Chapter VI (1)

EMOTIONAL AND IMITATIVE LANGUAGE (_continued_).

Imitative Words—Human actions named from sound—Animals’ names from
cries, &c.—Musical Instruments—Sounds reproduced—Words modified to
adapt sound to sense—Reduplication—Graduation of vowels to express
distance and difference—Children’s Language—Sound-words as related
to Sense-words—Language an original product of the lower Culture.

From the earliest times of language to our own day, it is unlikely that men ever quite ceased to be conscious that some of their words were derived from imitation of the common sounds heard about them. In our own modern English, for instance, results of such imitation are evident; flies _buzz_, bees _hum_, snakes _hiss_, a cracker or a bottle of ginger-beer _pops_, a cannon or a bittern _booms_. In the words for animals and for musical instruments in the various languages of the world, the imitation of their cries and tones is often to be plainly heard, as in the names of the _hoopoe_, the _ai-ai_ sloth, the _kaka_ parrot, the Eastern _tomtom_, which is a drum, the African _ulule_, which is a flute, the Siamese _khong-bong_, which is a wooden harmonicon, and in like manner through a host of other words. But these evident cases are far from representing the whole effects of imitation on the growth of language. They form, indeed, the easy entrance to a philological region, which becomes less penetrable the farther it is explored.

The operations of which we see the results before us in the actual languages of the world seem to have been somewhat as follows. Men have imitated their own emotional utterances or interjections, the cries of animals, the tones of musical instruments, the sounds of shouting, howling, stamping, breaking, tearing, scraping, with others which are all day coming to their ears, and out of these imitations many current words indisputably have their source. But these words, as we find them in use, differ often widely, often beyond all recognition, from the original sounds they sprang from. In the first place, man’s voice can only make a very rude copy of most sounds his ear receives; his possible vowels are very limited in their range compared with natural tones, and his possible consonants still more helpless as a means of imitating natural noises. Moreover, his voice is only allowed to use a part even of this imperfect imitative power, seeing that each language for its own convenience restricts it to a small number of set vowels and consonants, to which the imitative sounds have to conform, thus becoming conventionalized into articulate words with further loss of imitative accuracy. No class of words have a more perfect imitative origin than those which simply profess to be vocal imitations of sound. How ordinary alphabets to some extent succeed and to some extent fail in writing down these sounds may be judged from a few examples. Thus, the Australian imitation of a spear or bullet striking is given as _toop_; to the Zulu, when a calabash is beaten, it says _boo_; the Karens hear the flitting ghosts of the dead call in the wailing voice of the wind, _re, re, ro, ro_; the old traveller, Pietro della Valle, tells how the Shah of Persia sneered at Timur and his Tartars, with their arrows that went _ter ter_; certain Buddhist heretics maintained that water is alive, because when it boils it says _chichitá, chitichita_, a symptom of vitality which occasioned much theological controversy as to drinking cold and warm water. Lastly, sound-words taken up into the general inventory of a language have to follow its organic changes, and in the course of phonetic transition, combination, decay, and mutilation, to lose ever more and more their original shape. To take a single example, the French _huer_ ‘to shout’ (Welsh _hwa_) may be a perfect imitative verb; yet when it passes into modern English _hue_ and cry, our changed pronunciation of the vowel destroys all imitation of the call. Now to the language-makers all this was of little account. They merely wanted recognized words to express recognized thought, and no doubt arrived by repeated trials at systems which were found practically to answer this purpose. But to the modern philologist, who is attempting to work out the converse of the problem, and to follow backward the course of words to original imitative sound, the difficulty is most embarrassing. It is not only that thousands of words really derived from such imitation may now by successive change have lost all safe traces of their history; such mere deficiency of knowledge is only a minor evil. What is far worse is that the way is thrown open to an unlimited number of false solutions, which yet look on the face of them fully as like truth as others which we know historically to be true. One thing is clear, that it is of no use to resort to violent means, to rush in among the words of language, explaining them away right and left as derived each from some remote application of an imitative noise. The advocate of the Imitative Theory who attempts this, trusting in his own powers of discernment, has indeed taken in hand a perilous task, for, in fact, of all judges of the question at issue, he has nourished and trained himself up to become the very worst. His imagination is ever suggesting to him what his judgment would like to find true; like a witness answering the questions of the counsel on his own side, he answers in good faith, but with what bias we all know. It was thus with De Brosses, to whom this department of philology owes so much. It is nothing to say that he had a keen ear for the voice of Nature; she must have positively talked to him in alphabetic language, for he could hear the sound of hollowness in the _sk_ of σκάπτω ‘to dig,’ of hardness in the _cal_ of _callosity_, the noise of insertion of a body between two others in the _tr_ of _trans_, _intra_. In enquiries so liable to misleading fancy, no pains should be spared in securing impartial testimony, and it fortunately happens that there are available sources of such evidence, which, when thoroughly worked, will give to the theory of imitative words as near an approach to accuracy as has been attained to in any other wide philological problem. By comparing a number of languages, widely apart in their general system and materials, and whose agreement as to the words in question can only be accounted for by similar formation of words from similar suggestion of sound, we obtain groups of words whose imitative character is indisputable. The groups here considered consist in general of imitative words of the simpler kind, those directly connected with the special sound they are taken from, but their examination to some extent admits of words being brought in, where the connexion of the idea expressed with the sound imitated is more remote. This, lastly, opens the far wider and more difficult problem, how far imitation of sounds is the primary cause of the great mass of words in the vocabularies of the world, between whose sound and sense no direct connexion appears.

