That there is some analogy between the faculty of speech and the sounds which we utter in singing, laughing, crying, sobbing, sighing, moaning, screaming, whistling, and clicking, was known to Epicurus of old, and requires no proof. But does it require to be pointed out that even if the scream of a man who has his finger pinched should happen to be identically the same as the French hélas, that scream would be an effect, an involuntary effect of outward pressure, whereas an interjection like alas, hélas, Italian lasso, to say nothing of such words as pain, suffering, agony, &c., is there by the free will of the speaker, meant for something, used with a purpose, chosen as a sign?

Again, that sounds can be rendered in language by sounds, and that each language possesses a large stock of words imitating the sounds given out by certain things, who would deny? And who would deny that some words, originally expressive of sound only, might be transferred to other things which have some analogy with sound?

But how are all things that do not appeal to the sense of hearing-how are the ideas of going, moving, standing, sinking, tasting, thinking, to be expressed?

I give the following as a specimen of what may be achieved by the advocates of "painting in sound." Hooiaioai is said in Hawaian to mean to testify; and this, we are told, was the origin of the word: -1

"In uttering the i the breath is compressed into the smallest and seemingly swiftest current possible. It represents, therefore, a swift, and what we may call a sharp, movement.

1 The Polynesian, Honolulu, 1862.

goes farthest.

"Of all the vowels o is that of which the sound We have it, therefore, in most words relating to distance, as in holo, lo, long, &c.

"In joining the two, the sense is modified by their position. If we write oi, it is an o going on with an i. This is exemplified in oi, lame. Observe how a lame man advances. Standing on the sound limb, he puts the lame one leisurely out and sets it to the ground: this is the o. But no sooner does it get there, and the weight of the body begin to rest on it, than, hastening to relieve it of the burden, he moves the other leg rapidly forward, lessening the pressure at the same time by relaxing every joint he can bend, and thus letting his body sink as far as possible; this rapid sinking movement is the i.

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Again, oi, a passing in advance, excellency. Here o is the general advance, i is the going ahead of some particular one.

0.

“If, again, we write io, it is an i going on with an That is to say, it is a rapid and penetrating movement i, and that movement long continued. Thus we have in Hawaian io, a chief's forerunner. He would be a man rapid in his course-i; of good bottom- -0. In Greek, ios, an arrow, and Io, the goddess who went so fast and far. Hence io is anything that goes quite through, that is thorough, complete, real, true. Like Burns, 'facts are chiels that winna ding, that is, cannot be forced out of their course. Hence io, flesh, real food, in distinction to. bone, &c., and reality or fact, or truth generally.

"la is the pronoun that, analogous to Latin is, ea, id. Putting together these we have o, ia, io - Oh that is fact. Prefixing the causative hoo, we have

make that to be fact;' affix ai, completive of the action, and we have, 'make that completely out to be a fact,' that is 'testify to its truth.'

"It is to be remarked that the stress of the voice is laid on the second i, the oia being pronounced very lightly, and that in Greek the i in oíomai, I believe, is always strongly accented, a mark of the contraction the word has suffered."

The

Although the languages of Europe, with their well-established history, lend themselves less easily to such speculations, yet I could quote similar passages from French, German, and English etymologists. Dr. Bolza, in his " Vocabolario Genetico-Etimologico" (Vienna, 1852), tells us, among other things, that in Italian a expresses light, o redness, u darkness; and he continues, "Ecco probabilmente le tre note, che in fiamma, fuoco, e fumo, sono espresse dal mutamento della vocale, mentre la f esprime in tutti i tre il movimento dell' aria” (p. 61, note). And again we are told by him that one of the first sounds pronounced by children is m: hence mamma. root of this is ma or am, which gives us amare, to love. On account of the movement of the lips, it likewise supplies the root of mangiare and masticare; and explains besides muto, dumb, muggire, to low, miagolare, to mew, and mormorio, murmur. Now, even if amare could not be protected by the Sanskrit root am, to rush forward impetuously (according to others, kẩm, to love), we should have thought that mangiare and masticare would have been safe against onomatopoeic interference, the former being the Latin manducare, to chew, the latter the post-classical masticare, to chew. Manducare has a long history of its

own. It descends from mandere, to chew, and mandere leads us back to the Sanskrit root mard, to grind, one of the numerous offshoots of the root mar, the history of which will form the subject of one of our later lectures. Mûtus has been well derived by Professor A. Weber (Kuhn's Zeitschrift, vi. p. 318) from the Sanskrit mû, to bind (Pâņ. vi. 4, 20), so that its original meaning would have been "tonguebound." As to miagolare, to mew, we willingly hand it over to the onomatopoeic school.

The onomatopoeic theory goes very smoothly as long as it deals with cackling hens and quacking ducks; but round that poultry-yard there is a dead wall, and we soon find that it is behind that wall that language really begins.

But whatever we may think of these onomatopoic and interjectional theories, we must carefully distinguish between two things. There is one class of scholars who derive all words from roots according to the strictest rules of comparative grammar, but who look upon the roots, in their original character, as either interjectional or onomatopoeic. There are others who derive words straight from interjections and the cries of animals, and who claim in their etymologies all the liberty the cow claims in saying booh, mooh, or ooh, or that man claims in saying pooh, fi, pfui.1 With regard to the former theory, I should wish to remain entirely neutral, satisfied with considering roots as phonetic types till some progress has been made in tracing the principal roots, not of Sanskrit only, but of Chinese, Bask, the Turanian,

1 On the uncertainty of rendering inarticulate by articulate sounds, see Marsh (4th ed.), p. 36; Sir John Stoddart's Glossology, p. 231; Mélanges Asiatiques (St. Petersbourg) iv. 1.

and Semitic languages, back to the cries of man or the imitated sounds of nature.

Quite distinct from this is that other theory which, without the intervention of determinate roots, derives our words directly from cries and interjections. This theory would undo all the work that has been done by Bopp, Humboldt, Grimm, and others, during the last fifty years; it would with one stroke abolish all the phonetic laws that have been established with so much care and industry, and throw etymology back into a state of chaotic anarchy. According to Grimm's law, we derive the English fiend, the German feind, the Gothic fijand, from, a root which, if it exists at all in Sanskrit, Latin, Lithuanian, or Celtic, must there begin with the tenuis p. Such is the phonetic law that holds these languages together, and that cannot be violated with impunity. If we found in Sanskrit a word fiend, we should feel certain that it could not be the same as the English fiend. Following this rule we find in Sanskrit the root pîy, to hate, to destroy, the participle of which, piyanı, would correspond exactly with Gothic fijand. But suppose we derived fiend and other words of a similar sound, such as foul, filth, &c., from the interjections fi, and pooh (faugh! fo! fie! Lith. pui, Germ. pfui), all would be mere scramble and confusion; Grimm's law would be broken; and roots, kept distinct in Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, and German, would be mixed up together. For besides pîy, to hate, there is another root in Sanskrit, pûy, to decay. From it we have Latin pus, puteo, putridus; Greek pýon, and pythō; Lithuanian pulei, matter; and, in strict accordance with Grimm's law, Gothic fuls,