Page:Primitive Culture Vol 1.djvu/226

208 easily caught,' to pigeon 'to cheat,' Italian pipione 'a silly gull, one that is soon caught and trepanned,' pippionare 'to pigeon, to gull one.' In an entirely different family of languages, Mr. Wedgwood points out a curiously similar process of derivation; Magyar pipegni, pipelni 'to peep or cheep;' pipe, pipök 'a chicken, gosling;' pipe-ember (chicken-man), 'a silly young fellow, booby.' The derivation of Greek, Latin bos, Welsh bu, from the ox's lowing, or booing as it is called in the north country, has been much debated. With an excessive desire to make Sanskrit answer as a general Indo-European type, Bopp connected Sanskrit go, old German chuo, English cow, with these words, on the unusual and forced assumption of a change from guttural to labial. The direct derivation from sound, however, is favoured by other languages, Cochin-Chinese bo, Hottentot bou. The beast may almost answer for himself in the words of that Spanish proverb which remarks that people talk according to their nature: 'Habló el buey, y dijó bu!'  'The ox spoke, and he said boo!' 

Among musical instruments with imitative names are the following: — the shee-shee-quoi, the mystic rattle of the Red Indian medicine-man, an imitative word which reappears in the Darien Indian shak-shak, the shook-shook of the Arawaks, the Chinook shugh (whence shugh-opoots, rattletail, i.e., 'rattlesnake;') — the drum, called ganga in Haussa, gañgañ in the Yoruba country, gunguma by the Gallas, and having its analogue in the Eastern gong; — the bell, called in Yakama (N. Amer.) kwa-lal-kwa-lal, in Yalof (W. Afr.) walwal, in Russian kolokol. The sound of the horn is imitated in English nurseries as toot-toot, and this is transferred to express the 'omnibus' of which the bugle is the signal: with this nursery word is to be classed the