More frequent than such words as this [‘gas’], which only by a lucky hit gain life and career, are those in which the attempt has been made in a rude way to imitate the sounds of nature […] We call such words onomatopœias, literally ‘name-makings,’ because the Greeks did so: they could conceive of no way in which absolutely new language-material should be produced except by such imitation.
- Whitney (1875), Pag. 120

The office of onomatopœia was the provision, by the easiest attainable method, of the means of mutual intelligence; in proportion, then, as it became easier to make the same provision by another method, the differentiation and new application of signs already existing, the primitive method went into comparative disuse- as it has ever since continued, though never absolutely unused.
- Whitney (1875), Pag. 298

The theory [imitative theory] does […] rest in part on the undeniable presence of a considerable onomatopœic element in later speech, and on the fact that new material is actually won in this way through the whole history of language; onomatopœia is thus raised to the rank of a ‘vera causa’, attested by familiar fact […].
- Whitney (1875), Pag. 297