limited series of definite vowels and consonants, keeping with tolerable exactness to each, and thus choosing what we may call its phonetic alphabet. Neglecting such minor differences as occur in the speech of individuals or small communities, each dialect of the world may be said to have its own phonetic system, and these phonetic systems vary widely. Our vowels, for instance, differ much from those of French and Dutch. French knows nothing of either of the sounds which we write asthinthinandthat, while the Castilian lispedc, the so-calledceceo, is a third consonant which we must again make shift to write asth, though it is quite distinct in sound from both our own. It is quite a usual thing for us to find foreign languages wanting letters even near in sound to some of ours, while possessing others unfamiliar to ourselves. Among such cases are the Chinese difficulty in pronouncingr, and the want ofsandfin Australian dialects. When foreigners tried to teach the Mohawks, who have no labials in their language, to pronounce words withpandbin them, they protested that it was too ridiculous to expect people to shut their mouths to speak; and the Portuguese discoverers of Brazil, remarking that the natives had neitherf,l, norrin their language, neatly described them as a people with neitherfé,ley, norrey, neither faith, law, nor king. It may happen, too, that sounds only used by some nations as interjectional noises, unwritten and unwriteable, shall be turned to account by others in their articulate language. Something of this kind occurs with the noises called ‘clicks.’ Such sounds are familiar to us as interjections; thus the lateral click made in the cheek (and usually in the left cheek) is continually used in driving horses, while varieties of the dental and palatal click made with the tongue against the teeth and the roof of the mouth, are common in the nursery as expressions of surprise, reproof, or satisfaction. Thus, too, the nativesof Tierra del Fuego express ‘no’ by a peculiar cluck, as do also the Turks, who accompany it with the gesture of throwing back the head; and it appears from the accounts of travellers that the clicks of surprise and admiration among the natives of Australia are much like those we hear at home. But though here these clicking noises are only used interjectionally, it is well known that South African races have taken such sounds up into their articulate speech and have made, as we may say, letters of them. The very name of Hottentots, applied to the Namaquas and other kindred tribes, appears to be not a native name (as Peter Kolb thought) but a rude imitative word coined by the Dutch to express the clicking ‘hotentot,’ and the termHottentotismhas been thence adopted as a medical description of one of the varieties of stammering. North-West America is another district of the world distinguished for the production of strange clucking, gurgling, and grunting letters, difficult or impossible to European voices. Moreover, there are many sounds capable of being used in articulate speech, varieties of chirping, whistling, blowing, and sucking noises, of which some are familiar to our own use as calls to animals, or interjectional noises of contempt or surprise, but which no tribe is known to have brought into their alphabet. With all the vast phonetic variety of known languages, the limits of possible utterance are far from being reached.
Up to a certain point we can understand the reasons which have guided the various tribes of mankind in the selection of their various alphabets; ease of utterance to the speaker, combined with distinctness of effect to the hearer, have been undoubtedly among the principal of the selecting causes. We may fairly connect with the close uniformity of men’s organs of speech all over the world, the general similarity which prevails in the phonetic systems of the most different languages, and which gives us the power of roughly writing down so large a proportion of any one language by means of an alphabet intended for any other. But whilewe thus account by physical similarity for the existence of a kind of natural alphabet common to mankind, we must look to other causes to determine the selection of sounds used in different languages, and to account for those remarkable courses of change which go on in languages of a common stock, producing in Europe such variations of one original word aspater,father,vater, or in the islands of Polynesia offering us the numeral 5 under the strangely-varied forms oflima,rima,dima,nima, andhima. Changes of this sort have acted so widely and regularly, that since the enunciation of Grimm’s law their study has become a main part of philology. Though their causes are as yet so obscure, we may at least argue that such wide and definite operations cannot be due to chance or arbitrary fancy, but must be the result of laws as wide and definite as themselves.
