of being applied to express the movements of their spirits. Perhaps the principal contribution of exclamations to the origin of language was made in this way, rather than by the furnishing of actual radical elements: for the latter work, their restricted scope, their subjective character, their infertility of relations, would render them less fitted.
There is no real discordance between the onomatopoetic and interjectional theories, nor do the advocates of either, it is believed, deny or disparage the value of the other, or refuse its aid in the solution of their common problem. The definition of the onomatopoetic principle might be without difficulty or violence so widened that it should include the interjectional. We must, indeed, beware of restricting its action too narrowly. It is by no means limited to a reproduction of the sounds of animate and inanimate nature: it admits also a kind of symbolical representation—as an intimation of abrupt, or rapid, or laborious, or smooth action by utterances making an analogous impression upon the ear. A yet more subjective symbolism has been sought for among some of the earlier constituents of speech; it has been suggested, for example, not without a certain degree of plausibility, that the pronominal root of the first person in the Indo-European (and in many other) languages, ma (our me), has in its internality of formation, its utterance with closed lips, as if shutting out the external world, a peculiar adaptedness to express one's own personality; and that the demonstrative ta (which has become our that) was prompted by the position it calls for in the tongue, which is thrust forward in the mouth, as it were to point out the object indicated. Very little of this kind, if anything at all, can be satisfactorily made out in the material of language; that, however, some degree of such subjective correspondence, felt more distinctly in certain cases, less so in others, may have sometimes suggested to a root-proposer, by a subtile and hardly definable analogy, one particular complex of sounds rather than another, as the representative of an idea for which he was seeking expression, need not be absolutely denied. Only, in admitting it, and seeking for traces of its influence, we must beware of approximating in any degree to that wildest and most
