SCORPION

As quaint a mixture of words and interjectional cries as I
have met with, is in the great French Encyclopaedia, 2 which
gives a minute description of the hunter's craft, and pre-
scribes 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
them hd halle halle halle ! while to bring them up before
they are uncoupled it is prescribed that he shall call hau
hau ! or hau tahaut ! and when they are uncoupled he is to
change his cry to hau la y la la y la tayau ! a call which

1 For lists of drivers' words, see Grimm, I.e.; Pott, ' Zahlmethode,'
p. 261 ; Halliwell, ' Die. of Archaic and Provincial English,' s.v. ' ree ; '
Brand, vol. ii. p. 15 ; Pictet, part ii. p. 489.

2 ' Encyclopedic, ou Dictionnaire Raisonne des Sciences, &c.' Recueil de
Planches, Paris, 1763, art. ' Chasses.' The traditional cries are still more
or less in use. See * A Week in a French Country-house.'

i. N

182 EMOTIONAL AND IMITATIVE LANGUAGE.

suggests the Norman original of the English tally-ho !
With cries of this kind plain French words are intermixed,
ha bellement la ila, la ila, hau valet ! hau I' ami, tau tau
apres vpres, a route a 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 Test'
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 cry here do-do
ho ho ! to get them back to the right track he is to say
houpe boy, houpe boy f when there are several on ahead of
the rest of the pack, he is to ride up to them and cry saf
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 of
cobat, 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 is miz miz ! while zape 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 calling zape zape ! to them when he gave them

INTERJECTIONS. 183

their food, and then he drove them away with a stick,
crying angrily miz miz ; and this of course prevented any
stranger from calling and stealing them, for only he and
the cats knew the secret I 1 To philologists, the manner
in which such calls to animals become customary in par-
ticular districts illustrates the concensus 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 w r ithin 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 muti-
lated 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 cry

1 Aldrete, ' Lengua Castellana,' Madrid, 1673, s.vv. karre, exe.

184 ' EMOTIONAL AND IMITATIVE LANGUAGE.

but 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 utter-
ance among all the varieties of the human race is an
important manifestation of their close physical and intel-
lectual 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 lan-
guages, 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 which ah I
oh ! ahi ! aie ! are the inexpressive written representatives ;
such is the sigh which is written down in the Wolof lan-
guage of Africa as hhihhe ! in English as heigho ! in Greek
and Latin as e / e / heu ! cheu ! Thus the open-mouthed
wah wah ! of astonishment, so common in the East,
reappears in America in the hwah ! hwah-wa ! of the
Chinook Jargon ; and the kind of groan which is repre-
sented in European languages by weh! ouais! ovai! vae ! is
given in Coptic by ouae ! in Galla by wayo I in the Ossetic
of the Caucasus by voy ! among the Indians of British
Columbia by woi ! 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
Malagasy u-u ! of pleasure, the North-American Indian's
often-described guttural ugh ! the kwish ! of contempt
in the Chinook Jargon, the Tunguz yo yo ! of pain, the
Irish wb wb f of distress, the native Brazilian's teh teh !

INTERJECTIONS. 185

of wonder and reverence, the hai-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 say tiau ! and women
nyau ! 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 of he ! the
Hebrew he ! ha ! for ' lo ! behold ! ' the hoi ! of the
Clallam Indians for ' stop ! ' the Lummi hdi ! 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
sound mm, 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 is mu mu, as the Vei negroes of West
Africa would say. To the speaking man, the sound
which we write as mum ! says plainly enough * hold
your tongue ! ' ' munis the word ! ' and in accordance
with this meaning has served to form various imitative
words, of which a type is Tahitian mamu, 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
interjection hun is rendered, just as it might be in English,
as ' fudge ! ' Rochefort describes the Caribs listening in
reverent silence to their chief's discourse, and testifying

l86 , EMOTIONAL AND IMITATIVE LANGUAGE.

their approval with a hun-hun / just as in his time (i7th
century) an English congregation would have saluted a
popular preacher. 1 The gesture of blowing, again, is a
familiar expression of contempt and disgust, and when
vocalized gives the labial interjections which are written
pah ! bah I pugh ! pooh ! in Welsh pw ! in Low Latin
puppup ! and set down by travellers among the savages in
Australia as pooh / These interjections correspond with
the mass of imitative words which express blowing, such as
Malay puput, to blow. The labial gestures of blowing pass
into those of spitting ) of which one kind gives the dental
interjection t' ! which is written in English or Dutch
tut tut ! and that this is no mere fancy, a number of imita-
tive verbs of various countries will serve to show, Tahitian
tutua, to spit, being a typical instance.