Let us now suppose a book to be written with a tolerably correct alphabet, for instance an ordinary Italian book, or an English one in some good system of phonetic letters. To suppose English written in the makeshift alphabet which we still keep in use, would be of course to complicate the matter in hand with a new and needless difficulty. If, then, the book be written in a sufficient alphabet, and handed to a reader, his office will by no means stop short at rendering back into articulate sounds the vowels and consonants before him, as though he were reading over proofs for the press. For the emotional tone just spoken of has dropped out in writing down the words in letters, and it will be the reader’s duty to guess from the meaning of the words what this tone should be, and to put it in again accordingly. He has moreover to introduce emphasis, whether by accent or stress, on certain syllables or words, thereby altering their effect in the sentence; if he says, for example, ‘I never sold you that horse,’ an emphasis on any one of these six words will alter the import of the whole phrase. Now, in emphatic pronunciation two distinct processes are to be remarked. The effect produced by changes in loudness and duration of words is directly imitative; it is a mere gesture made withthe voice, as we may notice by the way in which any one will speak of ‘ashort sharpanswer,’ ‘along wearyyear,’ ‘aloud burstof music,’ ‘agentle glidingmotion,’ as compared with the like manner in which the gesture-language would adapt its force and speed to the kind of action to be represented. Written language can hardly convey but by the context the striking effects which our imitative faculty adds to spoken language, in our continual endeavour to make the sound of each word we speak a sort of echo to its sense. We see this in the difference between writing and telling the little story of the man who was worried by being talked to about ‘good books.’ ‘Do you mean,’ he asked, speaking shortly with a face of strong firm approval, ‘goodbooks?’ ‘or,’ with a drawl and a fatuous-benevolent simper, ‘goo-dbooks?’ Musical accent (accentus,[255]musical tone) is turned to account as a means of emphasis, as when we give prominence to a particular syllable or word in a sentence by raising or depressing it a semi-tone or more. The reader has to divide his sentences with pauses, being guided in this to some extent by stops; the rhythmic measure in which he will utter prose as well as poetry is not without its effect; and he has again to introduce music by speaking each sentence to a kind of imperfect melody. Professor Helmholtz endeavours to write down in musical notes how a German with a bass voice, speaking onBflat, might say,‘Ich bin spatzieren gegangen.—Bist du spatzieren gegangen?’falling a fourth (toF) at the end of the affirmative sentence, and rising a fifth (tof) in asking the question, thus ranging through an octave.[256]When an English speaker tries to illustrate in his own language the rising and falling tones of Siamese vowels, he compares them with the English ones of question and answer, as in ‘Will you go? Yes.’[257]The rules of this imperfect musical intonation in ordinary conversation have been as yet but little studied. But as ameans of giving solemnity and pathos to language, it has been more fully developed and even systematized under exact rules of melody, and we thus have on the one hand ecclesiastical intoning and the less conventional half-singing so often to be heard in religious meetings, and on the other the ancient and modern theatrical recitative. By such intermediate stages we may cross the wide interval from spoken prose, with the musical pitch of its vowels so carelessly kept, and so obscured by consonants as to be difficult even to determine, to full song, in which the consonants are as much as possible suppressed, that they may not interfere with the precise and expressive music of the vowels.
Proceeding now to survey such parts of the vocabulary of mankind as appear to have an intelligible origin in the direct expression of sense by sound, let us first examine Interjections. When Horne Tooke spoke, in words often repeated since, of ‘the brutish inarticulate Interjection,’ he certainly meant to express his contempt for a mode of expression which lay outside his own too narrow view of language. But the epithets are in themselves justifiable enough. Interjections are undoubtedly to a certain extent ‘brutish’ in their analogy to the cries of animals; and the fact gives them an especial interest to modern observers, who are thus enabled to trace phenomena belonging to the mental state of the lower animals up into the midst of the most highly cultivated human language. It is also true that they are ‘inarticulate,’ so far at least that the systems of consonants and vowels recognized by grammarians break down more hopelessly than elsewhere in the attempt to write down interjections. Alphabetic writing is far too incomplete and clumsy an instrument to render their peculiar and variously-modulated sounds, for which a few conventionally-written words do duty poorly enough. In reading aloud, and sometimes even in the talk of those who have learnt rather from books than from the living world, we may hear these awkward imitations,ahem!hein!tush!tut!pshaw!now carryingthe unquestioned authority of words printed in a book, and reproduced letter for letter with a most amusing accuracy. But when Horne Tooke fastens upon an unfortunate Italian grammarian and describes him as ‘The industrious and exact Cinonio, who does not appear ever to have had a single glimpse of reason,’ it is not easy to see what the pioneer of English philology could find to object to in Cinonio’s obviously true assertion, that a single interjection,ah!orahi!is capable of expressing more than twenty different emotions or intentions, such as pain, entreaty, threatening, sighing, disdain, according to the tone in which it is uttered.[258]The fact that interjections do thus utter feelings is quite beyond dispute, and the philologist’s concern with them is on the one hand to study their action in expressing emotion, and on the other to trace their passage into more fully-formed words, such as have their place in connected syntax and form part of logical propositions.
