Page:Primitive Culture Vol 1.djvu/193

Rh means of giving solemnity and pathos to language, it has been more fully developed and even systematized under exact rules of melody, and we thus have on the one hand ecclesiastical intoning and the less conventional half-singing so often to be heard in religious meetings, and on the other the ancient and modern theatrical recitative. By such intermediate stages we may cross the wide interval from spoken prose, with the musical pitch of its vowels so carelessly kept, and so obscured by consonants as to be difficult even to determine, to full song, in which the consonants are as much as possible suppressed, that they may not interfere with the precise and expressive music of the vowels.

Proceeding now to survey such parts of the vocabulary of mankind as appear to have an intelligible origin in the direct expression of sense by sound, let us first examine Interjections. When Horne Tooke spoke, in words often repeated since, of 'the brutish inarticulate Interjection,' he certainly meant to express his contempt for a mode of expression which lay outside his own too narrow view of language. But the epithets are in themselves justifiable enough. Interjections are undoubtedly to a certain extent 'brutish' in their analogy to the cries of animals; and the fact gives them an especial interest to modern observers, who are thus enabled to trace phenomena belonging to the mental state of the lower animals up into the midst of the most highly cultivated human language. It is also true that they are 'inarticulate,' so far at least that the systems of consonants and vowels recognized by grammarians break down more hopelessly than elsewhere in the attempt to write down interjections. Alphabetic writing is far too incomplete and clumsy an instrument to render their peculiar and variously-modulated sounds, for which a few conventionally-written words do duty poorly enough. In reading aloud, and sometimes even in the talk of those who have learnt rather from books than from the living world, we may hear these awkward imitations, ''ahem! hein! tush! tut! pshaw!'' now carrying