550 



THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.— SUPPLEMENT. 



terra, dry land ; tes-ta, dried clay, bowl, French 

 tete; testudo, turtle; probably for torrens, tor- 

 rent, torris, torch, and even for French aussitot. 1 

 This shows how language works. 



And with regard to objects which might most 

 easily have been named after the sounds which 

 they utter, we find again that generally they are 

 not so named, while in such words as cuckoo, 

 cuculus, Noire points out that these are not 

 names, but rather proper names, or nicknames, 

 and that they came in long after the concept of 

 the bird had been framed. Sounds such as bow- 

 wow, or baa or moo, would remind us, he thinks, 

 of single objects only, and would never be fit to 

 express conceptual thought. 



I had tried to show, in my lecture on Mr. Dar- 

 win's "Philosophy of Language," how even out 

 of such sounds the materials for roots or phonetic 

 types might have been elaborated, and how in 

 the same manner as various cries would leave the 

 concept of crying, various sounds, such as baa 

 and moo, might, by mutual friction, be raised to 

 a root, containing the concept of to cry. 



THE STMPATHIC THEORY. 



Prof. Noire has brought forward no argu- 

 ments against this theory, but he has started a 

 new theory, which, so far as it reaches, supplies 

 certainly a better explanation of phonetic types 

 and rational concepts than my own. He points 

 out that whenever our senses are excited and the 

 muscles hard at work, we feel a kind of relief in 

 uttering sounds. 2 He remarks that particularly 

 when people work together, when peasants dig 

 or thrash, when sailors row, when women spin, 

 when soldiers march, they are inclined to accom- 

 pany their occupation with certain more or less 

 vibratory or rhythmical utterances. These ut- 

 terances, noises, shouts, hummings, songs, are a 

 kind of reaction against the inward disturbance 

 caused by muscular effort. These sounds, he 

 thinks, possess two great advantages. They are 

 from the beginning signs of repeated acts, acts 

 performed by ourselves and perceived by our- 

 selves, but standing before us and continuing in 

 our memory as concepts only. Every repeated 

 act can be to us nothing but a concept, compre- 

 hending the many as one, and having really 

 nothing tangible corresponding to it in the outer 

 world. Here, therefore, was certainly an easy 

 bridge from perception to conception. Secondly, 

 as being uttered, not by one solitary man, but by 



1 Breal, "Melanges," p. 318. 



2 This point has been illustrated by Mr. Darwin in 

 Ms "Expression of the Emotions," chapter iv. 



men associated in the same work, these sounds 

 have another great advantage of being at once 

 intelligible. It cannot be denied that Noire's 

 arguments in support of his theory are very 

 strong, nor can there be any doubt that, as most 

 of our modern tools find their primitive types in 

 cave-dwellings and lacustrian huts, a very large 

 portion of our vocabulary can be derived, and 

 has been derived, from roots expressive of such 

 primitive acts as digging, cutting, rubbing, pull- 

 ing, striking, weaving, rowing, marching, etc. 



My only doubt is whether we should restrict 

 ourselves to this one explanation, and whether a 

 river so large, so broad, so deep as language may 

 not have had more than one source. 



Human language had, for instance, from a 

 very early time, to express not only acts, but 

 also states, or even sufferings. In fact, as Prof. 

 Noire has himself shown, all the work of our 

 senses admits of a double application, an active 

 and passive one. We listen actively, and we 

 hear passively ; we watch actively, and we per- 

 ceive passively ; we scent and sniff, and we per- 

 ceive disagreeable smells ; we grope, and we feel ; 

 we taste tentatively, and we taste something bit- 

 ter, whether we like it or not. Though in mod- 

 ern languages these two sides are often expressed 

 by one and the same verb, the two concepts were 

 originally quite distinct. To hear was probably 

 to vibrate, to be moved, to be struck ; and the 

 root kru, or klu, which in all the Aryan lan- 

 guages means to hear, may have been connected 

 with other roots, such as kru, to strike; krad, to 

 sound. Where we say, I hear the thunder, the 

 old expression might have been, I tremble, I 

 shake from the thunder. Hence the old con- 

 struction of such verbs with the ablative or geni- 

 tive preserved in Sanskrit or Greek ; while audire 

 in Latin has lost every trace of the old concept, 

 and governs the general objective case. To listen 

 in the active sense of watching, giving ear (aus- 

 culto), might have been expressed by a root con- 

 nected with the low, breathing sounds uttered by 

 a number of people who are waiting together for 

 some great event. Instead of this, we find that 

 in Sanskrit it is expressed by a secondary root, 

 srush, to hear, a kind of derivative from sru, to 

 hear, still present in the English to listen, Anglo- 

 Saxon hlosnian, hlystan. 



In some cases, again, Noire's view comes very 

 near the interjectional theory. Whether, for in- 

 stance, the root anh, to choke, should be called 

 interjectional or mimetic, or whether, as Noire 

 would have it, it was produced by the sympathy 

 of activity, will be difficult to determine. If 