In the first place, however, it is necessary to separate from proper interjections the many sense-words which, often kept up in a mutilated or old-fashioned guise, come so close to them both in appearance and in use. Among classic examples areφέρε! δεῦτε!age!macte!Such a word ishail!which as the Gothic Bible shows, was originally an adjective, ‘whole, hale, prosperous,’ used vocatively, just as the Italians crybravo!brava!bravi!brave!When the African negro cries out in fear or wondermámá! mámá![259]he might be thought to be uttering a real interjection, ‘a word used to express some passion or emotion of the mind,’ as Lindley Murray has it, but in fact he is simply calling, grown-up baby as he is, for his mother; and the very samething has been noticed among Indians of Upper California, who as an expression of pain cry,aná!that is ‘mother.’[260]Other exclamations consist of a pure interjection combined with a pronoun, asοἴμοι!oimè!ah me!or with an adjective, asalas!hélas!(ah weary!) With what care interjections should be sifted, to avoid the risk of treating as original elementary sounds of language what are really nothing but sense-words, we may judge from the way in which the common English exclamationwell! well!approaches the genuine interjectional sound in the Coptic expression ‘to makeouelouele,’ which signifies to wail,Latinululare. Still better, we may find a learned traveller in the18thcentury quite seriously remarking, apropos of the old Greek battle-shout,ἀλαλά! ἀλαλά!that the Turks to this day call outAllah! Allah! Allah!upon the like occasion.[261]
The calls to animals customary in different countries[262]are to a great extent interjectional in their use, but to attempt to explain them as a whole is to step upon as slippery ground as lies within the range of philology. Sometimes they may be in fact pure interjections, like theschû schû!mentioned as an old German cry to scare birds, as we should saysh sh!, or theaá!with which the Indians of Brazil call their dogs. Or they may be set down as simple imitations of the animal’s own cries, as thecluckingto call fowls in our own farm-yards, or the Austrian calls ofpi pi!ortiet tiet!to chickens, or the Swabiankauter kaut!to turkeys, or the shepherd’sbaaingto call sheep in India. In other cases, however, they may be sense-words more or less broken down, as when the creature is spoken to by a sound which seems merely taken from its own common name. If an English countryman meetsa stray sheep-dog, he will simply call to himship! ship!Soschäp schäp!is an Austrian call to sheep, andköss kuhel köss!to cows. In German districtsgus gus!gusch gusch!gös gös!are set down as calls to geese; and when we notice that the Bohemian peasant callshusy!to them, we remember that the name for goose in his language ishusa, a word familiar to English ears in the name of John Huss. The Bohemian, again, will call to his dogps ps!but thenpesmeans ‘dog.’ Other sense-words addressed to animals break down by long repetition into mutilated forms. When we are told that theto to!with which a Portuguese calls a dog is short fortoma toma!(i.e., ‘take take!’) which tells him to come and take his food, we admit the explanation as plausible; and thecoop coop!which a cockney might so easily mistake for a pure interjection, is only ‘Come up! come up!’
‘Come uppe, Whitefoot, come uppe, Lightfoot,Come uppe, Jetty, rise and follow,Jetty, to the milking shed.’
‘Come uppe, Whitefoot, come uppe, Lightfoot,Come uppe, Jetty, rise and follow,Jetty, to the milking shed.’
‘Come uppe, Whitefoot, come uppe, Lightfoot,Come uppe, Jetty, rise and follow,Jetty, to the milking shed.’
‘Come uppe, Whitefoot, come uppe, Lightfoot,
Come uppe, Jetty, rise and follow,
Jetty, to the milking shed.’
But I cannot offer a plausible guess at the origin of such calls ashüf hüf!to horses,hühl hühl!to geese,deckel deckel!to sheep. It is fortunate for etymologists that such trivial little words have not an importance proportioned to the difficulty of clearing up their origin. The wordpuss!raises an interesting philological problem. An English child callingpuss puss!is very likely keeping up the trace of the old Keltic name for the cat, Irishpus, Ersepusag, Gaelicpuis. Similar calls are known elsewhere in Europe (as in Saxony,pûs pûs!), and there is some reason to think that the cat, which came to us from the East, brought with it one of its names, which is still current there, Tamilpûsei!Afghanpusha, Persianpushak, &c. Mr. Wedgwood finds an origin for the call in an imitation of the cat’s spitting, and remarks that the Servians crypis!to drive a cat away, while the Albanians use a similar sound to call it. The way in which the cry ofpuss!has furnished a name forthe cat itself, comes out curiously in countries where the animal has been lately introduced by Englishmen. Thusboosiis the recognized word for cat in the Tonga Islands, no doubt from Captain Cook’s time. Among Indian tribes of North-West America,pwsh,pish-pish, appear in native languages with the meaning of cat; and not only is the European cat called apuss pussin the Chinook Jargon, but in the same curious dialect the word is applied to a native beast, the cougar, now called ‘hyaspuss-puss,’i.e., ‘great cat.’[263]
The derivation of names of animals in this manner from calls to them, may perhaps not have been unfrequent. It appears thathuss!is a cry used in Switzerland to set dogs on to fight, ass—s!might be in England, and that the Swiss call a doghussorhauss, possibly from this. We know the cry ofdill!dilly!as a recognized call to ducks in England, and it is difficult to think it a corruption of any English word or phrase, for the Bohemians also calldlidli!to their ducks. Now, thoughdillordillymay not be found in our dictionaries as the name for a duck, yet the way in which Hood can use it as such in one of his best-known comic poems, shows perfectly the easy and natural step by which such transitions can be made:—
‘For Death among the water-lilies,Cried “Duc ad me” to all her dillies.’
‘For Death among the water-lilies,Cried “Duc ad me” to all her dillies.’
‘For Death among the water-lilies,Cried “Duc ad me” to all her dillies.’
‘For Death among the water-lilies,
Cried “Duc ad me” to all her dillies.’
In just the same way, becausegee!is a usual call of the English waggoner to his horses, the wordgee-geehas become a familiar nursery noun meaning a horse. And neither in such nursery words, nor in words coined in jest,is the evidence bearing on the origin of language to be set aside as worthless; for it may be taken as a maxim of ethnology, that what is done among civilized men in jest, or among civilized children in the nursery, is apt to find its analogue in the serious mental effort of savage, and therefore of primæval tribes.
