the Yakama Indians, the e! of the Basuto, and the ai! of the Kanuri, are some examples of a wide group of forms, of which the following are only part of those noted down in Polynesian and South American districts—ii! é! ia! aio! io! ya! ey! &c., h'! heh! he-e! hü! hoehah! ah-ha! &c. The idea has most weight where pairs of words for 'yes!' and 'no!' are found both conforming. Thus in the very suggestive description by Dobrizhoffer among the Abipones of South America, for 'yes!' the men and youths say héé! the women say háá! and the old men give a grunt; while for 'no' they all say yna! and make the loudness of the sound indicate the strength of the negation. Dr. Martius's collection of vocabularies of Brazilian tribes, philologically very distinct, contains several such pairs of affirmatives and negatives, the equivalents of yes!'—'no!' being in Tupi ayé—aan! aani!; in Guato ii!—mau!; in Jumana, aeae!—mäiu!; in Miranha ha ú!—nani! The Quichua of Peru affirms by y! hu! and expresses ' no,' 'not,' 'not at all,' by ama! manan! &c., making from the latter the verb manamñi, 'to deny.' The Quiché of Guatemala has e or ve for the affirmative, ma, man, mana, for the negative. In Africa, again, the Galla language has ee! for 'yes!' and hn, hin, hm, for 'not!'; the Fernandian ee! for 'yes!' and 'nt for 'not;' while the Coptic dictionary gives the affirmative (Latin 'sane') as eie, ie, and the negative by a long list of nasal sounds such as an, emmen, en, mmn, &c. The Sanskrit particles hi! 'indeed, certainly,' na, 'not,' exemplify similar forms in Indo-European languages, down to our own aye! and no![1] There must be some meaning in all this, for otherwise I could hardly have noted down incidentally, without making any attempt at a general search, so many cases from such different languages, only finding a comparatively small number of contradictory cases.[2]
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EMOTIONAL AND IMITATIVE LANGUAGE.
