Page:Primitive Culture Vol 1.djvu/198

180 is the evidence bearing on the origin of language to be set aside as worthless; for it may be taken as a maxim of ethnology, that what is done among civilized men in jest, or among civilized children in the nursery, is apt to find its analogue in the serious mental effort of savage, and therefore of primæval tribes.

Drivers' calls to their beasts, such as this ''gee! gee-ho! to urge on horses, and weh! woh!'' to stop them, form part of the vernacular of particular districts. The geho! perhaps came to England in the Norman-French, for it is known in France, and appears in the Italian dictionary as gio! The traveller who has been hearing the drivers in the Grisons stop their horses with a long br-r-r! may cross a pass and hear on the other side a hü-ü-ü! instead. The ploughman's calls to turn the leaders of the team to right and left have passed into proverb. In France they say of a stupid clown 'Il n'entend ni à dia! ni a hurhaut!'  and the corresponding Platt-Deutsch phrase is 'He weet nich hutt! noch hoh!'  So there is a regular language to camels, as Captain Burton remarks on his journey to Mekka: ikh ikh! makes them kneel, yáhh yáhh! urges them on, hai hai! induces caution, and so forth. In the formation of these quaint expressions, two causes have been at work. The sounds seem sometimes thoroughly interjectional, as the Arab hai! of caution, or the French hue! North German jö! Whatever their origin, they may be made to carry their sense by imitative tones expressive to the ear of both horse and man, as any one will say who hears the contrast between the short and sharp high-pitched hüp! which tells the Swiss horse to go faster, and the long-drawn hü-ü-ü-ü! which brings him to a stand. Also, the way in which common sense-words are taken up into calls like ''gee-up! woh-back!'' shows that we may expect to find various old broken fragments of formal language in the list, and such on inspection we find accordingly. The following lines are quoted by Halliwell from the Micro-Cynicon (1599): —