Page:Primitive Culture Vol 1.djvu/211

Rh use for 'no!' and 'yes!' that tribes are actually named from these words as a convenient means of distinction. Thus the tribes known as Gureang, Kamilaroi, Kogai, Wolaroi, Wailwun, Wiratheroi, have their names from the words they use for 'no,' these being gure, kamil, ko, wol, wail, wira, respectively; and on the other hand the Pikambul are said to be so called from their word pika, 'yes.' The device of naming tribes, thus invented by the savages of Australia, and which perhaps recurs in Brazil in the name of the Cocatapuya tribe (coca 'no,' tapuya 'man') is very curious in its similarity to the mediæval division of Langue d'oc and Langue d'oïl, according to the words for 'yes!' which prevailed in Southern and Northern France: oc! is Latin hoc, as we might say 'that's it!' while the longer form hoc illud was reduced to oïl! and thence to oui! Many other of the words for 'yes!' and 'no!' may be sense-words, as, again, the French and Italian si! is Latin sic. But on the other hand there is reason to think that many of these particles in use in various languages are not sense-words, but sound-words of a purely interjectional kind; or, what comes nearly to the same thing, a feeling of fitness of the sound to the meaning may have affected the choice and shaping of sense-words — a remark of large application in such enquiries as the present. It is an old suggestion that the primitive sound of such words as non is a nasal interjection of doubt or dissent. It corresponds in sound with the visible gesture of closing the lips, while a vowel-interjection, with or without aspiration, belongs rather to open-mouthed utterance. Whether from this or some other cause, there is a remarkable tendency among most distant and various languages of the world, on the one hand to use vowel-sounds, with soft or hard breathing, to express 'yes!' and on the other hand to use nasal consonants to express 'no!' The affirmative form is much the commoner. The guttural i-i! of the West Australian, the ēē! of the Darien, the a-ah! of the Clallam, the é! of