so to speak, the same skeleton, may be made to follow the variation of sound, of force, of duration, of size, an imitative group more or less connected with the last will show — crick, creak, crack, crash, crush, crunch, craunch, scrunch, scraunch. It does not at all follow that because a word suffers such imitative and symbolic changes it must be, like this, directly imitative in its origin. What, for instance, could sound more imitative than the name of that old-fashioned cannon for throwing grape-shot, the patterero? Yet the etymology of the word appears in the Spanish form pedrero, French perrier; it means simply an instrument for throwing stones (piedra, pierre), and it was only when the Spanish word was adopted in England that the imitative faculty caught and transformed it into an apparent sound-word, resembling the verb to patter. The propensity of language, especially in slang, to make sense of strange words by altering them into something with an appropriate meaning has been often dwelt upon by philologists, but the propensity to alter words into something with an appropriate sound has produced results immensely more important. The effects of symbolic change of sound acting upon verb-roots seem almost boundless. The verb to waddle has a strong imitative appearance, and so in German we can hardly resist the suggestion that imitative sound has to do with the difference between wandern and wandeln; but all these verbs belong to a family represented by Sanskrit vad, to go, Latin vado, and to this root there seems no sufficient ground for assigning an imitative origin, the traces of which it has at any rate lost if it ever had them. Thus, again, to stamp with the foot, which has been claimed as an imitation of sound, seems only a 'coloured' word. The root sta, 'to stand,' Sanskrit sthâ, forms a causative stap, Sanskrit stâdpay, 'to make to stand,' English to stop, and a foot-step is when the foot comes to a stand, a foot-stop. But we have Anglo-Saxon stapan, stæpan, steppan, English to step, varying to express its meaning by sound in to staup, to stamp, to stump, and
