The Ideological Implications of Onomatopoeia in the Eighteenth Century

The Ideological Implications of Onomatopoeia in the Eighteenth Century R O Y H A RR I SzyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA Twentieth-century linguistics recognizes onomatopoetic words only as constituting a small, rather marginal and perhaps even dubious exception to the general principle that the linguistic sign is arbitrary.1 The term onomatopoeia does not even appear among the entries listed in the most recent dictionary of linguistic terminology.2 This omission would have struck many eighteenth-century writers about language as remarkable and perhaps inexplicable. It would doubtless have seemed so to the editors of what may be regarded as being, among its other claims to fame, Eu­ rope’s first dictionary of linguistics, the Encyclopedic, which contains an important article Onomatopee, written by Beauzee. For the eighteenth cen­ tury onomatopoesis was a phenomenon of considerable importance in the debate over how language began, and all participants in that debate took seriously the theory a later age was to ridicule under the derisive title of the “bow-wow” explanation of the origin of language. It is always of interest to examine why an explanation once taken seri­ ously comes to be dismissed as ridiculous or vice versa. The history of ideas provides many such examples, but the case of onomatopoeia is par­ ticularly instructive. Onomatopoeia itself—as the Encyclopedic article points out —is a term borrowed from the Greek and all it means etymo­ logically is “word-making” or “name-making.” Its very restriction to those examples of word-making which supposedly exemplify, to cite the Ency­ clopedic again, vox repercussa naturae already embodies a theory of the origin of the linguistic sign. What is particularly important about the idea of vox repercussa naturae is that it suggests something primitive, pre­ 209 210 / HARRIS civilized, something which antedates the time when language and linguis­ tic behaviour became subject to the rule of convention, or even to the emer­ gence of social institutions at all. An echo is a natural phenomenon, not a social phenomenon. Hence, potentially, the onomatopoetic principle sup­ plies the basis for an alternative account of the origin of the linguistic sign to that given by those Enlightenment theorists for whom the linguistic sign was essentially and inextricably social in origin; and perhaps more sig­ nificantly still, an alternative account to that given in the Bible. Thus its ideological implications are of considerable moment. In just the same way, and for exactly parallel reasons, a mimetic the­ ory of song as propounded by Lucretius in fedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA De rerum natura (where hu­ man imitation of the chirping of birds is given as the explanation) posed a potential threat to the “orthodox” eighteenth-century theory of the di­ vine origin of music, which held that Adam and Eve sang spontaneously in praise of their Creator in the Garden of Eden.3 A conflict automati­ cally arises between aetiological explanations based on “natural causes” and aetiological explanations based on appeal to mythology or divine in­ tervention. (For musicologists, however, mimetic theories retained their plausibility longer, and were not derisively dismissed in the nineteenth cen­ tury as “cheep-cheep” explanations of the origin of music.) Already in 1680, Dalgarno, in a passage which Hans Aarsleff quotes in From Locke to Saussure, had claimed All languages guided by the instinct of nature, have more or less of Onomatopoeia in them, and I think our English as much as any.... Take for example, wash, dash, plash, flash, clash, hash, lash, slash, trash, gash, etc. So grumble, tumble, crumble, jumble, fumble, stumble, bumble, mumble, etc., of which kind of words, the learned and my worthy friend Dr. Wallis has given a good account in his English Grammar. In all these and in such like words there is something symbolizing, and analogous to the notions of the things, which makes them both more emphatic and easy to the memory. But in words literally written, and of a mere ar­ bitrary institution, there can be nothing symbolical.4 The quotation from Dalgarno illustrates on what shaky empirical foun­ dations claims about onomatopoeia were made at that time. There is no attempt to prove that the words Dalgarno cites actually have an onomatopoetic origin. They are simply presented in long rhyming...