284 MENTAL EVOLUTION IN MAN 



Now, if any such process of extending or generalizing 

 aboriginally onomatopoetic terms were to have taken place 

 among the primitive framers of human speech, how hopeless 

 would be the task of the philologist who should now attempt 

 to find the onomatopoetic root! Yet, as above observed, not 

 only may we be perfectly certain that such extensions of 

 aboriginal onomatopoetic terms must have taken place, if any 

 such terms were ever in existence at all (and this cannot be 

 doubted), but also that it must have been almost a necessary 

 condition to the survival of an onomatopoetic term as a root 

 that such an extension of its meaning should have taken 

 place. In other words, we can see very good reason to 

 conclude that, as a rule, only those instances of primitive 

 onomatopoeia can have survived as roots, which must long 

 ago have had their onomatopoetic origin hopelessly obscured. 

 So that nowhere so much as in this case should we be 

 prepared to entertain the general principle of philological 

 research, that, as Goethe graphically states it, the original 

 meanings of words become gradually worn out, like the 

 image and superscription of a coin.* 



In view of such considerations, my only wonder is that 

 this origin admits of being traced so often as it does, even as 

 far back as the comparatively recent times when a pastoral 

 people coined the terms which afterwards constituted the 

 roots of Sanskrit. Kas, to cough ; ksJiu, to sneeze ; proth, 

 to snort ; ma, to bleat, and not a few others, are conceded, 

 even by Professor Max Miiller, to be of obviously imitative 



* It is needless to say that innumerable instances might be quoted of this 

 metaphorical change in the meanings of words, even in existing languages, — so 

 much so, indeed, that, as Richter says, all languages are but dictionaries of 

 forgotten metaphors. For example, there is a single Hebrew word of three 

 letters which may bear any one of the following significations : — to mix, to 

 exchange, to stand in place of, to pledge, to interfere, to be familiar, to disappear, 

 to set, to do a thing in the evening, to be sweet, a fly or beetle, an Arabian, a 

 stranger, the weft of cloth, the evening, a willow, and a raven. (See Farrar, 

 Chapters on Language, p. 229. He adds, "Assuming that all these significations 

 are ultimately deducible from one and the same root, we see at once the extent to 

 which metaphor must have been at work." For further examples of the same 

 principle, see ibid., pp. 234, 251, 252.) 



