The disorders of speech.

  • Wyllie, John, 1914-
Date:
1894
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The disorders of speech. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by UCL Library Services. The original may be consulted at UCL (University College London)

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    the Latin spuere, to spit; or witli t, as in the Arabic tufl. He gives many other modifications of it in other languages. He thus shows how differently a natural act, expressive of dislike, may in various languages be translated into an imitative interjection. To take a second example. The sound of a sigh or groan is, in English, translated into the interjection ah, ah; in German it becomes ach; in Welsh, ochan; and the verb to groan becomes, in German, achen or achzen; and so on. Other translations of the sigh he finds in the Latin Vae; in the German Weh, pain; Die wehen, the pangs of childbirth, etc. He also treats of other interjections, such as ugh, hush, hist, foch, fie, hem, blurt, pet, trotz, etc.; indicating the natural sounds that possibly suggested them, and showing how differently they have been translated into different languages. The second great source of primitive words that has been insisted upon by the Imitative School is the Voluntary Imitation of Natural Sounds, such as the natural cries of animals and the notes of birds (onomatopoeia). So long as a child, or the child- man, repeats these natural sounds in a merely mechanical manner, by echolalia, the natural sound has no claim to rank as a true word; but whenever the child-man began to use the imitation as a means of suggesting the animal, or other source of sound, to the mind of another person, then the imitation began to serve the purposes of a word; and it became an ordinary word when, after repeated use, it was modified and conventionalized by the addition of consonants, which made it more easy of articulation, though less true as an imita- tion. Cuckoo and Peewit are familiar words of such a deriva- tion; and so is Whip-poor-Will and a host of others. All kinds of natural sounds have thus been reproduced, and are represented in various languages. We talk of the clucking of hens, cackling or gaggling of geese, gobbling of a turkey cock, quacking of ducks or frogs, cawing or quawking of rooks,croaking of frogs or ravens, cooing or crooing of doves, hooting of owls, bumping of bitterns, chirping of sparrows or crickets, twittering of swallows, chattering of pies or monkeys, neighing or whinnying of horses, purring or mewing of cats, yelping, howling, barking, snarling of dogs, grunting or squealing of hogs, bellowing of bulls, lowing of oxen, bleating of sheep, baaing or maeing of lambs.1 1 Wedgwood, op. cit., p. 16.