Drivers’ calls to their beasts, such as thisgee!gee-ho!to urge on horses, andweh!woh!to stop them, form part of the vernacular of particular districts. Thegeho!perhaps came to England in the Norman-French, for it is known in France, and appears in the Italian dictionary asgio!The traveller who has been hearing the drivers in the Grisons stop their horses with a longbr-r-r!may cross a pass and hear on the other side ahü-ü-ü!instead. The ploughman’s calls to turn the leaders of the team to right and left have passed into proverb. In France they say of a stupid clown‘Il n’entend ni àdia!ni àhurhaut!’and the corresponding Platt-Deutsch phrase is ‘He weet nichhutt!nochhoh!’ So there is a regular language to camels, as Captain Burton remarks on his journey to Mekka:ikh ikh!makes them kneel,yáhh yáhh!urges them on,hai hai!induces caution, and so forth. In the formation of these quaint expressions, two causes have been at work. The sounds seem sometimes thoroughly interjectional, as the Arabhai!of caution, or the Frenchhue!North Germanjö!Whatever their origin, they may be made to carry their sense by imitative tones expressive to the ear of both horse and man, as any one will say who hears the contrast between the short and sharp high-pitchedhüp!which tells the Swiss horse to go faster, and the long-drawnhü-ü-ü-ü!which brings him to a stand. Also, the way in which common sense-words are taken up into calls likegee-up!woh-back!shows that we may expect to find various old broken fragments of formal language in the list, and such on inspection we find accordingly. The following lines are quoted by Halliwell from the Micro-Cynicon (1599):—
‘A base borne issue of a baser syer,Bred in a cottage, wandering in the myer,With nailed shooes and whipstaffe in his hand,Who with aheyandreethe beasts command.’
‘A base borne issue of a baser syer,Bred in a cottage, wandering in the myer,With nailed shooes and whipstaffe in his hand,Who with aheyandreethe beasts command.’
‘A base borne issue of a baser syer,Bred in a cottage, wandering in the myer,With nailed shooes and whipstaffe in his hand,Who with aheyandreethe beasts command.’
‘A base borne issue of a baser syer,
Bred in a cottage, wandering in the myer,
With nailed shooes and whipstaffe in his hand,
Who with aheyandreethe beasts command.’
Thisree!is equivalent to ‘right’ (riddle-me-ree = riddle me right), and tells the leader of the team to bear to the right hand. Thehey!may correspond withheit!orcamether!which call him to bear ‘hither,’i.e., to the left. In Germanyhar!här!har-üh!are likewise the same as ‘her,’ ‘hither, to the left.’ Soswude!schwude!zwuder!‘to the left,’ are of course simply ‘zuwider,’ ‘on the contrary way.’ Pairs of calls for ‘right’ and ‘left’ in German-speaking countries arehot!—har!andhott!—wist!Thiswist!is an interesting example of the keeping up of ancient words in such popular tradition. It is evidently a mutilated form of an old German word for the left hand,winistrâ, Anglo-Saxonwinstre, a name long since forgotten by modern High German, as by our own modern English.[264]
As quaint a mixture of words and interjectional cries as I have met with, is in the great French Encyclopædia,[265]which gives a minute description of the hunter’s craft, and prescribes exactly what is to be cried to the hounds under all possible contingencies of the chase. If the creatures understood grammar and syntax, the language could not be more accurately arranged for their ears. Sometimes we have what seem pure interjectional cries. Thus, to encourage the hounds to work, the huntsman is to call to themhà halle halle halle!while to bring them up before they are uncoupled it is prescribed that he shall callhau hau!orhau tahaut!and when they are uncoupled he is to change his cry tohau la y la la y la tayau!a call whichsuggests the Norman original of the Englishtally-ho!With cries of this kind plain French words are intermixed,hà bellement là ila, là ila, hau valet!—hau l’ami, tau tau après après, à route à route!and so on. And sometimes words have broken down into calls whose sense is not quite gone, like the‘vois le ci’and the‘vois le ce l’est’which are still to be distinguished in the shout which is to tell the hunters that the stag they have been chasing has made a return,vauleci revari vaulecelez!But the drollest thing in the treatise is the grave set of English words (in very Gallic shape) with which English dogs are to be spoken to, because, as the author says, ‘there are many English hounds in France, and it is difficult to get them to work when you speak to them in an unknown tongue, that is, in other terms than they have been trained to.’ Therefore, to call them, the huntsman is to cryhere do-do ho ho!to get them back to the right track he is to sayhoupe boy, houpe boy!when there are several on ahead of the rest of the pack, he is to ride up to them and crysaf me boy! saf me boy!and lastly, if they are obstinate and will not stop, he is to make them go back with a shout ofcobat, cobat!
