themselves. These interjections are merely conventional fixations of the
natural sounds. They therefore differ widely in various languages in
accordance with the specific phonetic genius of each of these. As such
they may be considered an integral portion of speech, in the properly
cultural sense of the term, being no more identical with the instinctive
cries themselves than such words as "cuckoo" and "kill-deer" are
identical with the cries of the birds they denote or than Rossini's
treatment of a storm in the overture to "William Tell" is in fact a
storm. In other words, the interjections and sound-imitative words of
normal speech are related to their natural prototypes as is art, a
purely social or cultural thing, to nature. It may be objected that,
though the interjections differ somewhat as we pass from language to
language, they do nevertheless offer striking family resemblances and
may therefore be looked upon as having grown up out of a common
instinctive base. But their case is nowise different from that, say, of
the varying national modes of pictorial representation. A Japanese
picture of a hill both differs from and resembles a typical modern
European painting of the same kind of hill. Both are suggested by and
both "imitate" the same natural feature. Neither the one nor the other
is the same thing as, or, in any intelligible sense, a direct outgrowth
of, this natural feature. The two modes of representation are not
identical because they proceed from differing historical traditions, are
executed with differing pictorial techniques. The interjections of
Japanese and English are, just so, suggested by a common natural
prototype, the instinctive cries, and are thus unavoidably suggestive of
each other. They differ, now greatly, now but little, because they are
builded out of historically diverse materials or techniques, the
respective linguistic traditions, phonetic systems, speech habits of the
two peoples. Yet the instinctive cries as such are practically identical
for all humanity, just as the human skeleton or nervous system is to all