22 
he has received or the notions he has conceived. It was long before 
the association of one sound with one idea became fixed and definite. 
The primeval utterances of mankind were scarcely rational and almost 
unintelligible. 
Few persons now attribute the compilation of the first vocabulary 
and grammar to the Creator, and Assyrian scholars have recently 
deprived us of a refuge in “ Babel,” or Babilum,* which it is said does 
not signify confusion of tongues. There is strong evidence that language 
did not result from any sudden outburst of inspiration, but was un- 
consciously and naturally developed by social Man, the desire to 
communicate with his species being, according to Whitney and practical 
philologists of his school, the most influential factor in its development. 
Other writers maintain that it necessarily resulted from man’s advance 
in civilization, and that the invention of useful implements, such as the 
seine fishing net, which gave employment to the hands of a number of 
individuals united in pursuit of a common object, was a step furthering 
the development of articulate speech, inasmuch as the hands could 
not be simultaneously employed in signs or gesture language. M. 
Noire believes that in the inarticulate rhythmical cries still uttered 
by workmen in hauling weights, rowing, and marching, to secure 
unity of action, we have an example of one method of the origin of 
language. This Mr. Romanes has recently named the “ Yo he ho” theory, 
considering it merely as accessory of the imitative and interjectional 
modes of development which Prof. Max Muller formerly satirised as the 
“ Bow Bow ” and the “ Pooh Pooh” theories. To gain a full realization 
of the condition of language at the interjectional and imitative stage 
we must have recourse to the farm yard,or,better still,to a heated public 
meeting, when so-called civilized nineteenth century man frequently 
and deliberately reverts to the inarticulate condition of his remote 
ancestors and meets with the hoot of the owl, the hiss of the goose and 
the serpent, with dismal howls, or the inarticulate groans and moans of 
his own childhood, the arguments of a speaker whose logic and facts 
are incontrovertible. The aborigines of Ceylon also mark their 
disapproval by “iss,” but these wild Veddahs are never known to laugh 
and cannot even remember the names they gave to their own wives in 
their absence. The Basutos and the natives of the New Hebrides hiss 
like geese to express their admiration. Many words in every language 
may be considered as derived from imitations of the cries of man and 
other animals, such as peewit, cuckoo, howl, screech, hiss, hum, buzz, 
in our own. Sanskrit yields kshu to sneeze, sakh to laugh, kas to cough, 
ma to bleat. Coptic ah ha to laugh, eioto to wear a sorrowful counten- 
ance. We can all recognize the ancient Egyptian name of the animal 
they were the first to domesticate,—the mau and awa for cow. The 
Chinese also call the cat mzou, and our pussy is as probably an imitation 
of the angry cry of that animal; Irish pus, Erse pusag, Gaelic puis, 
Tamil pussi, Afghan pusha, Persian pushak, boost in the Tonga islands 
from the very day Captain Cook introduced it to the natives, and in 
America pwsh, pish-pish. 
* A. H. Saye; in By-Patus or BIBLE KNOWLEDGE, vol. II. Religious 
Tract Society; 1888. 