How far the lower animals may attach any inherent meaning to interjectional sounds is a question not easy to answer. But it is plain that in most of the cases mentioned here they only understand them as recognized signals which have a meaning by regular association, as when they remember that they are fed with one noise and driven away with another, and they also pay attention to the gestures which accompany the cries. Thus the well-known Spanish way of calling the cat ismiz miz!whilezape zape!is used to drive it away; and the writer of an old dictionary maintains that there can be no real difference between these words except by custom, for, he declares, he has heard that in a certain monastery where they kept very handsome cats, the brother in charge of the refectory hit upon the device of callingzape zape!to them when he gave themtheir food, and then he drove them away with a stick, crying angrilymiz miz; and this of course prevented any stranger from calling and stealing them, for only he and the cats knew the secret![266]To philologists, the manner in which such calls to animals become customary in particular districts illustrates the consensus by which the use of words is settled. Each case of the kind indicates that a word has prevailed by selection among a certain society of men, and the main reasons of words holding their ground within particular limits, though it is so difficult to assign them exactly in each case, are probably inherent fitness in the first place, and traditional inheritance in the second.
When the ground has been cleared of obscure or mutilated sense-words, there remains behind a residue of real sound-words, or pure interjections. It has long and reasonably been considered that the place in history of these expressions is a very primitive one. Thus De Brosses describes them as necessary and natural words, common to all mankind, and produced by the combination of man’s conformation with the interior affections of his mind. One of the best means of judging the relation between interjectional utterances and the feelings they express, is to compare the voices of the lower animals with our own. To a considerable extent there is a similarity. As their bodily and mental structure has an analogy with our own, so they express their minds by sounds which have to our ears a certain fitness for what they appear to mean. It is so with the bark, the howl, and the whine of the dog, the hissing of geese, the purring of cats, the crowing and clucking of cocks and hens. But in other cases, as with the hooting of owls and the shrieks of parrots and many other birds, we cannot suppose that these sounds are intended to utter anything like the melancholy or pain which such cries from a human being would be taken to convey. There are many animals that never utter any crybut what, according to our notions of the meaning of sounds, would express rage or discomfort; how far are the roars and howls of wild beasts to be thus interpreted? We might as well imagine the tuning violin to be in pain, or the moaning wind to express sorrow. The connexion between interjection and emotion depending on the physical structure of the animal which utters or hears the sound, it follows that the general similarity of interjectional utterance among all the varieties of the human race is an important manifestation of their close physical and intellectual unity.
Interjectional sounds uttered by man for the expression of his own feelings serve also as signs indicating these feelings to another. A long list of such interjections, common to races speaking the most widely various languages, might be set down in a rough way as representing the sighs, groans, moans, cries, shrieks, and growls by which man gives utterance to various of his feelings. Such for instance, are some of the many sounds for whichah!oh!ahi!aie!are the inexpressive written representatives; such is the sigh which is written down in the Wolof language of Africa ashhihhe!in English asheigho!in Greek and Latin as ἒ ἒ! ἒ ἒ!heu!eheu!Thus the open-mouthedwah wah!of astonishment, so common in the East, reappears in America in thehwah!hwah-wa!of the Chinook Jargon; and the kind of groan which is represented in European languages byweh!ouais!οὐαί!vae!is given in Coptic byouae!in Galla bywayo!in the Ossetic of the Caucasus byvoy!among the Indians of British Columbia bywoī!Where the interjections taken down in the vocabularies of other languages differ from those recognized in our own, we at any rate appreciate them and see how they carry their meaning. Thus with the Malagasyu-u!of pleasure, the North-American Indian’s often-described gutturalugh!thekwish!of contempt in the Chinook Jargon, the Tunguzyo yo!of pain, the Irishwb wb!of distress, the native Brazilian’steh teh!of wonder and reverence, thehai-yah!so well known in the Pigeon-English of the Chinese ports, and even, to take an extreme case, the interjections of surprise among the Algonquin Indians, where men saytiau!and womennyau!It is much the same with expressions which are not uttered for the speaker’s satisfaction, but are calls addressed to another. Thus the Siamese call ofhē!the Hebrewhe! ha!for ‘lo! behold!’ thehói!of the Clallam Indians for ‘stop!’ the Lummihái!for ‘hold, enough!’—these and others like them belong just as much to English. Another class of interjections are such as any one conversant with the gesture-signs of savages and deaf-mutes would recognize as being themselves gesture signs, made with vocal sound, in short, voice-gestures. The soundm’m, m’n, made with the lips closed, is the obvious expression of the man who tries to speak, but cannot. Even the deaf-and-dumb child, though he cannot hear the sound of his own voice, makes this noise to show that he is dumb, that he ismu mu, as the Vei negroes of West Africa would say. To the speaking man, the sound which we write asmum!says plainly enough ‘hold your tongue!’ ‘mum’sthe word!’ and in accordance with this meaning has served to form various imitative words, of which a type is Tahitianmamu, to be silent. Often made with a slight effort which aspirates it, and with more or less continuance, this sound becomes what may be indicated as‘m,‘n,h’m,h’n, &c., interjections which are conventionally written down as words,hem!ahem!hein!Their primary sense seems in any case that of hesitation to speak, of ‘humming and hawing,’ but this serves with a varied intonation to express such hesitation or refraining from articulate words as belongs either to surprise, doubt or enquiry, approbation or contempt. In the vocabulary of the Yorubas of West Africa, the nasal interjectionhuñis rendered, just as it might be in English, as ‘fudge!’ Rochefort describes the Caribs listening in reverent silence to their chief’s discourse, and testifyingtheir approval with ahun-hun!just as in his time (17th century) an English congregation would have saluted a popular preacher.[267]The gesture of blowing, again, is a familiar expression of contempt and disgust, and when vocalized gives the labial interjections which are writtenpah!bah!pugh!pooh!in Welshpw!in Low Latinpuppup!and set down by travellers among the savages in Australia aspooh!These interjections correspond with the mass of imitative words which express blowing, such as Malaypuput, to blow. The labial gestures of blowing pass into those of spitting, of which one kind gives the dental interjectiont’ t’ t’!which is written in English or Dutchtut tut!and that this is no mere fancy, a number of imitative verbs of various countries will serve to show, Tahitiantutua, to spit, being a typical instance.