Words which express human actions accompanied with sound form a very large and intelligible class. In remote and most different languages, we find such forms as _pu_, _puf_, _bu_, _buf_, _fu_, _fuf_, in use with the meaning of _puffing_, _fuffing_; or blowing; Malay _puput_; Tongan _buhi_; Maori _pupui_; Australian _bobun_, _bwa-bun_; Galla _bufa_, _afufa_; Zulu _futa_, _punga_, _pupuza_ (_fu_, _pu_, used as expressive particles); Quiché _puba_; Quichua _puhuni_; Tupi _ypeû_; Finnish _puhkia_; Hebrew _puach_; Danish _puste_; Lithuanian _púciu_; and in numbers of other languages;[283] here, grammatical adjuncts apart, the significant force lies in the imitative syllable. Savages have named the European musket when they saw it, by the sound _pu_, describing not the report, but the puff of smoke issuing from the muzzle. The Society Islanders supposed at first that the white men blew through the barrel of the gun, and they called it accordingly _pupuhi_, from the verb _puhi_ to blow, while the New Zealanders more simply called it a _pu_. So the Amaxosa of South Africa call it _umpu_, from the imitative sound _pu!_ The Chinook Jargon of North-West America uses the phrase _mamook poo_ (make _poo_) for a verb ‘to shoot,’ and a six-chambered revolver is called _tohum poo_, _i.e._, a ‘six-_poo_.’ When a European uses the word _puff_ to denote the discharge of a gun, he is merely referring to the smoke blown out, as he would speak of a _puff_ of wind, or even a powder-_puff_ or a _puff_-ball; and when a pistol is called in colloquial German a _puffer_, the meaning of the word matches that used for it in French Argot, a ‘soufflant.’ It has often been supposed that the _puff_ imitates the actual sound, the _bang_ of the gun, and this has been brought forward to show by what extremely different words one and the same sound may be imitated, but this is a mistake.[284] These derivations of the name of the gun from the notion of blowing correspond with those which give names to the comparatively noiseless blow-tube of the bird-hunter, called by the Indians of Yucatan a _pub_, in South America by the Chiquitos a _pucuna_, by the Cocamas a _puna_. Looking into vocabularies of languages which have such verbs ‘to blow,’ it is usual to find with them other words apparently related to them, and expressing more or less distant ideas. Thus Australian _poo-yu_, _puyu_ ‘smoke;’ Quichua _puhucuni_ ‘to light a fire,’ _punquini_ ‘to swell,’ _puyu_, _puhuyu_ ‘a cloud;’ Maori _puku_ ‘to pant,’ _puka_ ‘to swell;’ Tupi _púpú_, _pupúre_ ‘to boil;’ Galla _bube_ ‘wind,’ _bubiza_ ‘to cool by blowing;’ Kanuri (root _fu_) _fungin_ ‘to blow, swell,’ _furúdu_ ‘a stuffed pad or bolster,’ &c., _bubute_ ‘bellows’ (_bubute fungin_ ‘I blow the bellows’); Zulu (dropping the prefixes) _puku_, _pukupu_ ‘frothing, foam,’ whence _pukupuku_ ‘an empty frothy fellow,’ _pupuma_ ‘to bubble, boil,’ _fu_ ‘a cloud,’ _fumfu_ ‘blown about like high grass in the wind,’ whence _fumfuta_ ‘to be confused, thrown into disorder,’ _futo_ ‘bellows,’ _fuba_ ‘the breast, chest,’ then figuratively ‘bosom, conscience.’

The group of words belonging to the closed lips, of which _mum_, _mumming_, _mumble_ are among the many forms belonging to European languages,[285] are worked out in like manner among the lower races—Vei _mu mu_ ‘dumb’; Mpongwe _imamu_ ‘dumb’; Zulu _momata_ (from _moma_, ‘a motion with the mouth as in mumbling’) ‘to move the mouth or lips,’ _mumata_ ‘to close the lips as with a mouthful of water,’ _mumuta_, _mumuza_ ‘to eat mouthfuls of corn, &c., with the lips shut;’ Tahitian _mamu_ ‘to be silent,’ _omumu_ ‘to murmur;’ Fijian, _nomo_, _nomo-nomo_ ‘to be silent;’ Chilian, _ñomn_ ‘to be silent;’ Quiché, _mem_ ‘mute,’ whence _memer_ ‘to become mute;’ Quichua, _amu_ ‘dumb, silent,’ _amullini_ ‘to have something in the mouth,’ _amul-layacuni simicta_ ‘to mutter, to grumble.’ The group represented by Sanskrit _t’hût’hû_ ‘the sound of spitting,’ Persian _thu kerdan_ (make _thu_) ‘to spit,’ Greek πτύω, may be compared with Chinook _mamook toh_, _tooh_, (make _toh_, _tooh_); Chilian _tuvcùtun_ (make _tuv_); Tahitian _tutua_; Galla _twu_; Yoruba _tu_. Among the Sanskrit verb-roots, none carries its imitative nature more plainly than _kshu_ ‘to sneeze;’ the following analogous forms are from South America:—Chilian, _echiun_; Quichua, _achhini_; and from various languages of Brazilian tribes, _techa-ai_, _haitschu_, _atchian_, _natschun_, _aritischune_, &c. Another imitative verb is well shown in the Negro-English dialect of Surinam, _njam_ ‘to eat’ (pron. _nyam_), _njam-njam_ ‘food’ (‘en hem _njanjam_ ben de sprinkhan nanga boesi-honi’—‘and his meat was locusts and wild honey’). In Australia the imitative verb ‘to eat’ reappears as _g’nam-ang_. In Africa the Susu language has _nimnim_, ‘to taste,’ and a similar formation is observed in the Zulu _nambita_ ‘to smack the lips after eating or tasting, and thence to be tasteful, to be pleasant to the mind.’ This is an excellent instance of the transition of mere imitative sound to the expression of mental emotion, and it corresponds with the imitative way in which the Yakama language, in speaking of little children or pet animals, expresses the verb ‘to love’ as _nem-no-sha_ (to make _n’m-n’_). In more civilized countries these forms are mostly confined to baby-language. The Chinese child’s word for eating is _nam_, in English nurseries _nim_ is noticed as answering the same purpose, and the Swedish dictionary even recognizes _namnam_ ‘a tid-bit.’

