Page:Primitive Culture Vol 1.djvu/196

178 a stray sheep-dog, he will simply call to him ''ship! ship! So schäp schäp! is an Austrian call to sheep, and köss kuhel köss!'' to cows. In German districts ''gus gus! gusch gusch! gös gös! are set down as calls to geese; and when we notice that the Bohemian peasant calls husy! to them, we remember that the name for goose in his language is husa,'' a word familiar to English ears in the name of John Huss. The Bohemian, again, will call to his dog ps ps! but then pes means 'dog.' Other sense-words addressed to animals break down by long repetition into mutilated forms. When we are told that the to to! with which a Portuguese calls a dog is short for toma toma! (i.e., 'take take!') which tells him to come and take his food, we admit the explanation as plausible; and the coop coop! which a cockney might so easily mistake for a pure interjection, is only 'Come up! come up!'

'Come uppe, Whitefoot, come uppe, Lightfoot, Come uppe, Jetty, rise and follow, Jetty, to the milking shed.'

But I cannot offer a plausible guess at the origin of such calls as hüf hüf! to horses, hühl hühl! to geese, deckel deckel! to sheep. It is fortunate for etymologists that such trivial little words have not an importance proportioned to the difficulty of clearing up their origin. The word puss! raises an interesting philological problem. An English child calling puss puss! is very likely keeping up the trace of the old Keltic name for the cat, Irish pus, Erse pusag, Gaelic puis. Similar calls are known elsewhere in Europe (as in Saxony, pûs pûs!), and there is some reason to think that the cat, which came to us from the East, brought with it one of its names, which is still current there, Tamil pûsei! Afghan pusha, Persian pushak, &c. Mr. Wedgwood finds an origin for the call in an imitation of the cat's spitting, and remarks that the Servians cry pis! to drive a cat away, while the Albanians use a similar sound to call it. The way in which the cry of puss! has furnished a name for