The place of interjectional utterance in savage intercourse is well shown in Cranz’s description. The Greenlanders, he says, especially the women, accompany many words with mien and glances, and he who does not well apprehend this may easily miss the sense. Thus when they affirm anything with pleasure they suck down air by the throat with a certain sound, and when they deny anything with contempt or horror, they turn up the nose and give a slight sound through it. And when they are out of humour, one must understand more from their gestures than their words.[268]Interjection and gesture combine to form a tolerable practical means of intercourse, as where the communication between French and English troops in the Crimea is described as ‘consisting largely of suchinterjectional utterances, reiterated with expressive emphasis and considerable gesticulation.’[269]This description well brings before us in actual life a system of effective human intercourse, in which there has not yet arisen the use of those articulate sounds carrying their meaning by tradition, which are the inherited words of the dictionary.
When, however, we look closely into these inherited sense-words themselves, we find that interjectional sounds have actually had more or less share in their formation. Not stopping short at the function ascribed to them by grammarians, of standing here and there outside a logical sentence, the interjections have also served as radical sounds out of which verbs, substantives, and other parts of speech have been shaped. In tracing the progress of interjections upward into fully developed language, we begin with sounds merely expressing the speaker’s actual feelings. When, however, expressive sounds likeah!ugh!pooh!are uttered not to exhibit the speaker’s actual feelings at the moment, but only in order to suggest to another the thought of admiration or disgust, then such interjections have little or nothing to distinguish them from fully formed words. The next step is to trace the taking up of such sounds into the regular forms of ordinary grammar. Familiar instances of such formations may be found among ourselves in nursery language, where towohis found in use with the meaning of to stop, or in that real though hardly acknowledged part of the English language to which belong such verbs as toboo-hoo. Among the most obvious of such words are those which denote the actual utterance of an interjection, or pass thence into some closely allied meaning. Thus the Fijian women’s cry of lamentationoile!becomes the verboile‘to bewail,’oile-taka‘to lament for’ (the men cryule!); now this is in perfect analogy with such words asululare, towail. With different grammatical terminations, another sound produces the Zulu verbgigitekaand its English equivalent togiggle.The Gallaiya, ‘to cry, scream, give the battle-cry’ has its analogues in Greekἰά, ἰή, ‘a cry,’ἰήïος‘wailing, mournful,’ &c. Good cases may be taken from a curious modern dialect with a strong propensity to the use of obvious sound-words, the Chinook Jargon of North-West America. Here we find adopted from an Indian dialect the verb tokish-kish, that is, ‘to drive cattle or horses’;hummstands for the word ‘stink,’ verb or noun; and the laugh,heehee, becomes a recognized term meaning fun or amusement, as inmamook heehee, ‘to amuse’ (i.e., ‘to makeheehee’) andheehee house, ‘a tavern.’ In Hawaii,aais ‘to insult;’ in the Tonga Islands,úi!is at once the exclamation ‘fie!’ and the verb ‘to cry out against.’ In New Zealand,hé!is an interjection denoting surprise at a mistake,héas a noun or verb meaning ‘error, mistake, to err, to go astray.’ In the Quiché language of Guatemala, the verbsay,oy,boy, express the idea of ‘to call’ in different ways. In the Carajas language of Brazil, we may guess an interjectional origin in the adjective ei, ‘sorrowful,’ and can scarcely fail to see a derivation from expressive sound in the verbhai-hai‘to run away’ (the wordaie-aie, used to mean ‘an omnibus’ in modern French slang, is said to be a comic allusion to the cries of the passengers whose toes are trodden on). The Camacan Indians, when they wish to express the notion of ‘much’ or ‘many,’ hold out their fingers and sayhi. As this is an ordinary savage gesture expressing multitude, it seems likely that thehiis a mere interjection, requiring the visible sign to convey the full meaning.[270]In the Quichua language of Peru,alalau!is an interjection of complaint at cold, whence the verbalalauñini, ‘to complain of the cold.’ At the end of each strophe of the Peruvian hymns to the Sun was sung the triumphant exclamationhaylli!and with this sound are connected the verbshayllini‘to sing,’hayllicuni, ‘to celebrate a victory.’ The Zuluhalala!of exultation, which becomes also a verb ‘to shout for joy,’ has its analogues in the Tibetanalala!of joy, and the Greek ἀλαλά, which is used as a noun meaning the battle-cry and even the onset itself, ἀλαλάζω, ‘to raise the war-cry,’ as well as Hebrewhillel, ‘to sing praise,’ whencehallelujah!a word which the believers in the theory that the Red Indians were the Lost Tribes naturally recognized in the native medicine-man’s chant ofhi-le-li-lah!The Zulu makes his pantingha!do duty as an expression of heat, when he says that the hot weather ‘saysha ha’; his way of pitching a song by aha! ha!is apparently represented in the verbhaya, ‘to lead a song,’hayo‘a starting song, a fee given to the singing-leader for thehaya’; and his interjectional expressionbà bà!‘as when one smacks his lips from a bitter taste,’ becomes a verb-root meaning ‘to be bitter or sharp to the taste, to prick, to smart.’ The Galla language gives some good examples of interjections passing into words, as where the verbsbirr-djeda(to saybrr!) andbirēfada(to makebrr!) have the meaning ‘to be afraid.’ Thuso!being the usual answer to a call, and also a cry to drive cattle, there are formed from it by the addition of verbal terminations, the verbsoada, ‘to answer,’ andofa, ‘to drive.’
