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

1 Also Oraon hae-ambo; Micmac é-mw.

2 A double contradiction in Carib anhan!='yes!' oua !='no!' Single contradictions in Catoquina hang! Tupi eém! Botocudo hemhem! Yoruba

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

en! 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.

1 (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.

2 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 sť'! and the Latin st! so well described

That it is not unfair to ask for fuller evidence of a sound being purely interjectional than its appearance in a single family of languages, may be shown by examining another group of interjections, which are found among the remotest tribes, and thus have really considerable claims to rank among the primary sounds of language. These are the simple sibilants, s! sh! h'sh! used especially to scare birds, and among men to express aversion or call for silence. Catlin describes a party of Sioux Indians, when they came to the portrait of a dead chief, each putting his hand over his mouth with a hush-sh; and when he himself wished to approach the sacred medicine' in a Mandan lodge, he was called to refrain by the same hush-sh! Among ourselves the sibilant interjection passes into two exactly opposite senses, according as it is meant to put the speaker himself to silence, or to command silence for him to be heard; and thus we find the sibilant used elsewhere, sometimes in the one way and sometimes in the other. Among the wild Veddas of Ceylon, iss! is an exclamation of disapproval, as in ancient or modern Europe; and the verb shárak, to hiss, is used in Hebrew with a like sense, 'they shall hiss him out of his place.' But in Japan reverence is expressed by a hiss, commanding silence. Captian Cook remarked that the natives of the New Hebrides expressed their admiration by hissing like geese. Casalis says of the Basutos, 'Hisses are the most unequivocal marks of applause, and are as much courted in the African parliaments as they are dreaded by our candidates for popular favour.' Among other sibilant interjections, are Turkish sûsá! Ossetic ss! sos! 'silence!'

in the curious old line quoted by Mr. Farrar, which compares it with the gesture of the finger on the lips ::

Isis, et Harpocrates digito qui significat st!' This group of interjections, again, has not been proved to be in use outside Aryan limits.

1 Catlin, 'North American Indians,' vol. i. pp. 221, 39, 151, 162. Bailey in 'Tr. Eth. Soc.,' vol. ii. p. 318. Job xxvii. 23. (The verb sharak also signifies to call by a hiss, and he will hiss unto them from the end of the

Fernandian sia! 'listen!' 'tush!' Yoruba sió! 'pshaw!' Thus it appears that these sounds, far from being special to one linguistic family, are very widespread elements of human speech. Nor is there any question as to their passage into fully-formed words, as in our verb to hush, which has passed into the sense of 'to quiet, put to sleep' (adjectively, 'as hush as death'), metaphorically to hush up a matter, or Greek risw 'to hush, say hush! command silence.' Even Latin silere and Gothic silan, 'to be silent,' may with some plausibility be explained as derived from the interjectional s! of silence.

Sanskrit dictionaries recognize several words which explicitly state their own interjectional derivation; such are húnkára (húm-making), 'the utterance of the mystic religious exclamation hum!' and çiççabda (çiç-sound), 'a hiss.' Besides these obvious formations, the interjectional element is present to some greater or less degree in the list of Sanskrit radicals, which represent probably better than those of any other language the verb-roots of the ancient Aryan stock. In ru, 'to roar, cry, wail,' and in kakh, 'to laugh,' we have the simpler kind of interjectional derivation, that which merely describes a sound. As to the more difficult kind, which carry the sense into a new stage, Mr. Wedgwood makes out a strong case for the connexion of interjections of loathing and aversion, such as pooh! fie! &c., with that large group of words which are represented in English by foul and fiend, in Sanskrit by the verbs púy, 'to become foul, to stink,' and piy, piy, 'to revile, to hate.'1 Further

earth, and behold, they shall come with speed,' Is. v. 26; Jer. xix. 8.) Alcock, 'The Capital of the Tycoon,' vol. i. p. 394. Cook, 2nd Voy.' vol. ii. p. 36. Casalis, 'Basutos,' p. 234.

1 Wedgwood, 'Origin of Language,' p. 83, 'Dictionary,' Introd. p. xlix. and s.v. 'foul.' Prof. Max Müller, Lectures,' 2nd series, p. 92, protests against the indiscriminate derivation of words directly from such cries and interjections, without the intervention of determinate roots. As to the present topic, he points out that Latin pus, putridus, Gothic fuls, English foul, follow Grimm's law as if words derived from a single root. Admitting this, however, the question has to be raised, how far pure interjections and their direct derivatives, being self-expressive and so to speak

evidence may be here adduced in support of this theory. The languages of the lower races use the sound pu to express an evil smell; the Zulu remarks that 'the meat says pu' (inyama iti pu), meaning that it stinks; the Timorese has poop 'putrid;' the Quiché language has puh, poh 'corruption, pus,' pohir 'to turn bad, rot,' puz rottenness, what stinks;' the Tupi word for nasty, puxi, may be compared with the Latin putidus, and the Columbia River name for the 'skunk,' o-pun-pun, with similar names of stinking animals, Sanskrit pûtika 'civet-cat,' and French putois 'pole-cat.' From the French interjection fi! words have long been formed belonging to the language, if not authenticated by the Academy; in medieval French 'maistre fi-fi' was a recognized term for a scavenger, and fi-fi books are not yet extinct.

There has been as yet, unfortunately, too much separation between what may be called generative philology, which examines into the ultimate origins of words, and historical philology, which traces their transmission and change. It will be a great gain to the science of language to bring these two branches of enquiry into closer union, even as the processes they relate to have been going on together since the earliest days of speech. At present the historical philologists of the school of Grimm and Bopp, whose great work has been the tracing of our Indo-European dialects to an early Aryan form of language, have had much the advantage in fulness of evidence and strictness of treatment. At the same time it is evident that the views of the generative philologists, from De Brosses onward, embody a sound

living sounds, are affected by phonetic changes such as that of Grimm's law, which act on articulate sounds no longer fully expressive in themselves, but handed down by mere tradition. Thus p and ƒ occur in one and the same dialect in interjections of disgust and aversion, puh! fi! being used in Venice or Paris, just as similar sounds would be in London. In tracing this group of words from early Aryan forms, it must also be noticed that Sanskrit is a very imperfect guide, for its alphabet has no fƒ, and it can hardly give the rule in this matter to languages possessing both p and ƒ, and thus capable of nicer appreciation of this class of interjections.