CHAPTER III. THE NAMING OF ANIMALS. 'Fingere... Græcis magis concessum est, qui sonis etiam quibusdam et affectibus non dubitaverunt nomina aptare; non aliâ libertate, quam quâ illi primi homines rebus appellationes dederunt.' QUINCTILIAN, Instt. Or. viii. 3. EVERY fact which as yet we have passed in review would lead us to the conclusion that the first men, in first exercising the faculty of speech, gave names to the animals around them, and that those names were onomatopoetic. It is hardly too much to say that they could not have been otherwise. For unless we agree with the ancient Analogists, and see a divine and mysterious connection, a natural and inexplicable harmony between words and things, by virtue of which each word necessarily expresses the inmost nature of the thing which it designates; or unless we are Anomalists, and attribute the connection of words with things to the purest accident, and the most haphazard and arbitrary conventions; unless we declare ourselves unreservedly 1 The word 'onomatopeia' is now universally understood to mean a word invented on the basis of a sound-imitation. It may be worth a passing notice that Campbell's use of it in his Rhetoric (ii. 194), to signify the transformation of a name into a word, as when we call a rich man a Croesus, or as in the line 'Sternhold himself shall be out-Sternholded'-is, so far as we are aware, wholly unauthorised. the champions of one or other of these equally exploded views, or accept in their place some mystical or inexplicable theory of roots,' we must be prepared with some other explanation which shall exclude from language alike the miraculous and the accidental. What this explanation is will appear hereafter; but at present we may say that, having disproved the revelation of language, we cannot suppose its development possible without some connection between sounds and objects. Now, as we have seen already, no connection is so easy and obvious, so self-suggesting and so absolutely satisfactory, as the acceptation of a sound to represent a sound, which in its turn at once recalls the creature by which the sound is uttered. If we consider the natural instinct' which leads to the reproduction of sounds, the brute imitations of wild-men and savage children, the onomatopoetic stepping-stones to speech adopted by all children, and the à priori presumption just explained, little or no doubt upon this point can remain in any candid mind. But we can go yet further by examining the actual nomenclature of animals in existing languages. If we consider any number of names for animals in any modern language, we shall find that they fall into various classes, viz.: 1. Those for which no certain derivation can be suggested; 2. Those derived from 1 This imitativeness (in which lies the tendency to onomatopoeia) is found even in animals. I once possessed a young canary which never sang until it had heard a child's squeaking doll. It immediately caught up and imitated this sound, which it never afterwards lost. It is well-known that nest-birds, if hatched by a bird of another species, will reproduce, or attempt to reproduce, its notes. There are good reasons for believing (since wild dogs do not bark) that the bark of the domestic dog is the result of hearing the human voice. See Rev. des deux Mondes, Feb. 1861. some analogy, or characteristic, or combination of characteristics which the animal presents; 3. Those which are distinctly onomatopoetic in origin or in form. The first class of words cannot of course furnish us with any linguistic inferences, and may here be left out of the question;1 under the second and third classes fall all names of recent origin; and if, as the Bible asserts, and as has been shown to be independently probable, animals were the first objects to receive names, they MUST have received names belonging to the third class (viz.: onomatopœias), because no previous words would have existed wherewith to designate or combine their observed qualities. But the imitative origin of animal names is not only à priori most probable, but reasoning à posteriori we see it to be generally the fact. If we would discover any analogies for the speech of primitive man, we must look for them in the languages of those savage nations who approach most nearly to the condition in which. man must have appeared upon the earth. Yet if we examine the vocabulary of almost any savage nation for this purpose, what are we certain to discover? That almost every name for an animal is a striking and obvious onomatopoeia. Take, for instance, the following names of some of the few birds and animals found in Australia : Ke-a-ra-pai. The white cockatoo. : 1 We assume, however, that every word has a reasonable derivation if we only knew what it was; just as we know that no place in the world ever received a name which could not be accounted for, though there are hundreds of such names of which we can now give no explanation. Ki-ra-ki-ra. The cock king-parrot. Nga-ü-wo. The seagull. These are chosen almost at random from Threlkeld's Australian Grammar,' and in other cases the author himself calls marked attention to the similar origin of others, as follows: "Kong-ko-rong. The emu, from the noise it makes." p. 87. 66 Pip-pi-ta. A small hawk, so called from its cry.” p. 91. "Kong-kung. Frogs, so called from the noise they make." p. 87. "Kun-bul. The black swan, from its note." p. 87. Or again, let us take some specimens from a North American 2 dialect-the Algonquin. Shi-sheeb, duck; Chee-chish-koo-wan, kos-kos-koo-oo, owl; oo-oo-me-see, screech-owl; mai-mai, redcrested woodpecker; paupau-say, common woodpecker; shi-shi-gwa, rattlesnake; pah-pah-ah-qwau, cock.3 In Chinese, too, a language which is generally believed to retain more of the characteristics of primitive speech than any other, the number of imitative sounds is very considerable.' A few may be seen quoted by Professor 6 1 Compare the English name Pippit; the Latin Pipilare, &c. 2 The highly euphonic character of the New Zealand language renders it unsuitable for illustrating the point before us; otherwise one can hardly avoid seeing onomatopoeias in Ti-oi-ci, Aki-aki, Akoa-akoa, the names of different birds, Pipipi, the turkey, &c. See the Ch. Miss. Soc.'s New Zealand Gram. Lond. 1820. I have borrowed these Algonquin words from a suggestive chapter in Dr. Daniel Wilson's Prehistoric Man, i. 74. Müller in the first series of his Lectures (p. 252); but in point of fact they constitute a whole class. The sixth class of Chinese characters is called Hyai-Shing meaning and sound." "These," says Marshman,1 in his Chinese Grammar, "are formed by adding to a character which denotes the genus, another which denotes the imagined sound of the species, or the individual signified. They adduce by way of example kyang, which, by adding to shooi water, the character kong, forms a character which denotes a rapid stream, from an allusion to the sound of its water when rushing down with violence. And also ho, the generic name of rivers, which is formed by adding to shooi, water, ho the supposed sound of a river in its course." These, with the signs Chwán-chyn, are about 3,000 in number. In Savage languages are, as we have already observed, the best to show us what must have been the primitive procedure; but we can trace the same necessary elements of words in languages far more advanced. Sanskrit, for instance, is not gô, the original of our cow 2 (Germ. kuh; comp. the words bos, Boûs, Boáw, yoáw), a direct imitation of the sound which the English child imitates by moo (comp. mugire)? Is not bukka a goat (comp. bukkana barking, bukhâra the lion's roar, Búoow, BÚKTYs, bucca, buccina, buck, butt) a very obvious onomatopoeia? Is not çukara3 a pig (cf. σûs, sus, Irish suig, Welsh hwch, Russian cushka) as transparently onomatopoetic as krakara a partridge, hiñkâra a 1 Marshman, Chinese Gram. p. 24. It must be admitted that his explanation is not particularly lucid. 2 Gô, in Sanscrit, also means a voice; almost all the derivatives from it adduced by Pictet are evident onomatopoeias. Even in Chinese the animal is called ngow, gü, &c. 3 These words mean the animal which makes the sound çû, kra, hin. |