

4 PROF. BLACKIE ON THE PRINCIPLE OF ONOMATOPCEIA IN LANGUAGE. 



producing an sesthetical effect, on the same imitative principle by which these 

 materials themselves were originally framed. And we can prove the actual 

 making of words on this principle from observation. A happy father calls his 

 child "little goo-goo /" Why? Because the little creasy-armed, chubby-faced 

 Hopeful has a throat, and g is a guttural letter ; and, therefore, as naturally as a 

 chicken cries pip, pip, the baby sends forth goo, goo, as the first notice of its 

 march into the realm of articulate speech ; and the delighted parent, by the 

 exercise of the parrot faculty, immediately forms a name for his son, which 

 might have remained for ever, as the only name it should get, did not the con- 

 ventional rights of baptism interfere, not to mention the long prescriptive claim 

 in favour of baby and boy, which the labial letters from old Greek and Roman 

 days have succeeded in establishing against the guttural. For I certainly do 

 believe, whatever may be said to the contraiw, that the Hebrew word em, the 

 Greek pata and wnig, the German Amme, and the common English ma\pa\ and 

 baby, have something to do with the use of the labial letters, so natural to the 

 toothless gums of children, and so obvious in the cries of certain animals. Of the 

 consonants indeed, which brutes use to modify their vocal cries, of which the 

 vowel is always the grand clement, the labials and gutturals, along with the 

 snarling R, the rolling L, and the sibilant S, seem to be the most common. We 

 shall not therefore be surprised to find an ox called Bo in Latin, Greek, and Gaelic, 

 or to hear the bellow of oxen called //,yxa<r3a/ in Greek, while the bleat of sheep is 

 called Mxuedui, and the cry of goats, in German meckern, for which I do not know 

 that we have a specific word in English. And if the Greeks say i/>.«x™ for the 

 bark of a dog, it is not because their language is not mimetic in this case, while 

 ours certainly is, but because i-?.«x™ is merely a lengthened derivative form of the 

 root 6x, Avhich is only a feebler form of our English lionl, German heulen. In the 

 same way that the letter R in the Greek -/.^mr,, the Latin corvus, the Hebrew 21V, 

 and the English crow, has something to do with the sound uttered by that class 

 of animals, I shall continue to believe, without any reference to Grimm's Law, 

 so long as in the world of animated sound neither swallows shall have been 

 heard to grunt on the eaves, nor pigs to twitter in the st} 7 , nor bulls to mew in 

 Bashan, nor cats to bellow at the fireside. 



Let so much therefore be allowed,— be held as admitted, — though not without 

 manifest unwillingness by those who disown the principle we now advocate. But 

 now comes the more important question, for the sake of which alone the preceding 

 examples have been given, as a sort of postulate, rather than as demanding proof. 

 Is this all ? If only a few names of animals, and certain phenomena in nature 

 always accompanied by sound, are to be explained by the principle of pictured 

 articulation, we are advanced but a very short way, and the great body of 

 the roots of a language, expressing not sounds but notions, remains unexplained. 

 When I express the idea of thinking in Latin by the root med, in Greek by ^r, 



