Page:Primitive Culture Vol 1.djvu/215

Rh Fernandian sia! 'listen!' 'tush!' Yoruba sió! 'pshaw!' Thus it appears that these sounds, far from being special to one linguistic family, are very widespread elements of human speech. Nor is there any question as to their passage into fully-formed words, as in our verb to hush, which has passed into the sense of 'to quiet, put to sleep' (adjectively, 'as hush as death'), metaphorically to hush up a matter, or Greek  'to hush, say hush! command silence.' Even Latin silere and Gothic silan, 'to be silent,' may with some plausibility be explained as derived from the interjectional s! of silence.

Sanskrit dictionaries recognize several words which explicitly state their own interjectional derivation; such are hûñkâra (hûm-making), 'the utterance of the mystic religious exclamation hum!' and çiççabda (çiç-sound), 'a hiss.' Besides these obvious formations, the interjectional element is present to some greater or less degree in the list of Sanskrit radicals,which represent probably better than those of any other language the verb-roots of the ancient Aryan stock. In ru, 'to roar, cry, wail,' and in kakh, 'to laugh,' we have the simpler kind of interjectional derivation, that which merely describes a sound. As to the more difficult kind, which carry the sense into a new stage, Mr. Wedgwood makes out a strong case for the connexion of interjections of loathing and aversion, such as ''pooh! fie! &c., with that large group of words which are represented in English by foul and fiend, in Sanskrit by the verbs pûy, 'to become foul, to stink,' and piy, pîy,'' 'to revile, to hate.' Further