As for imitative names of animals derived from their cries or noises, they are to be met with in every language from the Australian _twonk_ ‘frog,’ the Yakama _rol-rol_ ‘lark,’ to the Coptic _eeiō_ ‘ass,’ the Chinese _maou_ ‘cat,’ and the English _cuckoo_ and _peewit_. Their general principle of formation being acknowledged, their further philological interest turns mostly on cases where corresponding words have thus been formed independently in distant regions, and those where the imitative name of the creature, or its habitual sound, passes to express some new idea suggested by its character. The Sanskrit name of the _kâka_ crow reappears in the name of a similar bird in British Columbia, the _káh-káh_; a fly is called by the natives of Australia a _bumberoo_, like Sanskrit _bambharâli_ ‘fly,’ Greek βομ-βύλιος, and our _bumble_-bee. Analogous to the name of the _tse-tse_ fly, the terror of African travellers, is _ntsintsi_, the word for ‘fly’ among the Basutos, which also, by a simple metaphor, serves to express the idea of ‘a parasite.’ Mr. H. W. Bates’s description seems to settle the dispute among naturalists, whether the _toucan_ had its name from its cry or not. He speaks of its loud, shrill, yelping cries having ‘a vague resemblance to the syllables _tocáno, tocáno_, and hence the Indian name of this genus of birds.’ Granting this, we can trace this sound-word into a very new meaning; for it appears that the bird’s monstrous bill has suggested a name for a certain large-nosed tribe of Indians, who are accordingly called _Tucanos_.[286] The cock, gallo _quiquiriqui_, as the Spanish nursery-language calls him, has a long list of names from various languages which in various ways imitate his crowing; in Yoruba he is called _koklo_, in Ibo _okoko_, _akoka_, in Zulu _kuku_, in Finnish _kukko_, in Sanskrit _kukkuta_, and so on. He is mentioned in the Zend-Avesta in a very curious way, by a name which elaborately imitates his cry, but which the ancient Persians seem to have held disrespectful to their holy bird, who rouses men from sleep to good thought, word, and work:—

‘The bird who bears the name of Parôdars, O holy Zarathustra;
Upon whom evil-speaking men impose the name _Kabrkataç_.’[287]

The crowing of the cock (Malay _kâluruk_, _kukuk_) serves to mark a point of time, cockcrow. Other words originally derived from such imitation of crowing have passed into other curiously transformed meanings: Old French _cocart_ ‘vain;’ modern French _coquet_ ‘strutting like a _cock_, _coquetting_, a _coxcomb_;’ _cocarde_ ‘a _cockade_’ (from its likeness to a cock’s comb); one of the best instances is _coquelicot_, a name given for the same reason to the wild poppy, and even more distinctly in Languedoc, where _cacaracá_ means both the crowing and the flower. The hen in some languages has a name corresponding to that of the cock, as in Kussa _kukuduna_ ‘cock,’ _kukukasi_ ‘hen;’ Ewe _koklo-tsu_ ‘cock,’ _koklo-no_ ‘hen;’ and her _cackle_ (whence she has in Switzerland the name of _gugel_, _güggel_) has passed into language as a term for idle gossip and chatter of women, _caquet_, _caqueter_, _gackern_, much as the noise of a very different creature seems to have given rise not only to its name, Italian _cicala_, but to a group of words represented by _cicalar_ ‘to chirp, chatter, talk sillily.’ The _pigeon_ is a good example of this kind, both for sound and sense. It is Latin _pipio_, Italian _pippione_, _piccione_, _pigione_, modern Greek πιπίνιον, French _pipion_ (old), _pigeon_; its derivation is from the young bird’s _peep_, Latin _pipire_, Italian _pipiare_, _pigiolare_, modern Greek πιπινίζω, to chirp; by an easy metaphor, a _pigeon_ comes to mean ‘a silly young fellow easily caught,’ to _pigeon_ ‘to cheat,’ Italian _pipione_ ‘a silly gull, one that is soon caught and trepanned,’ _pippionare_ ‘to pigeon, to gull one.’ In an entirely different family of languages, Mr. Wedgwood points out a curiously similar process of derivation; Magyar _pipegni_, _pipelni_ ‘to _peep_ or cheep;’ _pipe_, _pipök_ ‘a chicken, gosling;’ _pipe-ember_ (chicken-man), ‘a silly young fellow, booby.’[288] The derivation of Greek βοῦς, Latin _bos_, Welsh _bu_, from the ox’s lowing, or _booing_ as it is called in the north country, has been much debated. With an excessive desire to make Sanskrit answer as a general Indo-European type, Bopp connected Sanskrit _go_, old German _chuo_, English _cow_, with these words, on the unusual and forced assumption of a change from guttural to labial.[289] The direct derivation from sound, however, is favoured by other languages, Cochin-Chinese _bo_, Hottentot _bou_. The beast may almost answer for himself in the words of that Spanish proverb which remarks that people talk according to their nature: ‘Habló el _buey_, y dijó _bu!_’ ‘The ox spoke, and he said _boo!_’

Among musical instruments with imitative names are the following:—the _shee-shee-quoi_, the mystic rattle of the Red Indian medicine-man, an imitative word which reappears in the Darien Indian _shak-shak_, the _shook-shook_ of the Arawaks, the Chinook _shugh_ (whence _shugh-opoots_, rattletail, _i.e._, ‘rattlesnake;’)—the drum, called _ganga_ in Haussa, _gañgañ_ in the Yoruba country, _gunguma_ by the Gallas, and having its analogue in the Eastern _gong_;—the bell, called in Yakama (N. Amer.) _kwa-lal-kwa-lal_, in Yalof (W. Afr.) _walwal_, in Russian _kolokol_. The sound of the horn is imitated in English nurseries as _toot-toot_, and this is transferred to express the ‘omnibus’ of which the bugle is the signal: with this nursery word is to be classed the Peruvian name for the ‘shell-trumpet,’ _pututu_, and the Gothic _thuthaurn_ (_thut_-horn), which is even used in the Gothic Bible for the last trumpet of the day of judgement,—‘In spêdistin thuthaúrna, thuthaúrneith auk jah daúthans ustandand’ (I Cor. xv. 52). How such imitative words, when thoroughly taken up into language, suffer change of pronunciation in which the original sound-meaning is lost, may be seen in the English word _tabor_, which we might not recognize as a sound-word at all, did we not notice that it is French _tabour_, a word which in the form _tambour_ obviously belongs to a group of words for drums, extending from the small rattling Arabic _tubl_ to the Indian _dundhubi_ and the _tombe_, the Moqui drum made of a hollowed log. The same group shows the transfer of such imitative words to objects which are like the instrument, but have nothing to do with its sound; few people who talk of _tambour_-work, and fewer still who speak of a footstool as a _tabouret_, associate these words with the sound of a drum, yet the connexion is clear enough. When these two processes go on together, and a sound-word changes its original sound on the one hand, and transfers its meaning to something else on the other, the result may soon leave philological analysis quite helpless, unless by accident historical evidence is forthcoming. Thus with the English word _pipe_. Putting aside the particular pronunciation which we give the word, and referring it back to its mediæval Latin or French sound in _pipa_, _pipe_, we have before us an evident imitative name of a musical instrument, derived from a familiar sound used also to represent the chirping of chickens, Latin _pipire_, English to _peep_, as in the translation of Isaiah viii. 19: ‘Seek ... unto wizards that _peep_, and that mutter.’ The Algonquin Indians appear to have formed from this sound _pib_ (with a grammatical suffix) their name for the _pib-e-gwun_ or native flute. Now just as _tuba_, _tubus_, ‘a trumpet’ (itself very likely an imitative word) has given a name for any kind of _tube_, so the word _pipe_ has been transferred from the musical instrument to which it first belonged, and is used to describe tubes of various sorts, gas-pipes, water-pipes, and pipes in general. There is nothing unusual in these transitions of meaning, which are in fact rather the rule than the exception. The _chibouk_ was originally a herdsman’s pipe or flute in Central Asia. The _calumet_, popularly ranked with the tomahawk and the mocassin among characteristic Red Indian words, is only the name for a shepherd’s pipe (Latin _calamus_) in the dialect of Normandy, corresponding with the _chalumeau_ of literary French; for when the early colonists in Canada saw the Indians performing the strange operation of smoking, ‘with a hollow piece of stone or wood like a pipe,’ as Jacques Cartier has it, they merely gave to the native tobacco-pipe the name of the French musical instrument it resembled. Now changes of sound and of sense like this of the English word _pipe_ must have been in continual operation in hundreds of languages where we have no evidence to follow them by, and where we probably may never obtain such evidence. But what little we do know must compel us to do justice to the imitation of sound as a really existing process, capable of furnishing an indefinitely large supply of words for things and actions which have no necessary connexion at all with that sound. Where the traces of the transfer are lost, the result is a stock of words which are the despair of philologists, but are perhaps none the less fitted for the practical use of men who simply want recognized symbols for recognized ideas.