If the magnific and honorificoof Japanese grammar can be assigned to an interjectional origin, its capabilities in modifying signification become instructive.[271]It is used before substantives as a prefix of honour;couni, ‘country,’ thus becomingocouni. When a man is talking to his superiors, he putsobefore the names of all objects belonging to them, while these superiors drop theoin speaking of anything of their own, or an inferior’s; among the higherclasses, persons of equal rank putobefore the names of each other’s things, but not before their own; it is polite to sayobefore the names of all women, and well-bred children are distinguished from little peasants by the way in which they are careful to put it even before the nursery names of father and mother,o toto,o caca, which correspond to thepapaandmamaof Europe. A distinction is made in written language betweeno, which is put to anything royal, andoowhich means great, as may be instanced in the use of the wordmets’kéor ‘spy’ (literally ‘eye-fixer’);o mets’kéis a princely or imperial spy, whileoo mets’kéis the spy in chief. This interjectional adjectiveoo, great, is usually prefixed to the name of the capital city, which it is customary to calloo Yedoin speaking to one of its inhabitants, or when officials talk of it among themselves. And lastly, theoof honour is prefixed to verbs in all their forms of conjugation, and it is polite to sayominahai matse, ‘please to see,’ instead of the mere plebeianminahai matse. Now an English child of six years old would at once understand these formations if taken as interjectional; and if we do not incorporate in our grammar theo!of admiration and reverential embarrassment, it is because we have not chosen to take advantage of this rudimentary means of expression. Another exclamation, the cry ofio!has taken a place in etymology. When added by the German to his cry of ‘Fire!’ ‘Murder!’Feuerio!Mordio!it remains indeed as mere an interjection as theo!in our street cries of ‘Pease-o!’ ‘Dust-o!’ or theâ!in old Germanwafenâ!‘to arms!’ ‘hilfâ!‘help!’ But the Iroquois of North America makes a fuller use of his materials, and carries hisio!of admiration into the very formation of compound words, adding it to a noun to say that it is beautiful or good; thus, in Mohawk,garontameans a tree,garontioa beautiful tree; in like manner,Ohiomeans ‘river-beautiful;’ andOntario, ‘hill-rock-beautiful,’ is derived in the same way. When, in the oldtimes of the French occupation of Canada, there was sent over a Governor-General of New France, Monsieur de Montmagny, the Iroquois rendered his name from their wordononte, ‘mountain,’ translating him intoOnontio, or ‘Great Mountain,’ and thus it came to pass that the name of Onontio was handed down long after, like that of Cæsar, as the title of each succeeding governor, while for the King of France was reserved the yet higher style of ‘the great Onontio.’[272]
The quest of interjectional derivations for sense-words is apt to lead the etymologist into very rash speculations. One of his best safeguards is to test forms supposed to be interjectional, by ascertaining whether anything similar has come into use in decidedly distinct languages. For instance, among the familiar sounds which fall on the traveller’s ear in Spain is the muleteer’s cry to his beasts,arre! arre!From this interjection, a family of Spanish words are reasonably supposed to be derived; the verbarrear, ‘to drive mules,’arriero, the name for the ‘muleteer’ himself, and so forth.[273]Now is thisarre!itself a genuine interjectional sound? It seems likely to be so, for Captain Wilson found it in use in the Pelew Islands, where the paddlers in the canoes were kept up to their work by crying to themarree! arree!Similar interjections are noticed elsewhere with a sense of mere affirmation, as in an Australian dialect wherea-ree!is set down as meaning ‘indeed,’ and in the Quichua language whereari!means ‘yes!’ whence the verbariñi, ‘to affirm.’ Two other cautions are desirable in such enquiries. These are, not to travel too far from the absolute meaning expressed by the interjection, unless there is strong corroborative evidence,and not to override ordinary etymology by treating derivative words as though they were radical. Without these checks, even sound principle breaks down in application, as the following two examples may show. It is quite true thath’m!is a common interjectional call, and that the Dutch have made a verb of it,hemmen, ‘to hem after a person.’ We may notice a similar call in West Africa, in themma!which is translated ‘hallo! stop!’ in the language of Fernando Po. But to apply this as a derivation for Germanhemmen, ‘to stop, check, restrain,’ tohemin, and even to thehemof a garment, as Mr. Wedgwood does without even a perhaps,[274]is travelling too far beyond the record. Again, it is quite true that sounds of clicking and smacking of the lips are common expressions of satisfaction all over the world, and words may be derived from these sounds, as where a vocabulary of the Chinook language of North-West America expresses ‘good’ ast’k-tok-te, ore-tok-te, sounds which we cannot doubt to be derived from such clicking noises, if the words are not in fact attempts to write down the very clicks themselves. But it does not follow that we may take such words asdeliciæ,delicatus, out of a highly organized language like Latin, and refer them, as the same etymologist does, to an interjectional utterance of satisfaction,dlick![275]To do this, is to ignore altogether the composition of words; we might as well explain Latindilectusor Englishdelightas direct formations from expressive sound. In concluding these remarks on interjections, two or three groups of words may be brought forward as examples of the application of collected evidence from a number of languages, mostly of the lower races.
