You will observe that in some of these cases the signification of a sound includes both a notion and its opposite, as greatness and smallness. This is an interesting feature, to which I shall refer later.
Turn now to another language, the Cree. Geographically it is contiguous to the Tinné; but, says Bishop Faraud, who spoke them both fluently, they resemble each other no more than the French does the Chinese. Nevertheless, we discover this same peculiarity of materially significant phonetic elements. Howse, in his _Cree Grammar_, observes that the guttural K and the labial W constitute the essential part of all intensive terms in that language, “whether the same be attributive, formative, or personal accident.” Indeed, he maintains that the articulate sounds of the Cree all express relative powers, feebleness or force, independent of their position with reference to other sounds.
You may inquire whether in the different groups of American tongues the same or a similar signification is attached to any one sound, or to the sounds of any one organ. If it were so, it would give countenance to those theories which maintain that there is some fixed relation between sound and sense in the radicals of languages. I must reply that I have found very little evidence for this theory; and yet some. For example, the N sound expresses the notion of the _ego_, of myself-ness, in a great many tongues, far apart geographically and linguistically. It is found at the basis of the personal pronoun of the first person and of the words for _man_ in numerous dialects in North and South America. Again, the K sound is almost as widely associated with the ideas of _otherness_, and is at the base of the personal pronoun of the second person singular and of the expressions for superhuman personalities, the divine existence.[337] It is essentially demonstrative in its power.
Again, in a long array of tongues in various parts of the world, the subjective relation is expressed by the M sound, as has been pointed out by Dr. Winkler; and other examples could be added. Many of these it is impossible to attribute to derivation from a common source. Some writers maintain that sounds have a subjective and fixed relation to ideas; others call such coincidences “blind chance,” but these should remember that chance itself means merely the action of laws not yet discovered.