Page:Primitive Culture Vol 1.djvu/219

musical instruments, the sounds of shouting, howling, stamping, breaking, tearing, scraping, with others which are all day coming to their ears, and out of these imitations many current words indisputably have their source. But these words, as we find them in use, differ often widely, often beyond all recognition, from the original sounds they sprang from. In the first place, man's voice can only make a very rude copy of most sounds his ear receives; his possible vowels are very limited in their range compared with natural tones, and his possible consonants still more helpless as a means of imitating natural noises. Moreover, his voice is only allowed to use a part even of this imperfect imitative power, seeing that each language for its own convenience restricts it to a small number of set vowels and consonants, to which the imitative sounds have to conform, thus becoming conventionalized into articulate words with further loss of imitative accuracy. No class of words have a more perfect imitative origin than those which simply profess to be vocal imitations of sound. How ordinary alphabets to some extent succeed and to some extent fail in writing down these sounds may be judged from a few examples. Thus, the Australian imitation of a spear or bullet striking is given as toop; to the Zulu, when a calabash is beaten, it says boo; the Karens hear the flitting ghosts of the dead call in the wailing voice of the wind, re, re, ro, ro; the old traveller, Pietro della Valle, tells how the Shah of Persia sneered at Timur and his Tartars, with their arrows that went ter ter; certain Buddhist heretics maintained that water is alive, because when it boils it says chichitá, chitichitá, a symptom of vitality which occasioned much theological controversy as to drinking cold and warm water. Lastly, sound-words taken up into the general inventory of a language have to follow its organic changes, and in the course of phonetic transition, combination, decay, and mutilation, to lose ever more and more .their original shape. To take a single example, the French huer 'to shout' (Welsh hwa) may be a perfect imitative verb; yet when it passes into modern