The claim of the Eastern _tomtom_ to have its name from a mere imitation of its sound seems an indisputable one; but when it is noticed in what various languages the beating of a resounding object is expressed by something like _tum_, _tumb_, _tump_, _tup_, as in Javan _tumbuk_, Coptic _tmno_, ‘to pound in a mortar,’ it becomes evident that the admission involves more than at first sight appears. In Malay, _timpa_, _tampa_, is ‘to beat out, hammer, forge;’ in the Chinook Jargon _tum-tum_ is ‘the heart,’ and by combining the same sound with the English word ‘water,’ a name is made for ‘waterfall,’ _tum-wâta_. The Gallas of East Africa declare that a box on the ear seems to them to make a noise like _tub_, for they call its sound _tubdjeda_, that is, ‘to say _tub_.’ In the same language, _tuma_ is ‘to beat,’ whence _tumtu_, ‘a workman, especially one who beats, a smith.’ With the aid of another imitative word, _bufa_ ‘to blow,’ the Gallas can construct this wholly imitative sentence, _tumtun bufa bufti_, ‘the smith blows with bellows,’ as an English child might say, ‘the _tumtum puffs_ the _puffer_.’ This imitative sound seems to have obtained a footing among the Aryan verb-roots, as in Sanskrit _tup_, _tubh_ ‘to smite,’ while in Greek, _tup_, _tump_, has the meaning of ‘to beat, to _thump_,’ producing for instance τύμπανον, _tympanum_, ‘a drum or _tomtom_.’ Again, the verb to _crack_ has become in modern English as thorough a root-word as the language possesses. The mere imitation of the sound of breaking has passed into a verb to break; we speak of a _cracked_ cup or a _cracked_ reputation without a thought of imitation of sound; but we cannot yet use the German _krachen_ or French _craquer_ in this way, for they have not developed in meaning as our word has, but remain in their purely imitative stage. There are two corresponding Sanskrit words for the saw, _kra-kara_, _kra-kacha_, that is to say, the ‘_kra_-maker, _kra_-crier;’ and it is to be observed that all such terms, which expressly state that they are imitations of sound, are particularly valuable evidence in these enquiries, for whatever doubt there may be as to other words being really derived from imitative sound, there can, of course, be none here. Moreover, there is evidence of the same sound having given rise to imitative words in other families of language, Dahoman _kra-kra_, ‘a watchman’s rattle;’ Grebo _grikâ_ ‘a saw;’ Aino _chacha_ ‘to saw;’ Malay _graji_ ‘a saw,’ _karat_ ‘to gnash the teeth,’ _karot_ ‘to make a _grating_ noise;’ Coptic _khrij_ ‘to gnash the teeth,’ _khrajrej_ ‘to _grate_.’ Another form of the imitation is given in the descriptive Galla expression _cacakdjeda_, _i.e._, ‘to say _cacak_,’ ‘to _crack_, _krachen_.’ With this sound corresponds a whole family of Peruvian words, of which the root seems to be the guttural _cca_, coming from far back in the throat; _ccallani_, ‘to break,’ _ccatatani_, ‘to gnash the teeth,’ _ccacñiy_, ‘thunder,’ and the expressive words for ‘a thunder-storm,’ _ccaccaccahay_, which carries the imitative process so much farther than such European words as thunder-_clap_, donner-_klapf_. In Maori, _pata_ is ‘to _patter_ as water dropping, drops of rain.’ The Manchu language describes the noise of fruits falling from the trees as _pata pata_ (so Hindustani _bhadbhad_); this is like our word _pat_, and we should say in the same manner that the fruit comes _pattering_ down, while French _patatra_ is a recognized imitation of something falling. Coptic _potpt_ is ‘to fall,’ and the Australian _badbadin_ (or _patpatin_) is translated into almost literal English as _pitpatting_. On the strength of such non-Aryan languages, are we to assign an imitative origin to the Sanskrit verb-root _pat_, ‘to fall,’ and to Greek πίπτω?

