hat,
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
intents and purposes a "fixed," that is, an only slightly and
"accidentally" variable, feature of man's organism.

Interjections are among the least important of speech elements. Their
discussion is valuable mainly because it can be shown that even they,
avowedly the nearest of all language sounds to instinctive utterance,
are only superficially of an instinctive nature. Were it therefore
possible to demonstrate that the whole of language is traceable, in its
ultimate historical and psychological foundations, to the interjections,
it would still not follow that language is an instinctive activity. But,
as a matter of fact, all attempts so to explain the origin of speech
have been fruitless. There is no tangible evidence, historical or
otherwise, tending to show that the mass of speech elements and speech
processes has evolved out of the interjections. These are a very small
and functionally insignificant proportion of the vocabulary of language;
at no time and in no linguistic province that we have record of do we
see a noticeable tendency towards their elaboration into the primary
warp and woof of language. They are ne