nor any very salient property, to provide itself ew title,—then a new name must be invented; his case we venture to assert that there is not and in any country a single instance of a name ted which is not an onomatopoeia. Such s whip-poor-will, pee-whee (Muscicapa rapax), (Emberiza erythroptera), kittawake (Larus us), &c., may be profusely paralleled; and in es the onomatopoetic instinct is so strong that itself side by side with the adoption of a name; in the childish words moo-cow, bumble-bee) h American Indian will speak of a gun as an -gun, or a Paush-ske-zi-gun. It has often erted that man has lost the power of inventing , and this present inability is urged as a ground ving that language could not have been a nvention. We have elsewhere3 given reasons ting the assertion, and even if it were true, it e beside the mark, seeing that the absence of sity of exercise for a faculty is the certain cause -but-irretrievable decay. From the fact, how , Or. du Lang. p. 277, who refers to Condillac, Gram. ch. v. d, Malay Gram. i. 68. of Lang. p. 68 sqq. A very few instances of invented words, emarks upon them, may be found, Id. pp. 60, 61. sents them to be, have in them a fertility and of growth which can only be represented by the of vegetable life, and which is as sufficient to for the fullgrown languages of even the Aryan the germinative properties of an acorn are suf account for the stateliest oak that ever waved over British soil. The history of colonisation, then, by rep some of the conditions of primitive man, enab see his linguistic instincts in actual operat those instincts undeniably confirm our theory playing themselves in the very directions which been pointing out. But we can offer yet anot of the reasonableness of our view in certain 1 of modern invention, to which we shall again a mean the various Argots of the dangerou throughout Europe. These languages have the opposite conditions of being distinct to t use them, and unintelligible to the rest of t And how do they effect this? Partly indeed ralising the special, and specialising the genera by seizing on some one very distinct attri describing it, if necessary, by periphrases; b great measure by the obvious resource of dire ses are rattlers and prads. In the French he heart is battant; a sheep is bêlant; a is bobine; a marionette is bouis-bouis; to die er; a liar is craquelin; to drink a health is ; a skeleton-key is frou-frou; a glutton is a shoe is paffe; a soldier, by an onomatopoeia would take too long to explain, is piou-piou; himney-sweeper is raclette; a cab is roulant; mbour; a noisy child turabate; and gendarmes, songs which soldiers like, is called tourlouru. re but a few instances out of many, and it is le to deny that they establish the necessity of ecourse to onomatopoeia when new words have Tented. They therefore furnish a fresh support Lews here advocated. by strict etymological laws we have traced back hrough all its various changes, instructive and as the process is sure to have been, we have hing to explain its origin or to account for its istory, unless we can point to its ultimate germ onomatopoetic or interjectional root; and perhe majority of cases this can be done with a fair of probability; for the number of roots required ormation of a language is extremely small; and ll number is amply supplied by the imitation Becker1 and Dalgarno, and Wilkins, and F Letellier can only move us to a smile, becaus based on a conventional theory of languag utterly mistaken. This, too, is the reason guage is stronger than emperors, and Tiber neither give the citizenship to a word, nor procure acceptance even for a useful letter. new word to have any chance of obtaining must of necessity be of an imitative characte curious fact that some of the tribes on th New Guinea derive even the names which ti their children from direct imitations of the fi or cries which they utter. We are surely entitled then to draw secure from the facts hitherto observed, and those For an account of their systems see Du Ponceau, Syst. Gram. de quelques Nations Indiennes, pp. 26-31, 31 Lit. Eur. iii. 362; and Letellier, Établissement immédiat Universelle. 2 Tu enim Cæsar civitatem potes dare hominibus, verbi said Capito to Tiberius.-Sueton. De Illustr. Gram. Claudius vainly tried to introduce into the Roman antisigma X, with the value Ps. ' pro qua Claudius Cæsar. hac figurâ scribi voluit, sed nulli ausi sunt antiquam scriptu --Priscian, i. De Literarum Numero et Affinitate. 4 Salverte, Hist. of Names, i. 62. Engl. Transl. |