Wishing rather to gain a clear survey of the principles of language-making than to plunge into obscure problems, it is not necessary for me to discuss here questions of intricate detail. The point which continually arises is this,—granted that a particular kind of transition from sound to sense is possible in the abstract, may it be safely claimed in a particular case? In looking through the vocabularies of the world, it appears that most languages offer words which, by obvious likeliness or by their correspondence with similar forms elsewhere, may put forward a tolerable claim to be considered imitative. Some languages, as Aztec or Mohawk, offer singularly few examples, while in others they are much more numerous. Take Australian cases: _walle_, ‘to _wail_;’ _bung-bung-ween_, ‘thunder;’ _wirriti_, ‘to blow, as wind;’ _wirrirriti_, ‘to storm, rage, as in fight;’ _wirri_, _bwirri_, ‘the native throwing club,’ seemingly so called from its _whir_ through the air; _kurarriti_, ‘to hum, buzz;’ _kurrirrurriri_, ‘round about, unintelligible,’ &c.; _pitata_, ‘to knock, pelt, as rain,’ _pitapitata_, ‘to knock;’ _wiiti_, ‘to laugh, rejoice’—as in our own ‘Turnament of Tottenham’:—

‘“_We te he!_” quoth Tyb, and lugh,
“Ye er a dughty man!”’

The so-called Chinook Jargon of British Columbia is a language crowded with imitative words, sometimes adopted from the native Indian languages, sometimes made on the spot by the combined efforts of the white man and the Indian to make one another understand. Samples of its quality are _hóh-hoh_, ‘to cough,’ _kó-ko_, ‘to knock,’ _kwa-lal-kwa-lal_, ‘to gallop,’ _muck-a-muck_, ‘to eat,’ _chak-chak_, ‘the bald eagle’ (from its scream), _mamook tsish_ (make _tsish_), ‘to sharpen on the grindstone.’ It has been remarked by Prof. Max Müller that the peculiar sound made in blowing out a candle is not a favourite in civilized languages, but it seems to be recognized here, for no doubt it is what the compiler of the vocabulary is doing his best to write down when he gives _mamook poh_ (make _poh_) as the Chinook expression for ‘to blow out or extinguish as a candle.’ This jargon is in great measure of new growth within the last seventy or eighty years, but its imitative words do not differ in nature from those of the more ordinary and old-established languages of the world. Thus among Brazilian tribes there appear Tupi _cororóng_, _cururuc_, ‘to snore’ (compare Coptic _kherkher_, Quichua _ccorcuni_ (_ccor_)), whence it appears that an imitation of a snore may perhaps serve the Carajás Indians to express ‘to sleep’ as _arourou-cré_, as well as the related idea of ‘night,’ _roou_. Again Pimenteira _ebaung_, ‘to bruise, beat,’ compares with Yoruba _gba_, ‘to slap,’ _gbã_ (gbang) ‘to sound loudly, to _bang_,’ and so forth. Among African languages, the Zulu seems particularly rich in imitative words. Thus _bibiza_, ‘to dribble like children, drivel in speaking’ (compare English _bib_); _babala_, ‘the larger bush-antelope’ (from the _baa_ of the female); _boba_, ‘to _babble_, chatter, be noisy,’ _bobi_, ‘a _babbler_;’ _boboni_, ‘a throstle’ (cries _bo! bo!_ compare American _bobolink_); _bomboloza_, ‘to rumble in the bowels, to have a bowel-complaint;’ _bubula_, ‘to _buzz_ like bees,’ _bubulela_, ‘a swarm of bees, a buzzing crowd of people;’ _bubuluza_, ‘to make a blustering noise, like frothing beer or boiling fat.’ These examples, from among those given under one initial letter in one dictionary of one barbaric language, may give an idea of the amount of the evidence from the languages of the lower races bearing on the present problem.

For the present purpose of giving a brief series of examples of the sort of words in which imitative sound seems fairly traceable, the strongest and most manageable evidence is of course found among such words as directly describe sounds or what produces them, such as cries of and names for animals, the terms for action accompanied by sound, and the materials and objects so acted upon. In further investigation it becomes more and more requisite to isolate the sound-type or root from the modifications and additions to which it has been subjected for grammatical and phonetical adaptation. It will serve to give an idea of the extent and intricacy of this problem, to glance at a group of words in one European language, and notice the etymological network which spreads round the German word _klapf_, in Grimm’s dictionary, _klappen_, _klippen_, _klopfen_, _kläffen_, _klimpern_, _klampern_, _klateren_, _kloteren_, _klitteren_, _klatzen_, _klacken_, and more, to be matched with allied forms in other languages. Setting aside the consideration of grammatical inflexion, it belongs to the present subject to notice that man’s imitative faculty in language is by no means limited to making direct copies of sound and shaping them into words. It seizes upon ready-made terms of whatever origin, alters and adapts them to make their sound fitting to their sense, and pours into the dictionaries a flood of adapted words of which the most difficult to analyse are those which are neither altogether etymological nor altogether imitative, but partly both. How words, while preserving, so to speak, the same skeleton, may be made to follow the variation of sound, of force, of duration, of size, an imitative group more or less connected with the last will show—_crick_, _creak_, _crack_, _crash_, _crush_, _crunch_, _craunch_, _scrunch_, _scraunch_. It does not at all follow that because a word suffers such imitative and symbolic changes it must be, like this, directly imitative in its origin. What, for instance, could sound more imitative than the name of that old-fashioned cannon for throwing grape-shot, the _patterero_? Yet the etymology of the word appears in the Spanish form _pedrero_, French _perrier_; it means simply an instrument for throwing stones (_piedra_, _pierre_), and it was only when the Spanish word was adopted in England that the imitative faculty caught and transformed it into an apparent sound-word, resembling the verb to _patter_. The propensity of language, especially in slang, to make sense of strange words by altering them into something with an appropriate meaning has been often dwelt upon by philologists, but the propensity to alter words into something with an appropriate sound has produced results immensely more important. The effects of symbolic change of sound acting upon verb-roots seem almost boundless. The verb to _waddle_ has a strong imitative appearance, and so in German we can hardly resist the suggestion that imitative sound has to do with the difference between _wandern_ and _wandeln_; but all these verbs belong to a family represented by Sanskrit _vad_, to go, Latin _vado_, and to this root there seems no sufficient ground for assigning an imitative origin, the traces of which it has at any rate lost if it ever had them. Thus, again, to _stamp_ with the foot, which has been claimed as an imitation of sound, seems only a ‘coloured’ word. The root _sta_, ‘to stand,’ Sanskrit _sthâ_, forms a causative _stap_, Sanskrit _sthâpay_, ‘to make to stand,’ English to _stop_, and a foot-_step_ is when the foot comes to a stand, a foot-_stop_. But we have Anglo-Saxon _stapan_, _stæpan_, _steppan_, English to _step_, varying to express its meaning by sound in to _staup_, to _stamp_, to _stump_, and to _stomp_, contrasting in their violence or clumsy weight with the foot on the Dorset cottage-sill in Barnes’s poem:—

‘Where love do seek the maïden’s evenèn vloor,
Wi’ _stip-step light_, an tip-tap slight
Ageän the door.’

