Page:Primitive Culture Vol 1.djvu/195

Rh thing has been noticed among Indians of Upper California, who as an expression of pain cry, aná! that is 'mother.' Other exclamations consist of a pure interjection combined with a pronoun, as ! ''oimè! ah me! or with an adjective, as alas! hélas! (ah weary!) With what care interjections should be sifted, to avoid the risk of treating as original elementary sounds of language what are really nothing but sense-words, we may judge from the way in which the common English exclamation well! well! approaches the genuine interjectional sound in the Coptic expression 'to make ouelouele,' which signifies to wail, Latin ululare. Still better, we may find a learned traveller in the 18th century quite seriously remarking, apropos of the old Greek battle-shout, that the Turks to this day call out Allah! Allah! Allah!'' upon the like occasion.

The calls to animals customary in different countries are to a great extent interjectional in their use, but to attempt to explain them as a whole is to step upon as slippery ground as lies within the range of philology. Sometimes they may be in fact pure interjections, like the schû schû! mentioned as an old German cry to scare birds, as we should say sh sh!, or the aá! with which the Indians of Brazil call their dogs. Or they may be set down as simple imitations of the animal's own cries, as the clucking to call fowls in our own farm-yards, or the Austrian calls of pi pi! or tiet tiet! to chickens, or the Swabian kauter kaut! to turkeys, or the shepherd's baaing to call sheep in India. In other cases, however, they may be sense-words more or less broken down, as when the creature is spoken to by a sound which seems merely taken from its own common name. If an English countryman meets