The place of interjectional utterance in savage inter-
course is well shown in Cranz's description. The Green-
landers, 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 any-
thing 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. 2 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 such

1 ' There prevailed in those days an indecent custom ; when the preacher
touched any favourite topick in a manner that delighted his audience, their
approbation was expressed by a loud hum, continued in proportion to their
zeal or pleasure. When Burnet preached, part of his congregation hummed
so loudly and so long, that he sat down to enjoy it, and rubbed his face with
his handkerchief. When Sprat preached, he likewise was honoured with
the like animating hum, but he stretched out his hand to the congregation,
and cried, " Peace, peace ; I pray you, peace." ' Johnson, ' Life of Sprat.'

8 Cranz, ' Gronland,' p. 279.

INTERACTIONAL WORDS. 187

interjectional utterances, reiterated with expressive em-
phasis and considerable gesticulation.' 1 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 inter-
jections upward into fully developed language, we begin
with sounds merely expressing the speaker's actual feelings.
When, however, expressive sounds like ah ! 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 to woh is 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 to boo-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 lamentation
oile ! becomes the verb oile ' to bewail,' oile-taka ' to
lament for ' (the men cry ule /) ; now this is in perfect
analogy with such words as ululare, to wail. With different
grammatical terminations, another sound produces the
Zulu verb gigiteka and its English equivalent to giggle.

1 D. Wilson, ' Prehistoric Man,' p. 65.

l88 ' EMOTIONAL AND IMITATIVE LANGUAGE.

The Galla iya, ' to cry, scream, give the battle-cry ' has
its analogues in Greek Id, /, ' a cry,' />)>? ' 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 to kish-kish, that is, 'to drive cattle or horses ' ;
humm stands for the word ' stink/ verb or noun ; and the
laugh, heehee, becomes a recognized term meaning fun or
amusement, as in mamook heehee, ' to amuse ' (i.e,, ' to
make heehee') and heehee house, ' a tavern.' In Hawaii,
aa is ' to insult ; ' in the Tonga Islands, ui ! is at once
the exclamation ' fie ! ' and the verb ' to cry out against/
In New Zealand, hi I is an interjection denoting surprise at
a mistake, he as a noun or verb meaning ' error, mistake,
to err, to go astray/ In the Quiche language of Guate-
mala, the verbs ay, 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 verb hai-hai ' to run away ' (the
word aie-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 say hi. As this is
an ordinary savage gesture expressing multitude, it seems
likely that the hi is a mere interjection, requiring the
visible sign to convey the full meaning. 1 In the Quichua
language of Peru, alalau ! is an interjection of complaint at
cold, whence the verb alalaunini, 'to complain of the
cold/ At the end of each strophe of the Peruvian hymns
to the Sun was sung the triumphant exclamation haylli!
and with this sound are connected the verbs hayllini
1 to sing/ hayUicuni, ' to celebrate a victory/ The Zulu

1 Compare, in the same district, Came , Cotoxo hiebie, eubidbia, multus,

INTERACTIONAL WORDS. 189

, halala ! of exultation, which becomes also a verb ' to shout
: for joy,' has its analogues in the Tibetan alala ! of joy,
and the Greek aAaAo, which is used as a noun meaning the
battle-cry and even the onset itself, aA.aA.afw, 'to raise the
war-cry,' as well as Hebrew hillel, ' to sing praise/ whence
hallelujah ! 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 of hi-le-li-lah ! The Zulu
makes his panting ha ! do duty as an expression of heat,
when he says that the hot weather 'says ha ha '; his way of
1 pitching a song by a ha ! ha ! is apparently represented in
the verb hay a, ' to lead a song,' hayo ' a starting song, a
fee given to the singing-leader for the hay a ' ; and his
inter jectional expression ba bd ! ' 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 verbs birr-djeda (to say
brrf) and birefada (to make brr!) have the meaning 'to be
afraid.' Thus o f 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 verbs oada, ' to
answer/ and ofa, ' to drive/

If the magnific and honorific o of Japanese grammar can
be assigned to an interjectional origin, its capabilities in
modifying signification become instructive. 1 It is used
before substantives as a prefix of honour ; couni, ' country/
thus becoming ocouni. When a man is talking to his
superiors, he puts o before the names of all objects belonging
to them, while these superiors drop the o in speaking of
anything of their own, or an inferior's ; among the higher

1 J. H. Donker Curtius, ' Essai de Grammaire Japonaise,' p. 34, &c.
199. In former editions of the present work, the directly interjectional
character of the o is held in an unqualified manner. Reference to the
grammars of Prof. B. H. Chamberlain and others, where this particle
(on, o) is connected with other forms implying a common root, leaves the
argument to depend wholly or partly on the supposition of an interjec-
tional source for this root. [Note to 3rd ed.]

