Note 282 — Chapter V · EMOTIONAL AND IMITATIVE LANGUAGE.

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 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 f 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 f, and it can hardly give the rule in this matter to languages possessing both p and f, and thus capable of nicer appreciation of this class of interjections.