Note 206 — Chapter XIII

Professor Max Müller has argued that in the Indo-European languages the apparently onomatopoetic words signifying “thunder” are derived from the root tan, to “stretch,” and therefore were not of imitative origin. But Farrar has satisfactorily met this objection, even as regards this one particular case, by showing that even if not originally onomatopoetic, these words afterwards “became so from a feeling of the need that they should be” (Origin of Language, p. 82). See also, Chapters on Language, pp. 178-182; Heyse, System, s. 93; and Wundt, Vorlesungen, &c., ii. 396.