IQO ' EMOTIONAL AND IMITATIVE LANGUAGE.

classes, persons of equal rank put o before the names of
each other's things, but not before their own; it is polite
to say o before 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 the papa and mama of Europe. A dis-
tinction is made in written language between o, which is put
to anything royal, and oo which means great, as may be
instanced in the use of the word mets'ke or ' spy ' (literally
' eye-fixer ') ; o mets'ke is a princely or imperial spy, while
oo mets'ke is the spy in chief. This inter] ectional adjective
oo, great, is usually prefixed to the name of the capital
city, which it is customary to call oo Yedo in speaking to
one of its inhabitants, or when officials talk of it among
themselves. And lastly, the o of honour is prefixed to
verbs in all their forms of conjugation, and it is polite
to say ominahai matse, ' please to see/ instead of the
mere plebeian minahai 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 +he o ! of admiration and reverential
embarrassment, it is because we have not chosen
to take advantage of this rudimentary means of ex-
pression. Another exclamation, the cry of io ! 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 the o ! in our
street cries of 'Pease-o/' 'Dust-o/' or the d! in old
German wafend ! ' to arms ! ' hilfd ! ' help ! ' But the
Iroquois of North America makes a fuller use of his
materials, and carries his io ! 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, garonta
means a tree, garontio a beautiful tree ; in like manner,
Ohio means * river-beautiful : ' and Ontario, ' hill-rock-
beautiful,' is derived in the same way. When, in the old

TRANSITION TO SENSE-WORDS. IQI

times 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
word onontc, ' mountain,' translating him into Onontio, or
' Great Mountain,' and thus it came to pass that the name
of Onontio was handed down long after, like that of Caesar,
as the title of each succeeding governor, while for the King
of France was reserved the yet higher style of ' the great
Onontio.' *

The quest of inter jectional 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 verb arrear, ' to
drive mules/ arriero, the name for the ' muleteer ' him-
self, and so forth. 8 Now is this arre ! 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 them arree ! arree ! Similar interjections are noticed
elsewhere with a sense of mere affirmation, as in an Aus-
tralian dialect where a-ree ! is set down as meaning
4 indeed/ and in the Quichua language where ari ! means
' yes ! ' whence the verb arini, ' 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,

1 Bruyas, ' Mohawk Lang.,' p. 16, in Smithson. Contr. vol. iii. Schoolcraft,
4 Indian Tribes,' Part iii. p. 328, 502, 507. Charlevoix, ' Nouv. France,'
vol. i. p. 350.

2 The arre ! may have been introduced into Europe by the Moors, as it is
used in Arabic, and its use in Europe corresponds nearly with the limits of
the Moorish conquest, in Spain arre ! in Provence arri !

' EMOTIONAL AND IMITATIVE LANGUAGE.

and not to override ordinary etymology by treating deri-
vative 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 that
h'm ! is a common inter jectional 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 the mma I
which is translated ' hallo ! stop ! ' in the language of
Fernando Po. But to apply this as a derivation for German
hemmen, ' to stop, check, restrain/ to hem in, and even to
the hem of a garment, as Mr. Wedgwood does without even
a perhaps, 1 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 ' as t'k-tok-te, or e-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 as delicice, delicatus, out of a highly
organized language like Latin, and refer them, as the same
etymologist does, to an inter jectional utterance of satisfac-
tion, dlick /* To do this, is to ignore altogether the compo-
sition of words ; we might as well explain Latin dilectus
or English delight as 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 lan-
guage 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 they

1 Wedgwood, * Origin of Language,' p. 92.

2 Ibid., p. 72.

AFFIRMATIVES AND NEGATIVES.

