De Brosses maintained that the Latin stare, to stand, might be traced to an origin in expressive sound. He fancied he could hear in it an organic radical sign designating fixity, and could thus explain why st! should be used as a call to make a man stand still. Its connexion with these sounds is often spoken of in more modern books, and one imaginative German philologer describes their origin among primæval men as vividly as though he had been there to see. A man stands beckoning in vain to a companion who does not see him, till at last his effort relieves itself by the help of the vocal nerves, and involuntarily there breaks from him the sound st! Now the other hears the sound, turns toward it, sees the beckoning gesture, knows that he is called to stop; and when this has happened again and again, the action comes to be described in common talk by uttering the now familiar st! and thus sta becomes a root, the symbol of the abstract idea to stand!^[279] This is a most ingenious conjecture, but unfortunately nothing more. It would be at any rate strengthened, though not established, if its supporters could prove that the st! used to call people in Germany, pst! in Spain, is itself a pure interjectional sound. Even this, however, has never been made out. The call has not yet been shown to be in use outside our own Indo-European family of languages; and so long as it is only found in use within these limits, an opponent might even plausibly claim it as an abbreviation of the very sta! (‘stay! stop!’) for which the theory proposes it as an origin.^[280]

That it is not unfair to ask for fuller evidence of a sound being purely interjectional than its appearance in a single family of languages, may be shown by examining another group of interjections, which are found among the remotest tribes, and thus have really considerable claims to rank among the primary sounds of language. These are the simple sibilants, s! sh! h’sh! used especially to scare birds, and among men to express aversion or call for silence. Catlin describes a party of Sioux Indians, when they came to the portrait of a dead chief, each putting his hand over his mouth with a hush-sh; and when he himself wished to approach the sacred ‘medicine’ in a Mandan lodge, he was called to refrain by the same hush-sh! Among ourselves the sibilant interjection passes into two exactly opposite senses, according as it is meant to put the speaker himself to silence, or to command silence for him to be heard; and thus we find the sibilant used elsewhere, sometimes in the one way and sometimes in the other. Among the wild Veddas of Ceylon, iss! is an exclamation of disapproval, as in ancient or modern Europe; and the verb shârak, to hiss, is used in Hebrew with a like sense, ‘they shall hiss him out of his place.’ But in Japan reverence is expressed by a hiss, commanding silence. Captain Cook remarked that the natives of the New Hebrides expressed their admiration by hissing like geese. Casalis says of the Basutos, ‘Hisses are the most unequivocal marks of applause, and are as much courted in the African parliaments as they are dreaded by our candidates for popular favour.’^[281] Among other sibilant interjections, are Turkish sûsâ! Ossetic ss! sos! ‘silence!’ Fernandian sia! ‘listen!’ ‘tush!’ Yoruba sió! ‘pshaw!’ Thus it appears that these sounds, far from being special to one linguistic family, are very widespread elements of human speech. Nor is there any question as to their passage into fully-formed words, as in our verb to hush, which has passed into the sense of ‘to quiet, put to sleep’ (adjectively, ‘as hush as death’), metaphorically to hush up a matter, or Greek σίζω ‘to hush, say hush! command silence.’ Even Latin silere and Gothic silan, ‘to be silent,’ may with some plausibility be explained as derived from the interjectional s! of silence.

Sanskrit dictionaries recognize several words which explicitly state their own interjectional derivation; such are hûñkâra (hûm-making), ‘the utterance of the mystic religious exclamation hûm!’ and çiççabda (çiç-sound), ‘a hiss.’ Besides these obvious formations, the interjectional element is present to some greater or less degree in the list of Sanskrit radicals, which represent probably better than those of any other language the verb-roots of the ancient Aryan stock. In ru, ‘to roar, cry, wail’ and in kakh, ‘to laugh,’ we have the simpler kind of interjectional derivation, that which merely describes a sound. As to the more difficult kind, which carry the sense into a new stage, Mr. Wedgwood makes out a strong case for the connexion of interjections of loathing and aversion, such as pooh! fie! &c., with that large group of words which are represented in English by foul and fiend, in Sanskrit by the verbs pûy, ‘to become foul, to stink’ and piy, pîy, ‘to revile, to hate.’^[282] Further evidence may be here adduced in support of this theory. The languages of the lower races use the sound pu to express an evil smell; the Zulu remarks that ‘the meat says pu’ (inyama iti pu), meaning that it stinks; the Timorese has poöp ‘putrid;’ the Quiché language has puh, poh ‘corruption, pus,’ pohir ‘to turn bad, rot,’ puz ‘rottenness, what stinks;’ the Tupi word for nasty, puxi, may be compared with the Latin putidus, and the Columbia River name for the ‘skunk,’ o-pun-pun, with similar names of stinking animals, Sanskrit pûtikâ ‘civet-cat,’ and French putois ‘pole-cat.’ From the French interjection fi! words have long been formed belonging to the language, if not authenticated by the Academy; in mediæval French ‘maistre fi-fi’ was a recognized term for a scavenger, and fi-fi books are not yet extinct.

There has been as yet, unfortunately, too much separation between what may be called generative philology, which examines into the ultimate origins of words, and historical philology, which traces their transmission and change. It will be a great gain to the science of language to bring these two branches of enquiry into closer union, even as the processes they relate to have been going on together since the earliest days of speech. At present the historical philologists of the school of Grimm and Bopp, whose great work has been the tracing of our Indo-European dialects to an early Aryan form of language, have had much the advantage in fulness of evidence and strictness of treatment. At the same time it is evident that the views of the generative philologists, from De Brosses onward, embody a sound principle, and that much of the evidence collected as to emotional and other directly expressive words, is of the highest value in the argument. But in working out the details of such word-formation, it must be remembered that no department of philology lies more open to Augustine’s caustic remark on the etymologists of his time, that like the interpretation of dreams, the derivation of words is set down by each man according to his own fancy. (Ut somniorum interpretatio ita verborum origo pro cujusque ingenio prædicatur.)