By expanding, modifying, or, so to speak, colouring, sound is able to produce effects closely like those of gesture-language, expressing length or shortness of time, strength or weakness of action, and then passing into a further stage to describe greatness or smallness of size or of distance, and thence making its way into the widest fields of metaphor. And it does all this with a force which is surprising when we consider how childishly simple are the means employed. Thus the Bachapin of Africa call a man with the cry _héla!_ but according as he is far or farther off the sound of the _hêela!_ _hê-ê-la!_ is lengthened out. Mr. Macgregor in his ‘Rob Roy on the Jordan,’ graphically describes this method of expression, ‘“But where is Zalmouda?”... Then with rough eagerness the strongest of the Dowana faction pushes his long forefinger forward, pointing straight enough—but whither? and with a volley of words ends, _Ah-ah-a-a-a——a-a_. This strange expression had long before puzzled me when first heard from a shepherd in Bashan.... But the simple meaning of this long string of “_ah’s_” shortened, and quickened, and lowered in tone to the end, is merely that the place pointed to is a “very great way off.”’ The Chinook Jargon, as usual representing primitive developments of language, uses a similar device in lengthening the sound of words to indicate distance. The Siamese can, by varying the tone-accent, make the syllable _non_, ‘there,’ express a near, indefinite, or far distance, and in like manner can modify the meaning of such a word as _ny_, ‘little.’ In the Gaboon, the strength with which such a word as _mpolu_, ‘great,’ is uttered serves to show whether it is great, very great, or very very great, and in this way, as Mr. Wilson remarks in his Mpongwe Grammar, ‘the comparative degrees of greatness, smallness, hardness, rapidity, and strength, &c., may be conveyed with more accuracy and precision than could readily be conceived.’ In Madagascar _ratchi_ means ‘bad,’ but _râtchi_ is ‘very bad.’ The natives of Australia, according to Oldfield, show the use of this process in combination with that of symbolic reduplication: among the Watchandie tribe _jir-rie_ signifies ‘already or past,’ _jir-rie jir-rie_ indicates ‘a long time ago,’ while _jie-r-rie jirrie_ (the first syllable being dwelt on for some time) signifies ‘an immense time ago.’ Again, _boo-rie_ is ‘small,’ _boo-rie-boo-rie_ ‘very small,’ and _b-o-rie boorie_ ‘exceedingly small.’ Wilhelm von Humboldt notices the habit of the southern Guarani dialect of South America of dwelling more or less time on the suffix of the perfect tense, _yma_, _y—ma_, to indicate the length or shortness of the distance of time at which the action took place; and it is curious to observe that a similar contrivance is made use of among the aboriginal tribes of India, where the Ho language forms a future tense by adding _á_ to the root, and prolonging its sound, _kajee_ ‘to speak,’ Amg _kajēēá_ ‘I will speak.’ As might be expected, the languages of very rude tribes show extremely well how the results of such primitive processes pass into the recognized stock of language. Nothing could be better for this than the words by which one of the rudest of living races, the Botocudos of Brazil, express the sea. They have a word for a stream, _ouatou_, and an adjective which means great, _ijipakijiou_; thence the two words ‘stream-great,’ a little strengthened in the vowels, will give the term for a river, _ouatou-ijiipakiiijou_, as it were, ‘stream-grea-at,’ and this, to express the immensity of the ocean, is amplified into _ouatou-iijipakiijou-ou-ou-ou-ou-ou_. Another tribe of the same family works out the same result more simply; the word _ouatou_, ‘stream,’ becomes _ouatou-ou-ou-ou_, ‘the sea.’ The Chavantes very naturally stretch the expression _rom-o-wodi_, ‘I go a long way,’ into _rom-o-o-o-o-wodi_, ‘I go a very long way indeed,’ and when they are called upon to count beyond five they say it is _ka-o-o-oki_, by which they evidently mean it is a very great many. The Cauixanas in one vocabulary are described as saying _lawauugabi_ for four, and drawling out the same word for five, as if to say ‘a long four,’ in somewhat the same way as the Aponegicrans, whose word for six is _itawuna_, can expand this into a word for seven, _itawuūna_, obviously thus meaning a ‘long six.’ In their earlier and simpler stages nothing can be more easy to comprehend than these, so to speak, pictorial modifications of words. It is true that writing, even with the aid of italics and capitals, ignores much of this symbolism in spoken language, but every child can see its use and meaning, in spite of the efforts of book-learning and school-teaching to set aside whatever cannot be expressed by their imperfect symbols, nor controlled by their narrow rules. But when we try to follow out to their full results these methods, at first so easy to trace and appreciate, we soon find them passing out of our grasp. The language of the Sahaptin Indians shows us a process of modifying words which is far from clear, and yet not utterly obscure. These Indians have a way of making a kind of disrespectful diminutive by changing the _n_ in a word to _l_; thus _twinwt_ means ‘tailless,’ but to indicate particular smallness, or to express contempt, they make this into _twilwt_, pronounced with an appropriate change of tone; and again, _wana_ means ‘river,’ but this is made into a diminutive _wala_ by ‘changing _n_ into _l_, giving the voice a different tone, putting the lips out in speaking, and keeping them suspended around the jaw.’ Here we are told enough about the change of pronunciation to guess at least how it could convey the notions of smallness and contempt. But it is less easy to follow the process by which the Mpongwe language turns an affirmative into a negative verb by ‘an intonation upon, or prolongation of the radical vowel,’ _tŏnda_, to love, _tŏnda_, not to love; _tŏndo_, to be loved, _tŏndo_, not to be loved. So Yoruba, _bába_, ‘a great thing,’ _bàba_, ‘a small thing,’ contrasted in a proverb, ‘_Baba_ bo, _baba_ molle’—‘A great matter puts a smaller out of sight.’ Language is, in fact, full of phonetic modifications which justify a suspicion that symbolic sound had to do with their production, though it may be hard to say exactly how.