use for ' no ! ' and ' yes ! ' that tribes are actually named
from these words as a convenient means of distinction.
Thus the tribes known as Gureang, Kamilaroi, Kogai,
Wolaroi, Wailwun, Wiratheroi, have their names from the
words they use for ' no,' these being gure, kamil, ko,
wol, wail, wira, respectively ; and on the other hand the
Pikambul are said to be so called from their word pika,
4 yes.' The device of naming tribes, thus invented by the
savages of Australia, and which perhaps recurs in Brazil in
the name of the Cocatapuya tribe (coca ' no,' tapuya ' man ')
is very curious in its similarity to the mediaeval division of
Langue d'oc and Langue d'oil, according to the words for
' yes ! ' which prevailed in Southern and Northern France :
oc ! is Latin hoc, as we might say ' that's it ! ' while the
longer form hoc illud was reduced to o# / and thence to
oui I Many other of the words for ' yes ! ' and ' no ! ' may
be sense-words, as, again, the French and Italian si ! is Latin
sic. 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 appli-
cation in such enquiries as the present. It is an old
suggestion that the primitive sound of such words as non is
a nasal interjection of doubt or dissent. 1 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 con-
sonants to express ' no ! ' The affirmative form is much
the commoner. The guttural i-i ! of the West Australian,
the ee ! of the Darien, the a-ah ! of the Clallam, the e ! of

1 De Brosses, vol. i. p. 203. See Wedgwood.

194 'EMOTIONAL AND IMITATIVE LANGUAGE.

the Yakama Indians, the e I of the Basuto, and the ai ! 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 ! e ! ia !
aio ! io ! ya ! ey ! &c., h' ! heh ! he-e ! hii ! 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 say nee ! the women say had ! and the old men
give a grunt ; while for ' no ' they all say yna ! 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 Tupi aye aan ! aani ! ; in Guato
ii ! man I ; in Jumana, aeae ! mdiu !; in Miranha ha u !
nani ! The Quichua of Peru affirms by y ! hu I and
expresses 'no,' ' not,' ' not at all,' by ama ! manan ! &c.,
making from the latter the verb manamni, ' to deny.'
The Quiche of Guatemala has e or ve for the affirmative, ma,
man, mana, for the negative. In Africa, again, the Galla
language has ee ! for ' yes ! ' and hn, hin, km, for ' not ! ' ;
the Fernandian ee ! for ' yes ! ' and *nt for ' not ; ' while the
Coptic dictionary gives the affirmative (Latin ' sane ') as
eie, ie, and the negative by a long list of nasal sounds such
as an, emmen, en, mmn, &c. The Sanskrit particles hi !
' indeed, certainly,' na, ' not,' exemplify similar forms in
Indo-European languages, down to our own aye ! and no ! l
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. 2

1 Also Oraon bae ambo ; Micmac e tnw.

2 A double contradiction in Carib anban /= ' yes ! ' oua /== ' no ! ' Single
contradictions in Catoquina bang ! Tupi eem I Botocudo bembem ' Yoruba

AFFIRMATIVES AND NEGATIVES. 195

De Brosses maintained that the Latin stare, to stand,
might be traced to an origin in expressive sound. He
fancied he could hear in it an organic radical sign desig-
nating fixity, and could thus explain why st I should be used
as a call to make a man stand still. Its connexion with
these sounds is often spoken of in more modern books, and
one imaginative German philologer describes their origin
among primaeval men as vividly as though he had been
there to see. A man stands beckoning in vain to a com-
panion 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 sound st ! 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 com-
mon talk by uttering the now familiar st / and thus sta
becomes a root, the symbol of the abstract idea to stand I 1
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 the
st ! used to call people in Germany, pst ! in Spain, is
itself a pure inter jectional 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 limitc, an opponent might even plausibly claim it as
an abbreviation of the very sta ! ( stay ! stop ! ') for which
the theory proposes it as an origin.*

en ! for ' yes ! ' Culino aiy ! Australian yo ! for ' no ! ' &c. How much
these sounds depend on peculiar intonation, we, who habitually use b"m !
either for ' yes ! ' or ' no ! ' can well understand.

1 (Charles de Brosses) ' Traite" de la Formation Me"canique des
Langues, &c.' Paris, An. ix., vol. i. p. 238 ; vol. ii. p. 313. Lazarus and
Steinthal, 'Zeitschrift fiir Volkcrpsychologie,' &c., vol. i. p. 421. Heyse,
' System der Sprachwissenschaft,' p. 73, Farrar, ' Chapters on Language/

p. 202.

2 Similar sounds are used to command silence, to stop speaking as well
as to stop going. English husbt ! whist ! hist ! Welsh ust ! French chut f
Italian zino ! Swedish tyst ! Russian si 1 ! and the Latin st ! so well described

196 EMOTIONAL AND IMITATIVE LANGUAGE.

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 a hush^sh ; and when he himself wished to
approach the sacred ' medicine ' in a Mandan lodge, he
was called to refrain by the same hush-sh ! Among our-
selves 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, some-
times 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 verb
shdrak, 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 un-
equivocal marks of applause, and are as much courted in
the African parliaments as they are dreaded by our candi-
dates for popular favour. 1 Among other sibilant interjec-
tions, are Turkish susd ! Ossetic ss / sos ! 'silence!'

in the curious old line quoted by Mr. Farrar, which compares it with the
gesture of the finger on the lips :

' Isis, et Harpocrates digito qui significat 5/ / '

This group of interjections, again, has not been proved to be in use outside
Aryan limits.

