De Brosses maintained that the Latin stare, to stand, might be traced to an origin in expressive sound. He fancied he could hear in it an organic radical sign designating fixity, and could thus explain why st! should be used as a call to make a man stand still. Its connexion with these sounds is often spoken of in more modern books, and one imaginative German philologer describes their origin among primæval men as vividly as though he had been there to see. A man stands beckoning in vain to a companion who does not see him, till at last his effort relieves itself by the help of the vocal nerves, and involuntarily there breaks from him the sound st! Now the other hears the sound, turns toward it, sees the beckoning gesture, knows that he is called to stop; and when this has happened again and again, the action comes to be described in common talk by uttering the now familiar st! and thus sta becomes a root, the symbol of the abstract idea to stand![1] This is a most ingenious conjecture, but unfortunately nothing more. It would be at any rate strengthened, though not established, if its supporters could prove that the st! used to call people in Germany, pst! in Spain, is itself a pure interjectional sound. Even this, however, has never been made out. The call has not yet been shown to be in use outside our own Indo-European family of languages; and so long as it is only found in use within these limits, an opponent might even plausibly claim it as an abbreviation of the very sta! ('stay! stop!') for which the theory proposes it as an origin.[2]
- ↑ (Charles de Brosses) 'Traité de la Formation Mécanique des Langues, &c.' Paris, An. ix., vol. i. p. 238; vol. ii. p. 313. Lazarus and Steinthal, 'Zeitschrift für Völkerpsychologie,' &c., vol. i. p. 421. Heyse, System der Sprachwissenschaft,' p. 73. Farrar, 'Chapters on Language,' p. 202.
- ↑ Similar sounds are used to command silence, to stop speaking as well as to stop going. English husht!! whist! hist! Welsh ust! French chut! Italian zitto! Swedish tyst! Russian st'! and the Latin st! so well described
eñ! for 'yes!' Culino aiy! Australian yo! for 'no!' &c. How much these sounds depend on peculiar intonation, we, who habitually use h'm! either for 'yes!' or 'no!' can well understand.
