Page:Primitive Culture Vol 1.djvu/190

172 of Tierra del Fuego express 'no' by a peculiar cluck, as do also the Turks, who accompany it with the gesture of throwing back the head; and it appears from the accounts of travellers that the clicks of surprise and admiration among the natives of Australia are much like those we hear at home. But though here these clicking noises are only used interjectionally, it is well known that South African races have taken such sounds up into their articulate speech and have made, as we may say, letters of them. The very name of Hottentots, applied to the Namaquas and other kindred tribes, appears to be not a native name (as Peter Kolb thought) but a rude imitative word coined by the Dutch to express the clicking  'hot en tot'  and the term Hottentotism has been thence adopted as a medical description of one of the varieties of stammering. North-West America is another district of the world distinguished for the production of strange clucking, gurgling, and grunting letters, difficult or impossible to European voices. Moreover, there are many sounds capable of being used in articulate speech, varieties of chirping, whistling, blowing, and sucking noises, of which some are familiar to our own use as calls to animals, or interjectional noises of contempt or surprise, but which no tribe is known to have brought into their alphabet. With all the vast phonetic variety of known languages, the limits of possible utterance are far from being reached.

Up to a certain point we can understand the reasons which have guided the various tribes of mankind in the selection of their various alphabets; ease of utterance to the speaker, combined with distinctness of effect to the hearer, have been undoubtedly among the principal of the selecting causes. We may fairly connect with the close uniformity of men's organs of speech all over the world, the general similarity which prevails in the phonetic systems of the most different languages, and which gives us the power of roughly writing down so large a proportion of any one language by means of an alphabet intended for any other. But while