Page:Researches into the Early History of Mankind and the Development of Civilization.djvu/67

Rh any certain notion, as for instance in the class of pure imitative words such as "cuckoo," "peewit,'" and the like, the connection between word and idea is not only real but evident. It is true that different imitative words may be used for the same sound, as for instance the tick of a clock is called also pick in Germany; but both these words have an evident resemblance to the unwriteable sound that a clock really makes. So the Tahitian word for the crowing of cocks, aaoa, might be brought over as a rival to "cock-a-doodle-do!" There is, moreover, a class of words of undetermined extent, which seem to have been either chosen in some measure with a view to the fitness of their sound to represent their sense, or actually modified by a reflection of sound into sense. Some such process seems to have made the distinction between to crash, to crush, to crunch, and to craunch, and to have differenced to flip, to flap, to flop, and to flump, out of a common root. Some of these words must be looked for in dictionaries of "provincialisms," but they are none the less English for that. In pure interjections, such as ''oh! ah!'' the connection between the actual pronunciation and the idea which is to be conveyed is perceptible enough, though it is hardly more possible to define it than it is to convey in writing their innumerable modulations of sound and sense.

But if there was a living connection between word and idea outside the range of these classes of words, it seems dead now. We might just as well use "inhabitable" in the French sense as in that of modern English. In fact Shakspeare and other writers do so, as where Norfolk says in 'Richard the Second,'

It makes no practical difference to the world at large, that our word to "rise" belongs to the same root as Old German rîsan, to fall, French arriser, to let fall, whichever of the two meanings may have come first, nor that black, blanc, bleich, to bleach, to blacken, Anglo-Saxon blæc, blac=black, blâc=pale, white, come so nearly together in sound. It has been plausibly conjectured that the reversal of the meaning of to "rise" may have happened through a preposition being prefixed to change the sense, and