Again, there is the familiar process of reduplication, simple or modified, which produces such forms as _murmur_, _pitpat_, _helterskelter_. This action, though much restricted in literary dialects, has such immense scope in the talk of children and savages that Professor Pott’s treatise on it[290] has become incidentally one of the most valuable collections of facts ever made with relation to early stages of language. Now up to a certain point any child can see how and why such doubling is done, and how it always adds something to the original idea. It may make superlatives or otherwise intensify words, as in Polynesia _loa_ ‘long,’ _lololoa_ ‘very long’; Mandingo _ding_ ‘a child,’ _dingding_ ‘a very little child.’ It makes plurals, as Malay _raja-raja_ ‘princes,’ _orang-orang_ ‘people.’ It adds numerals, as Mosquito _walwal_ ‘four’ (two-two), or distributes them, as Coptic _ouai ouai_ ‘singly’ (one-one). These are cases where the motive of doubling is comparatively easy to make out. As an example of cases much more difficult to comprehend may be taken the familiar reduplication of the perfect tense, Greek γέγραφα from γράφω, Latin _momordi_ from _mordeo_, Gothic _haihald_ from _haldan_, ‘to hold.’ Reduplication is habitually used in imitative words to intensify them, and still more, to show that the sound is repeated or continuous. From the immense mass of such words we may take as instances the Botocudo _hou-hou-hou-gitcha_ ‘to suck’ (compare Tongan _hūhū_ ‘breast’), _kiaku-käck-käck_, ‘a butterfly’; Quichua _chiuiuiuiñichi_ ‘wind whistling in the trees’; Maori _haruru_ ‘noise of wind’; _hohoro_ ‘hurry’; Dayak _kakakkaka_ ‘to go on laughing loud’; Aino _shiriushiriukanni_ ‘a rasp’; Tamil _murumuru_ ‘to _murmur_’; Akra _ewiewiewiewie_ ‘he spoke repeatedly and continually’; and so on, throughout the whole range of the languages of the world.

The device of conveying different ideas of distance by the use of a graduated scale of vowels seems to me one of great philological interest, from the suggestive hint it gives of the proceedings of the language-makers in most distant regions of the world, working out in various ways a similar ingenious contrivance of expression by sound. A typical series is the Javan: _iki_ ‘this’ (close by) _ika_ ‘that’ (at some distance); _iku_ ‘that’ (farther off). It is not likely that the following list nearly exhausts the whole number of cases in the languages of the world, for about half the number have been incidentally noted down by myself without any especial search, but merely in the course of looking over vocabularies of the lower races.[291]

Javan ... _iki_, this; _ika_, that (intermediate); _iku_, that.

Malagasy ... _ao_, there (at a short distance); _eo_, there (at a
shorter distance); _io_, there (close at hand). _atsy_, there (not
far off); _etsy_, there (nearer); _itsy_, this or these.

Japanese ... _ko_, here; _ka_, there. _korera_, these; _karera_,
they (those).

Canarese ... _ivanu_, this; _uvanu_, that (intermediate); _avanu_,
that.

Tamul ... _î_, this; _â_, that.

Rajmahali ... _îh_, this; _âh_, that.

Dhimal ... _isho_, _ita_, here; _usho_, _uta_, there. _iti_,
_idong_, this; _uti_, _udong_, that (of things and persons
respectively).

Abchasian ... _abri_, this; _ubri_, that.

Ossetic ... _am_, here; _um_, there.

Magyar ... _ez_, this; _az_, that.

Zulu ... _apa_, here; _apo_, there. _lesi_, _leso_, _lesiya_; _abu_,
_abo_, _abuya_; &c. = this, that, that (in the distance).

Yoruba ... _na_, this; _ni_, that.

Fernandian ... _olo_, this; _ole_, that.

Tumale ... _re_, this; _ri_, that. _ngi_, I; _ngo_, thou; _ngu_, he.

Greenlandish ... _uv_, here, there (where one points to); _iv_,
there, up there.

Sujelpa (Coleville Ind.) ... _aa_, this; _ii_, that.

Sahaptin ... _kina_, here; _kuna_, there.

Mutsun ... _ne_, here; _nu_, there.

Tarahumara ... _ibe_, here; _abe_, there.

Guarani ... _nde_, _ne_, thou; _ndi_, _ni_, he.

Botocudo ... _ati_, I; _oti_, thou, you, (prep.) to.

Carib ... _ne_, thou; _ni_, he.

Chilian ... _tva_, _vachi_, this; _tvey_, _veychi_, that.

It is obvious on inspection of this list of pronouns and adverbs that they have in some way come to have their vowels contrasted to match the contrast of here and there, this and that. Accident may sometimes account for such cases. For instance it is well known to philologists that our own _this_ and _that_ are pronouns partly distinct in their formation, _thi-s_ being probably two pronouns run together, but yet the Dutch neuters _dit_ ‘this,’ and _dat_ ‘that,’ have taken the appearance of a single form with contrasted vowels.[292] But accident cannot account for the frequency of such words in pairs, and even in sets of three, in so many different languages. There must have been some common intention at work, and there is evidence that some of these languages do resort to a change of sound as a means of expressing change of distance. Thus the language of Fernando Po can not only express ‘this’ and ‘that’ by _olo_, _ole_, but it can even make a change of the pronunciation of the vowel distinguish between _o boehe_ ‘this month,’ and _oh boehe_, ‘that month.’ In the same way the Grebo can make the difference between ‘I’ and ‘thou,’ ‘we,’ and ‘you,’ ‘solely by the intonation of the voice, which the final _h_ of the second persons _mâh_ and _ăh_ is intended to express.’

_mâ_ di, I eat; _mâh_ di, thou eatest;
_ă_ di, we eat; _ăh_ di, ye eat.

The set of Zulu demonstratives which express the three distances of near, farther, farthest, are very complex, but a remark as to their use shows how thoroughly symbolic sound enters into their nature. The Zulus not only say _nansi_, ‘here is,’ _nanso_, ‘there is,’ _nansiya_, ‘there is in the distance,’ but they even express the greatness of this distance by the emphasis and prolongation of the _ya_. If we could discern a similar gradation of the vowels to express a corresponding gradation of distance throughout our list, the whole matter would be easier to explain; but it is not so, the _i_-words for instance, are sometimes nearer and sometimes farther off than the _a_-words. We can only judge that, as even children can see that a scale of vowels makes a most expressive scale of distances, many pronouns and adverbs in use in the world have probably taken their shape under the influence of this simple device, and thus there have arisen sets of what we may call contrasted or ‘differential’ words.

