DOI Page / Citation link:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.42067#0342
302
Literature, music, and dance
Thus we have in British Columbia
Ham ham hamaya, He-who-travels-from-one-end-of-the-world-to-the-other
ham ham.
Ham ham hamaya, The-great-cannibal-of-the-north-end-of-the-world,
ham ham.
Ham ham hamaya, He-who-carries-corpses-to-be-his-food,
ham ham.
In other songs the significant words are more elaborate. They
are phrases fitted to the tunes, often by doing violence to the
ordinary forms of the words. The words are controlled by the
tunes. I might imitate this in the following way:
Instead of “I saw the great spirit travelling about". We might have
I sawhaw the greaheat sp’rit trading ’bout, ham ham.
This process is not quite unfamiliar to us in so far as we use the
apostrophe for syllables that in ordinary speech are not slurred,
when we expand a long vowel over several tones, when we utilise
archaic pronunciations for the sake of the meter, or when wrong
accents are introduced. Disregard for the words is found also in bor-
rowed songs which are sung in a language that is not understood
and in which the words (which are usually mispronounced) have only
the value of a burden that may be connected with a certain emotion
determined by the use of the song. All these forms are found every-
where and must therefore be considered the foundations of poetry.
Primitive poetry is primarily lyric, in many cases dithyrambic,
and elements which express definite coherent ideas are, in all prob-
ability, later developments. Perhaps we may see here an analogy
to the growth of language. In the animal world cries are primarily
reactions to emotions and only indirectly designative. It seems
likely that in human speech the spontaneous emotional cry preceded
the designative and so much more the predicative expression, not
by any means in the sense that the exclamation accounts for the
origin of organized speech, but that it is probably the first form of
articulation.
Literature, music, and dance
Thus we have in British Columbia
Ham ham hamaya, He-who-travels-from-one-end-of-the-world-to-the-other
ham ham.
Ham ham hamaya, The-great-cannibal-of-the-north-end-of-the-world,
ham ham.
Ham ham hamaya, He-who-carries-corpses-to-be-his-food,
ham ham.
In other songs the significant words are more elaborate. They
are phrases fitted to the tunes, often by doing violence to the
ordinary forms of the words. The words are controlled by the
tunes. I might imitate this in the following way:
Instead of “I saw the great spirit travelling about". We might have
I sawhaw the greaheat sp’rit trading ’bout, ham ham.
This process is not quite unfamiliar to us in so far as we use the
apostrophe for syllables that in ordinary speech are not slurred,
when we expand a long vowel over several tones, when we utilise
archaic pronunciations for the sake of the meter, or when wrong
accents are introduced. Disregard for the words is found also in bor-
rowed songs which are sung in a language that is not understood
and in which the words (which are usually mispronounced) have only
the value of a burden that may be connected with a certain emotion
determined by the use of the song. All these forms are found every-
where and must therefore be considered the foundations of poetry.
Primitive poetry is primarily lyric, in many cases dithyrambic,
and elements which express definite coherent ideas are, in all prob-
ability, later developments. Perhaps we may see here an analogy
to the growth of language. In the animal world cries are primarily
reactions to emotions and only indirectly designative. It seems
likely that in human speech the spontaneous emotional cry preceded
the designative and so much more the predicative expression, not
by any means in the sense that the exclamation accounts for the
origin of organized speech, but that it is probably the first form of
articulation.