1 soon after they have learnt to attach significance to those natural sounds by which all nations express the relationships of father and mother. Thus, in representing the animals as the first existing things which received their names from the earliest man, the Jehovist of the Book of Genesis wrote with a profound insight into the nature of language and the germs out of which it is instinctively developed. 2 (iii.) But, thirdly, from the fact that the only sound used by the Egyptian children was an imitation of the sounds made by the only living things with which they were familiar, we saw another indication of the fact that onomatopoeia (which is only a form of the many imitative tendencies which characterize the highest animals) is the most natural and fruitful source out of which the faculty of speech was instinctively evolved ;— the first stepping-stone in the stream which separates sound from sense, matter from intelligence, thought from speech;—the keystone of that mighty bridge which divides the dúvapus from the pyov, the faculty from the fact. In this point also our inference is curiously confirmed by a variety of observed phenomena. What, for instance, are the names by which, in the present day, children first learn to distinguish animals? Are they not invariably onomatopoetic? 3 Is any one acquainted with any child, ordinarily trained, which first learned to call a dog, a cow, or a sheep by their names, without having learnt, by means of the nursery 1 See Buschman, Ueber d. Naturlaut. 2 The cause of this particular development of the imitative instinct will be explained hereafter. 3 A horse does not frequently neigh; and this is probably the reason that in so many dialects the childish onomatopoeia for it is derived, not onomatopoeias, that a sound may stand for a thing? This is the most difficult lesson of all language; and when, by the use of a few words, the child has once learnt it,—when it has once succeeded in catching this elementary conception,-the rest follows with astonishing rapidity. Hence, very few onomatopoeias, and these borrowed from the commonest and simplest objects, are sufficient for the purpose. What the child has to learn is, that a modification of the ambient medium by a motion of the tongue can be accepted as a representation of the objects which are mirrored upon his retina-in other words, that the objects of sight may be recalled and identified by articulated sounds. But how is he to learn this marvellous lesson? Only by observing instinctively that since certain things give forth certain sounds, the repetition of the sound, by an inevitable working of the law of association, recalls the object which emits it. Nor is it the slightest objection to this to say that the child does not learn the onomatopoeia for itself, but learns it from its nurse. Supposing that from the sound it makes, but from the sounds (Lautgeberden) addressed to it, e. g. in English gee-gee; in parts of Germany, on the other hand, hotte-pärd; in Finland humma, &c. See Wedgwood, Etym. Dict. s. v. Hobby, ii. 246. (That horse is itself an onomatopoeia seems probable from the cognate form hross, Germ. Ross.) The fact, then, that a young child names a horse from the sounds used in urging horses on, only shows how widely various are the points which may suggest the onomatopoetic designation. Similarly in Spain a mule-driver is called arriero from his cry arri, and in the French argot an omnibus is aie aie. The whole observation illustrates the active, living power of speech, which is no mere dead matter that can be handed over from father to son. See Heyse, Syst. d. Sprachwissenschaft, § 47. Even a watch is to a child invariably a tick-tick, and the very same onomatopoeia is used in the Lingua Franca of Vancouver's island, and in which we also find 'hehe,' 'liplip,' 'tam-water,' &c. for laugh,' 'boil,' ' cataract,' &c. we grant this, what does it prove? Simply the fact that every nurse and every mother is guided by the swift, beautiful, and unerring beneficence of instinct to follow the very same process which the great mother, Nature, adopted when man was her infant child;—or let us say, in language more reverent, and not less true, that such a process is in instinctive unconscious accorddance with the great method of the Creator. For the whole idea of language,—the conception that those impressions which the brain mainly receives through the sense of sight may be combined and expressed by means of the sense of hearing, influenced through the organs of sound, the discovery, in fact, of a common principle, by virtue of which unity and coherence may be given to every external impression,-all lies in the discovery, by a child, that a rude ideal imitation of the bark of a dog may serve as a sign or mark for the dog itself. Hence, although Professor Max Müller's designation of the onomatopoetic theory of language as the "bow-wow theory,' was accepted by all flippant minds as a piece of crushing and convincing wit, it is really nothing but an undignified way of expressing that which is, as we shall see by his own admission, a great linguistic probability, and which at any rate deserves respectful consideration because it has been deliberately accepted by some of the greatest thinkers and the greatest philologists of the century. Plutarch tells us the commonly-accepted Egyptian legend that Thoth was the first inventor of language; 1 We are glad to find an expression of half-regret for this unfortunate term in later editions of Prof. Müller's lectures; to abandon it finally would be but a graceful concession to the many eminent men who have held the view. and he adds the curious tradition that, previous to his time, men had no other mode of expression than the cries of animals. That such may well have been the case is illustrated by the fact that it has been found to be so among wild children lost in the woods and there caught long afterwards. Thus we are told of Clemens, one of the wild boys received in the asylum at Overdyke (an asylum rendered necessary by the number of children left destitute and uncared for in Germany after Napoleon's desolating wars), that his knowledge of birds and their habits was extraordinary,' and that 'to every bird he had given a distinctive and often very appropriate name of his own, which they appeared to recognise as he whistled after them;'1 a sentence which can only mean that his onomatopoeias were of the most objective or simply-imitative kind. Here, then, in historical times, is a surprising, unquestionable, and most unexpected confirmation of the inferences which we felt ourselves entitled to draw from the story of Psammetichus. Without dwelling on the arguments adduced in a previous 2 work, or attaching too much importance to the fact that the aborigines of Malacca lisp their words, the sound of which is like the noise of birds,' or that the vocabulary of the Yamparicos is 'like the growling of a dog, eked out by a copious vocabulary of signs,' we may find a very strong indication of the reasonableness of 6 1 Se9 an interesting paper on Wild Men and Beast Children, by Mr. E. Burnet Tylor, Anthropol. Rev. i. p. 22; and Ladevi-Roche, De l'Orig. du Lang. p. 55. H-t. Hist. d'une jeune Fille sauvage, Paris, 1775. Tulpius, Obs. Med. p. 298. Camerarius, Hor. Subsec. Cent. 1. Francf. 1602. Dict. des Merveilles de la Nature, § v. Sauvage. Virey, Hist. du Genre Hum. i. 88 and ad f. &c. 2 Origin of Lang. p. 75 seqq. |