Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 9.djvu/165

 H. STEINTHAL'S ABIIIXX r-ER spRACHU'itsESStJUAFT, I. 153 whole sentences that onomatopoeia is so powerful. In the well- known line from Homer's description of Sisyphus : A^TM eTrena ireeovZe icuivtfTo Xaas ai'atcjjv. only KU is an onomatopoeia, whilst the masterly effect in Milton's With hideous ruin and combustion, down To bottomless perdition ; is produced without a single mimetic root. The same applies to Virgil's Sed fugit interea, fugit irreparabile tempus. " If then," says Steinthal, " the onomatopoetic feeling and the sound-reflex are an established fact, we may accept it theoretically or hypothetically as the principle of the original creation of language." Hitherto we have been considering language as the pathog- noniic representation of perceptions. But how was the transition effected from the word to the sentence ? " The onomatopoetic sound-reflex, because and as long as it indicates le perceptions and intuitions, is a sound-gesture ; it is only when it l> for a mere momentum of a sensuous intuition that it becomes a 1, which first appears in the form of a root. But then the immediate t;xion of the meaning with the feeling is necessarily broken, the ou< imatopoetie character of language disappears. The root is no longer onomatopoetic. Thus, where language first comes forward in its true individuality, where it wins its full intellectual character, it breaks through onomatopoeia ; and the word in its true sense first arises with the form of the sentence, i.e., simultaneously with the antithesis of subject and predi- cate, which soon becomes fixed for the difference in naming things and expressing states and changes. The logical character of a word seems to be decidedly antagonistic to its onomatopoetic origin. If it is undeniable that, in the later history of nations, many a word has become so phoneti- cally changed that in sound it has come to onomatopoetically approach the object named, it is also probable, on the other hand, that, in early times, when the onomatopoetic principle was left, the appearance of onomatopoeia became obscured and avoided." This second stage of linguistic development Steinthal designates as the characterising. The evolution of language itself is the cause that onomatopoeia is absorbed by the characterising inner form, and that then the etymon is lost in the third inner speech- form, or linguistic custom . Respecting the formation of the sentence, much would seeni to depend upon the fact that many objects may be included in one and the same perception ; suckling, for instance, contains the woman and the child in one act. This phenomenon having once been fixed with the sound-reflex da-d&, this sound could serve not only for the suckling (filiu*) and the woman (ftminu) the nurse and the grandmother (~i]0i]}, but also for the particular organ brought into play (0i/j/, teat), and would be both subject and predicate. Thus, the sentence da dad'i would mean flUun feUat, the suckling sucks. But since the same being is perceived