De Brosses maintained that the Latinstare, tostand, might be traced to an origin in expressive sound. He fancied he could hear in it an organic radical sign designating fixity, and could thus explain whyst!should be used as a call to make a manstand still. Its connexion with these sounds is often spoken of in more modern books, and one imaginative German philologer describes their origin among primæval men as vividly as though he had been there to see. A man stands beckoning in vain to a companion who does not see him, till at last his effort relieves itself by the help of the vocal nerves, and involuntarily there breaks from him the soundst!Now the other hears the sound, turns toward it, sees the beckoning gesture, knows that he is called to stop; and when this has happened again and again, the action comes to be described in common talk by uttering the now familiarst!and thusstabecomes a root, the symbol of the abstract idea to stand![279]This is a most ingenious conjecture, but unfortunately nothing more. It would be at any rate strengthened, though not established, if its supporters could prove that thest!used to call people in Germany,pst!in Spain, is itself a pure interjectional sound. Even this, however, has never been made out. The call has not yet been shown to be in use outside our own Indo-European family of languages; and so long as it is only found in use within these limits, an opponent might even plausibly claim it as an abbreviation of the verysta!(‘stay! stop!’) for which the theory proposes it as an origin.[280]
That it is not unfair to ask for fuller evidence of a sound being purely interjectional than its appearance in a single family of languages, may be shown by examining another group of interjections, which are found among the remotest tribes, and thus have really considerable claims to rank among the primary sounds of language. These are the simple sibilants,s!sh!h’sh!used especially to scare birds, and among men to express aversion or call for silence. Catlin describes a party of Sioux Indians, when they came to the portrait of a dead chief, each putting his hand over his mouth with ahush-sh; and when he himself wished to approach the sacred ‘medicine’ in a Mandan lodge, he was called to refrain by the samehush-sh!Among ourselves the sibilant interjection passes into two exactly opposite senses, according as it is meant to put the speaker himself to silence, or to command silence for him to be heard; and thus we find the sibilant used elsewhere, sometimes in the one way and sometimes in the other. Among the wild Veddas of Ceylon,iss!is an exclamation of disapproval, as in ancient or modern Europe; and the verbshârak, to hiss, is used in Hebrew with a like sense, ‘they shall hiss him out of his place.’ But in Japan reverence is expressed by a hiss, commanding silence. Captain Cook remarked that the natives of the New Hebrides expressed their admiration by hissing like geese. Casalis says of the Basutos, ‘Hisses are the most unequivocal marks of applause, and are as much courted in the African parliaments as they are dreaded by our candidates for popular favour.’[281]Among other sibilant interjections, are Turkishsûsâ!Osseticss!sos!‘silence!’Fernandiansia!‘listen!’ ‘tush!’ Yorubasió!‘pshaw!’ Thus it appears that these sounds, far from being special to one linguistic family, are very widespread elements of human speech. Nor is there any question as to their passage into fully-formed words, as in our verb tohush, which has passed into the sense of ‘to quiet, put to sleep’ (adjectively, ‘ashushas death’), metaphorically tohushup a matter, or Greekσίζω‘to hush, say hush! command silence.’ Even Latinsilereand Gothicsilan, ‘to be silent,’ may with some plausibility be explained as derived from the interjectionals!of silence.
Sanskrit dictionaries recognize several words which explicitly state their own interjectional derivation; such arehûñkâra(hûm-making), ‘the utterance of the mystic religious exclamationhûm!’ andçiççabda(çiç-sound), ‘a hiss.’ Besides these obvious formations, the interjectional element is present to some greater or less degree in the list of Sanskrit radicals, which represent probably better than those of any other language the verb-roots of the ancient Aryan stock. Inru, ‘to roar, cry, wail’ and inkakh, ‘to laugh,’ we have the simpler kind of interjectional derivation, that which merely describes a sound. As to the more difficult kind, which carry the sense into a new stage, Mr. Wedgwood makes out a strong case for the connexion of interjections of loathing and aversion, such aspooh!fie!&c., with that large group of words which are represented in English byfoulandfiend, in Sanskrit by the verbspûy, ‘to become foul, to stink’ andpiy,pîy, ‘to revile, to hate.’[282]Furtherevidence may be here adduced in support of this theory. The languages of the lower races use the soundputo express an evil smell; the Zulu remarks that ‘the meat sayspu’ (inyama itipu), meaning that it stinks; the Timorese haspoöp‘putrid;’ the Quiché language haspuh,poh‘corruption, pus,’pohir‘to turn bad, rot,’puz‘rottenness, what stinks;’ the Tupi word for nasty,puxi, may be compared with the Latinputidus, and the Columbia River name for the ‘skunk,’o-pun-pun, with similar names of stinking animals, Sanskritpûtikâ‘civet-cat,’ and Frenchputois‘pole-cat.’ From the French interjectionfi!words have long been formed belonging to the language, if not authenticated by the Academy; in mediæval French‘maistrefi-fi’was a recognized term for a scavenger, andfi-fibooks are not yet extinct.
There has been as yet, unfortunately, too much separation between what may be called generative philology, which examines into the ultimate origins of words, and historical philology, which traces their transmission and change. It will be a great gain to the science of language to bring these two branches of enquiry into closer union, even as the processes they relate to have been going on together since the earliest days of speech. At present the historical philologists of the school of Grimm and Bopp, whose great work has been the tracing of our Indo-European dialects to an early Aryan form of language, have had much the advantage in fulness of evidence and strictness of treatment. At the same time it is evident that the views of the generative philologists, from De Brosses onward, embody a soundprinciple, and that much of the evidence collected as to emotional and other directly expressive words, is of the highest value in the argument. But in working out the details of such word-formation, it must be remembered that no department of philology lies more open to Augustine’s caustic remark on the etymologists of his time, that like the interpretation of dreams, the derivation of words is set down by each man according to his own fancy. (Ut somniorum interpretatio ita verborum origo pro cujusque ingenio prædicatur.)