PROF. BLACKIE ON THE PRINCIPLE OF ONOMATOPOEIA IN LANGUAGE. 5 



and in English by think, what possible connection can such words have with 

 screaming, or grunting, or twittering, or with the cry of any unreasoning animal ? 

 For man, as a reasoning animal, must have a method of proceeding in forming 

 his language, altogether different from the procedure which would suffice for 

 unreasoning brutes ; his discourse is not only p»«j, mere voice, but it is \6yog, that 

 is simply the outside of reason, and expressed in Greek (as all the world knows) 

 by the word which likewise signifies reason. Depend upon it, all the important 

 roots of a language must be notional ; otherwise, we suppose man acting without 

 reason, and our philosophy sinks into the lowest sensationalism of the French 

 school of the last century. 



Now, before answering this argument, I must again protest distinctly against 

 the presumption here implied, that the assertion that we do any thing without 

 the intervention of conscious notions and ideas is degrading to man, and ignores 

 that reason which is his characteristic. We eat, drink, sleep, love, hate, dance, 

 fly into sublime passions, and write lofty poetry, not without reason, indeed, but 

 certainly in nowise by virtue of consciously worked out products of reason, 

 called abstract ideas. If it should be found, therefore, that certain words denot- 

 ing mental action are only a secondary application of words originally painting 

 an outward mechanical action or position, or even a mere sound, I see nothing to 

 be ashamed of in the matter. A man may make himself a pig, or worse than a 

 pig in many ways, but certainly not merely by painting a pig-sty, or by ven- 

 triloquizing a grunt, or even by borrowing a grunt, for the expression of some 

 moral or metaphysical idea. The degradation to a reasonable being in the matter 

 of language consists, not in the borrowing from physical sources, but in not sub- 

 mitting the borrowed physical material to a native metaphysical treatment. 



This premised, we remark that it is a known tendency of language to grow, not 

 by the creation of new roots, when they are not necessary, but by a dexterous use 

 of the stock already acquired. In harmony with this fact, we have a right to sup- 

 pose that the original framers of language having succeeded, by the principle of 

 phonic imitation, in making a vocabulary to express the sounds made by animals 

 or sounding bodies, and the related names by which these should be known, would 

 not stop here, but would proceed to apply the same principle to a much wider and 

 more important range of ideas. Nor was the stepping-stone far to seek, by which 

 they soon learned to pass from the domain of single imitated sounds to the domain 

 of actions generally, and of all sorts of ideas. For if we attend to the process of 

 nature in such cases, we shall observe three facts which would necessarily help 

 to work out the original stock of strictly pictorial words imitating mere sounds, 

 to a large class of words, including all the most important verbs which language 

 in its early stages required. The first of these facts is, that most actions which 

 attract the notice of men are, in the first place, accompanied by certain sounds 

 or noises, which serve to indicate the approach, and to express the manner and 



VOL. XXIV. PART I. B 



