Now, under our present point of view we can see a very good reason why this element of sterility should have attached to these roots of Sanskrit whose onomatopoetic origin still admits of being clearly traced: it is just because they failed to be extended that their imitative source continues to be apparent.[200] But suppose, for the sake of illustration, that any one of them had been extended, and what would have happened? If _ma_, to bleat, had been metaphorically applied to the crying of a child, and had then become more and more habitually used in this new signification, while the original meaning became more and more obsolete, it might have taken the place of any such root as _bhi_, to fear; _ish_, to love, &c.; and in all the progeny of words which in this its conventional use it might subsequently have generated, no trace of imitative origin could now have been met with—any more than such an origin can be detected in the sound “quack,” as used by the above-mentioned child to designate a shilling. Several other considerations to the same general effect might be adduced. But, to mention only some of the more important, Steinthal points out that imitative utterance differs widely even among different races of existing men, so that the onomatopoetic words of one race do not convey any imitative suggestion to the minds of another.[201] Similarly, Professor Sayce insists, “it is not necessary that the imitation of natural sounds should be an exact one; indeed, that it never can be: all that is wanted is that the imitation should be recognizable by those addressed. The same natural sound, consequently, may strike the ear of different persons very differently, and so be represented in articulate speech in a strangely varying manner.”[202] Another very good illustration of the same point is to be found in the names for a grasshopper in different languages. After giving a number, Archdeacon Farrar remarks that obviously they are “all imitative: yet how immensely varied by the fantasies of imitation! How is this to be explained? Simply by the fact to which it is so often necessary to recur, that words are not mere imitations, but subjective echoes and reproductions—repercussions which are modified both organically and ideally—which have moreover been immensely blurred and disintegrated by the lapse of ages.”[203]