1 Catlin, ' North American Indians,' vol. i. pp. 221, 39, 151, 162. Bailey
in ' Tr. Eth. Soc.,' vol. ii. p. 318. Job xxvii. 23. (The verb shdrak also
signifies to call by a hiss, ' and he will hiss unto them from the end of the

NATURAL ROOT-WORDS.

Fernandian sia ! ' listen ! ' ' tush ! ' Yoruba si 6 ! ' 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 to hush,
which has passed into the sense of ' to quiet, put to sleep '
(adjectively, ' as hush as death '), metaphorically to hush up
a matter, or Greek <rifw ' to hush, say hush ! command
silence/ Even Latin silere and Gothic silan, ' to be silent, 1
may with some plausibility be explained as derived from the
interjectional s / of silence.

Sanskrit dictionaries recognize several words which ex-
plicitly state their own interjectional derivation ; such are
hunkdra (/mw-making), ' the utterance of the mystic
religious exclamation hum ! ' and $i$gabda (pip-sound), ' a
hiss.' Besides these obvious formations, the interjectional
element is present to some greater or less degree in the list ot
Sanskrit radicals,which represent probably better than those
of any other language the verb-roots of the ancient Aryan
stock. In ru, ' to roar, cry, wail,' and in kakh, ( 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 as pooh ! fie / &c., with that
large group of words which are represented in English by
foul and fiend, in Sanskrit by the verbs puy, ' to become
foul, to stink,' and piy, piy, ' to revile, to hate.' 1 Further

earth, and behold, they shall come with speed,' Is. v. 26 ; Jer. xix. 8.)
Alcock, ' The Capital of the Tycoon,' vol. i. p. 394. Cook, ' 2nd Voy.'
vol. ii. p. 36. Casalis, ' Basutos,' p. 234.

1 Wedgwood, ' Origin of Language,' p. 83, ' Dictionary,' Introd. p. xlix.
and s.v. ' foul.' Prof. Max Muller, * Lectures,' 2nd series, p. 92, protests
against the indiscriminate derivation of words directly from such cries and
interjections, without the intervention of determinate roots. As to the
present topic, he points out that Latin pus, putridus, Gothic fuls, English
/ow/, follow Grimm's law as if words derived from a single root. Admitting
this, however, the question has to be raised, how far pure interjec-
tions and their direct derivatives, being self-expressive and so to speak

i. o

198 t EMOTIONAL AND IMITATIVE LANGUAGE.

evidence may be here adduced in support of this theory.
The languages of the lower races use the sound pu to
express an evil smell ; the Zulu remarks that ' the meat
says pu ' (inyama iti pu), meaning that it stinks ; the
Timorese has poop ' putrid ; ' the Quiche* language has i
puh, poh ' corruption, pus/ pohir ' to turn bad, rot/ puz i
' rottenness, what stinks ; ' the Tupi word for nasty, puxi,
may be compared with the Latin putidus, and the Columbia
River name for the ' skunk/ o-pun-pun, with similar names
of stinking animals, Sanskrit putikd ' civet-cat/ and French
putois ' pole-cat/ From the French interjection fi ! words
have long been formed belonging to the language, if not
authenticated by the Academy ; in mediaeval French
' maistre /*-/* ' was a recognized term for a scavenger, and
fi-fi books are not yet extinct.

There has been as yet, unfortunately, too much separa-
tion bet ween 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 philo-
logists 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 genera-
tive philologists, from De Brosses onward, embody a sound ^

living sounds, are affected by phonetic changes such as that of Grimm's
law, which act on articulate sounds no longer fully expressive in them-
selves, but handed down by mere tradition. Thus p and / occur in one and
the same dialect in interjections of disgust and aversion, pub t fi ! being
used in Venice or Paris, just as similar sounds would be in London. In
tracing this group of words from early Aryan forms, it must also be noticed
that Sanskrit is a very imperfect guide, for its alphabet has no /, and it can
hardly give the rule in this matter to languages possessing both p and /,
and thus capable of nicer appreciation of this class of interjections.

NATURAL ROOT- WORDS. 199

principle, 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-format ion, 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 acco r ding to his own fancy. (Ut
somniorum interpret at io it a verborum origo pu cuj usque
ingenio praedicatur.)