How the differencing of words by change of vowels may be used to distinguish between the sexes, is well put in a remark of Professor Max Müller’s: ‘The distinction of gender ... is sometimes expressed in such a manner that we can only explain it by ascribing an expressive power to the more or less obscure sound of vowels. _Ukko_, in Finnic, is an old man; _akka_, an old woman.... In Mandshu _chacha_ is mas. ... _cheche_, femina. Again, _ama_, in Mandshu, is father; _eme_, mother; _amcha_, father-in-law, _emche_, mother-in-law.’[293] The Coretú language of Brazil has another curiously contrasted pair of words _tsáackö_, ‘father,’ _tsaacko_ ‘mother,’ while the Carib has _baba_ for father, and _bibi_ for mother, and the Ibu of Africa has _nna_ for father and _nne_ for mother. This contrivance of distinguishing the male from the female by a difference of vowels is however but a small part of the process of formation which can be traced among such words as those for father and mother. Their consideration leads into a very interesting philological region, that of ‘Children’s language.’

If we set down a few of the pairs of words which stand for ‘father’ and ‘mother’ in very different and distant languages—_papa_ and _mama_; Welsh, _tad_ (_dad_) and _mam_; Hungarian, _atya_ and _anya_; Mandingo, _fa_ and _ba_; Lummi (N. America), _man_ and _tan_; Catoquina (S. America), _payú_ and _nayú_; Watchandie (Australia), _amo_ and _ago_—their contrast seems to lie in their consonants, while many other pairs differ totally, like Hebrew _ab_ and _im_; Kuki, _p’ha_ and _noo_; Kayan, _amay_ and _inei_; Tarahumara, _nono_ and _jeje_. Words of the class of _papa_ and _mama_, occurring in remote parts of the world, were once freely used as evidence of a common origin of the languages in which they were found alike. But Professor Buschmann’s paper on ‘Nature-Sound,’ published in 1853,[294] effectually overthrew this argument, and settled the view that such coincidence might arise again and again by independent production. It was clearly of no use to argue that Carib and English were allied because the word _papa_, ‘father,’ belongs to both, or Hottentot and English because both use _mama_ for ‘mother,’ seeing that these childish articulations may be used in just the opposite way, for the Chilian word for mother is _papa_, and the Tlatskanai for father is _mama_. Yet the choice of easy little words for ‘father’ and ‘mother’ does not seem to have been quite indiscriminate. The immense list of such words collected by Buschmann shows that the types _pa_ and _ta_, with the similar forms _ap_ and _at_, preponderate in the world as names for ‘father,’ while _ma_ and _na, am_ and _an_, preponderate as names for ‘mother.’ His explanation of this state of things as affected by direct symbolism choosing the hard sound for the father, and the gentler for the mother, has very likely truth in it, but it must not be pushed too far. It cannot be, for instance, the same principle of symbolism which leads the Welshmen to say _tad_ for ‘father’ and _mam_ for ‘mother,’ and the Indian of British Columbia to say _maan_, ‘father’ and _taan_, ‘mother,’ or the Georgian to say _mama_ ‘father’ and _deda_ ‘mother.’ Yet I have not succeeded in finding anywhere our familiar _papa_ and _mama_ exactly reversed in one and the same language; the nearest approach to it that I can give is from the island of Meang, where _mama_ meant ‘father, man,’ and _babi_, ‘mother, woman.’[295]

Between the nursery words _papa_ and _mama_ and the more formal _father_ and _mother_ there is an obvious resemblance in sound. What, then, is the origin of these words _father_ and _mother_? Up to a certain point their history is clear. They belong to the same group of organized words with _vater_ and _mutter_, _pater_ and _mater_, πατήρ and μήτηρ, _pitar_ and _mâtar_, and other similar forms through the Indo-European family of languages. There is no doubt that all these pairs of names are derived from an ancient and common Aryan source, and when they are traced back as far as possible towards that source, they appear to have sprung from a pair of words which may be roughly called _patar_ and _matar_, and which were formed by adding _tar_, the suffix of the actor, to the verb-roots _pa_ and _ma_. There being two appropriate Sanskrit verbs _pâ_ and _mâ_, it is possible to etymologize the two words as _patar_, ‘protector,’ and _matar_, ‘producer.’ Now this pair of Aryan words must have been very ancient, lying back at the remote common source from which forms parallel to our English _father_ and _mother_ passed into Greek and Persian, Norse and Armenian, thus holding fixed type through the eventful course of Indo-European history. Yet, ancient as these words are, they were no doubt preceded by simpler rudimentary words of the children’s language, for it is not likely that the primitive Aryans did without baby-words for father and mother until they had an organized system of adding suffixes to verb-roots to express such notions as ‘protector’ or ‘producer.’ Nor can it be supposed that it was by mere accident that the root-words thus chosen happened to be the very sounds _pa_ and _ma_, whose types so often occur in the remotest parts of the world as names for ‘father’ and ‘mother.’ Prof. Adolphe Pictet makes shift to account for the coincidence thus: he postulates first the pair of forms _pâ_ and _mâ_ as Aryan verb-roots of unknown origin, meaning ‘to protect’ and ‘to create,’ next another pair of forms _pa_ and _ma_, children’s words commonly used to denote father and mother, and lastly he combines the two by supposing that the root-verbs _pâ_ and _mâ_ were chosen to form the Indo-European words for parents, because of their resemblance to the familiar baby-words already in use. This circuitous process at any rate saves those sacred monosyllables, the Sanskrit verb-roots, from the disgrace of an assignable origin. Yet those who remember that these verb-roots are only a set of crude forms in use in one particular language of the world at one particular period of its development, may account for the facts more simply and more thoroughly. It is a fair guess that the ubiquitous _pa_ and _ma_ of the children’s language were the original forms; that they were used in an early period of Aryan speech as indiscriminately substantive and verb, just as our modern English, which so often reproduces the most rudimentary linguistic processes, can form from the noun ‘father’ a verb ‘to father;’ and that lastly they became verb-roots, whence the words _patar_ and _matar_ were formed by the addition of the suffix.[296]