The affirmative and negative particles, which bear in language such meanings as ‘yes!’ ‘indeed!’ and ‘no!’ ‘not,’ may have their derivations from many different sources. It is thought that the Australian dialects all belong to a single stock, but so unlike are the sounds theyuse for ‘no!’ and ‘yes!’ that tribes are actually named from these words as a convenient means of distinction. Thus the tribes known asGureang,Kamilaroi,Kogai,Wolaroi,Wailwun,Wiratheroi, have their names from the words they use for ‘no,’ these beinggure,kamil,ko,wol,wail,wira, respectively; and on the other hand thePikambulare said to be so called from their wordpika, ‘yes.’ The device of naming tribes, thus invented by the savages of Australia, and which perhaps recurs in Brazil in the name of theCocatapuyatribe (coca‘no,’tapuya‘man’) is very curious in its similarity to the mediæval division ofLangue d’ocandLangue d’oïl, according to the words for ‘yes!’ which prevailed in Southern and Northern France:oc!is Latinhoc, as we might say ‘that’s it!’ while the longer formhoc illudwas reduced tooïl!and thence tooui!Many other of the words for ‘yes!’ and ‘no!’ may be sense-words, as, again, the French and Italiansi!is Latinsic. But on the other hand there is reason to think that many of these particles in use in various languages are not sense-words, but sound-words of a purely interjectional kind; or, what comes nearly to the same thing, a feeling of fitness of the sound to the meaning may have affected the choice and shaping of sense-words—a remark of large application in such enquiries as the present. It is an old suggestion that the primitive sound of such words asnonis a nasal interjection of doubt or dissent.[276]It corresponds in sound with the visible gesture of closing the lips, while a vowel-interjection, with or without aspiration, belongs rather to open-mouthed utterance. Whether from this or some other cause, there is a remarkable tendency among most distant and various languages of the world, on the one hand to use vowel-sounds, with soft or hard breathing, to express ‘yes!’ and on the other hand to use nasal consonants to express ‘no!’ The affirmative form is much the commoner. The gutturali-i!of the West Australian, theēē!of the Darien, thea-ah!of the Clallam, theé!ofthe Yakama Indians, thee!of the Basuto, and theai!of the Kanuri, are some examples of a wide group of forms, of which the following are only part of those noted down in Polynesian and South American districts—ii!é!ia!aio!io!ya!ey!&c.,h’!heh!he-e!hü!hoehah!ah-ha!&c. The idea has most weight where pairs of words for ‘yes!’ and ‘no!’ are found both conforming. Thus in the very suggestive description by Dobrizhoffer among the Abipones of South America, for ‘yes!’ the men and youths sayhéé!the women sayháá!and the old men give a grunt; while for ‘no’ they all sayyna!and make the loudness of the sound indicate the strength of the negation. Dr. Martius’s collection of vocabularies of Brazilian tribes, philologically very distinct, contains several such pairs of affirmatives and negatives, the equivalents of ‘yes!’—‘no!’ being in Tupiayé—aan! aani!; in Guatoii!—mau!; in Jumana,aeae!—mäiu!; in Miranhaha ú!—nani!The Quichua of Peru affirms byy!hu!and expresses ‘no,’ ‘not,’ ‘not at all,’ byama!manan!&c., making from the latter the verbmanamñi, ‘to deny.’ The Quiché of Guatemala haseorvefor the affirmative,ma,man,mana, for the negative. In Africa, again, the Galla language hasee!for ‘yes!’ andhn,hin,hm, for ‘not!’; the Fernandianee!for ‘yes!’ and‘ntfor ‘not;’ while the Coptic dictionary gives the affirmative (Latin ‘sane’) aseie,ie, and the negative by a long list of nasal sounds such asan,emmen,en,mmn, &c. The Sanskrit particleshi!‘indeed, certainly,’na, ‘not,’ exemplify similar forms in Indo-European languages, down to our ownaye!andno![277]There must be some meaning in all this, for otherwise I could hardly have noted down incidentally, without making any attempt at a general search, so many cases from such different languages, only finding a comparatively small number of contradictory cases.[278]