interjectional utterances, reiterated with expressive emphasis and considerable gesticulation.'[1] This description well brings before us in actual life a system of effective human intercourse, in which there has not yet arisen the use of those articulate sounds carrying their meaning by tradition, which are the inherited words of the dictionary.
When, however, we look closely into these inherited sense-words themselves, we find that interjectional sounds have actually had more or less share in their formation. Not stopping short at the function ascribed to them by grammarians, of standing here and there outside a logical sentence, the interjections have also served as radical sounds out of which verbs, substantives, and other parts of speech have been shaped. In tracing the progress of interjections upward into fully developed language, we begin with sounds merely expressing the speaker's actual feelings. When, however, expressive sounds like ah! ugh! pooh! are uttered not to exhibit the speaker's actual feelings at the moment, but only in order to suggest to another the thought of admiration or disgust, then such interjections have little or nothing to distinguish them from fully formed words. The next step is to trace the taking up of such sounds into the regular forms of ordinary grammar. Familiar instances of such formations may be found among ourselves in nursery language, where to woh is found in use with the meaning of to stop, or in that real though hardly acknowledged part of the English language to which belong such verbs as to boo-hoo. Among the most obvious of such words are those which denote the actual utterance of an interjection, or pass thence into some closely allied meaning. Thus the Fijian women's cry of lamentation oile! becomes the verb oile 'to bewail,' oile-taka 'to lament for' (the men cry ule!); now this is in perfect analogy with such words as ululare, to wail. With different grammatical terminations, another sound produces the Zulu verb gigiteka and its English equivalent to giggle.
- ↑ D. Wilson, 'Prehistoric Man,' p. 65.
