Page:Language and the Study of Language.djvu/451

Each of them furnishes a good and sufficient explanation of a part of the facts for which we are seeking to account, since each suggests available means by which the first speakers should have arrived at mutually intelligible signs. Especially great and undeniable are the capabilities of the onomatopoetic principle. We saw in one of our recent illustrations that, since qualities or acts are the immediate objects of the first designations, and since the voice is the appointed means of designating, audible acts, utterances or accompanying noises, would be most naturally chosen to be designated. That words have been and may be formed through the medium of imitation of natural sounds is palpably true; every language has such to show in its vocabulary. That, for example, an animal can be named from its cry, and the name thus given generalized and made fertile of derivatives, is shown by such a word as cock, which is regarded by etymologists as an abbreviated imitation of chanticleer's cock-a-doodle-doo! and from which come, by allusion to the bird's pride and strut, the words coquette, cockade, the cock of a gun, to cock one's eye, to cock the head on one side, a cocked hat, and so on. Through all the stages of growth of language, absolutely new words are produced by this method more than by any other, or even almost exclusively; there is also to be seen an evident disposition to give an imitative complexion to words which denote matters cognizable by the ear; the mind pleases itself with bringing about a sort of agreement between the sign and the thing signified. Both theory and observed fact, therefore, unite to prove the imitative principle more actively productive than any other in the earliest processes of language-making. But neither is a noteworthy degree of importance to be denied to the exclamatory or interjectional principle. It is, beyond all question, as natural for the untaught and undeveloped man to utter exclamations, as to make gestures, expressive of his feelings; and as, in the absence of a voice, the tendency to gesture might have been fruitful in suggesting a language of significant motions, so we may most plausibly suppose that the tendency to exclaim was not without value in aiding men to realize that they had in their voices that which was capable