Note 53 — Chapter II · SPEECH.

How were primitive terms (roots or words) formed? A much-debated and still unsolved question. Man had at his disposal one primary element, the interjection. By all accounts this remained sterile, unfertile; it did not give birth to words; it remained in articulate language as a mark of its emotional origin. A second proceeding was that of imitation with the aid of sound, onomatopœia. From antiquity to the present time, it has been regarded as the parent, par excellence. This was accepted by Renan, Whitney, Tylor, H. Paul, etc.; rejected by M. Müller, Bréal, P. Regnaud, etc. No one disputes the formation of many words by onomatopœia, but those who question its value as a universal process say that “if in certain sounds of our idioms we seem to hear an imitation of the sounds of nature, we must recollect that the same noises are represented by quite different sounds in other languages, which are also held by those who utter them to be onomatopœia. Thus it would be more just to say that we hear the sounds of nature through the words to which our ear has been accustomed from infancy” (Bréal). I have observed that those who study the spontaneous formation of language in children, claim for them but little onomatopœism. On the other hand, a word created by undoubted onomatopœia is sometimes by means of association, or of strange analogies, transferred successively to so many objects that all trace of the transformations of meaning may be lost, and the imitative origin actually denied. Such was Darwin’s case, cited above, where the onomatopœia of the duck finally served to designate all liquids, all that flies, all pieces of money. If the successive extensions of the term had not been observed, who could have recovered its origin?