We have more than once referred to the “elements of speech,†by which we understood, roughly speaking, what are ordinarily called “words.†We must now look more closely at these elements and acquaint ourselves with the stuff of language. The very simplest element of speech—and by “speech†we shall hence-forth mean the auditory system of speech symbolism, the flow of spoken words—is the individual sound, though, as we shall see later on, the sound is not itself a simple structure but the resultant of a series of independent, yet closely correlated, adjustments in the organs of speech. And yet the individual sound is not, properly considered, an element of speech at all, for speech is a significant function and the sound as such has no significance. It happens occasionally that the single sound is an independently significant element (such as Frencha“has†andà “to†or Latini“go!â€), but such cases are fortuitous coincidences between individual sound and significant word. The coincidence is apt to be fortuitous not only in theory but in point of actual historic fact; thus, the instances cited are merely reduced forms of originally fuller phonetic groups—Latinhabetandadand Indo-Europeaneirespectively. If language is a structure and if the significant elements of language are the bricks of the structure, then the sounds of speech can only be compared to the unformed and unburnt clay ofwhich the bricks are fashioned. In this chapter we shall have nothing further to do with sounds as sounds.
The true, significant elements of language are generally sequences of sounds that are either words, significant parts of words, or word groupings. What distinguishes each of these elements is that it is the outward sign of a specific idea, whether of a single concept or image or of a number of such concepts or images definitely connected into a whole. The single word may or may not be the simplest significant element we have to deal with. The English wordssing,sings,singing,singereach conveys a perfectly definite and intelligible idea, though the idea is disconnected and is therefore functionally of no practical value. We recognize immediately that these words are of two sorts. The first word,sing, is an indivisible phonetic entity conveying the notion of a certain specific activity. The other words all involve the same fundamental notion but, owing to the addition of other phonetic elements, this notion is given a particular twist that modifies or more closely defines it. They represent, in a sense, compounded concepts that have flowered from the fundamental one. We may, therefore, analyze the wordssings,singing, andsingeras binary expressions involving a fundamental concept, a concept of subject matter (sing), and a further concept of more abstract order—one of person, number, time, condition, function, or of several of these combined.
If we symbolize such a term assingby the algebraic formula A, we shall have to symbolize such terms assingsandsingerby the formula A + b.[1]The element A may be either a complete and independent word (sing) or the fundamental substance, the so-called root orstem[2]or “radical element†(sing-) of a word. The element b (-s,-ing,-er) is the indicator of a subsidiary and, as a rule, a more abstract concept; in the widest sense of the word “form,†it puts upon the fundamental concept a formal limitation. We may term it a “grammatical element†or affix. As we shall see later on, the grammatical element or the grammatical increment, as we had better put it, need not be suffixed to the radical element. It may be a prefixed element (like theun-ofunsingable), it may be inserted into the very body of the stem (like thenof the Latinvinco“I conquer†as contrasted with its absence invici“I have conqueredâ€), it may be the complete or partial repetition of the stem, or it may consist of some modification of the inner form of the stem (change of vowel, as insungandsong; change of consonant as indeadanddeath; change ofaccent;actual abbreviation). Each and every one of these types of grammatical element or modification has this peculiarity, that it may not, in the vast majority of cases, be used independently but needs to be somehow attached to or welded with a radical element in order to convey an intelligible notion. We had better, therefore, modify our formula, A + b, to A + (b), the round brackets symbolizing the incapacity of an element to stand alone. The grammatical element, moreover, is not only non-existent except as associated with a radical one, it does not even, as a rule, obtain its measure of significance unless it is associated with a particular class of radical elements. Thus, the-sof Englishhe hitssymbolizes an utterly different notion from the-sofbooks, merely becausehitandbookare differently classified as to function. We must hasten to observe, however, that while the radical element may, on occasion, be identicalwith the word, it does not follow that it may always, or even customarily, be used as a word. Thus, thehort-“garden†of such Latin forms ashortus,horti, andhortois as much of an abstraction, though one yielding a more easily apprehended significance, than the-ingofsinging. Neither exists as an independently intelligible and satisfying element of speech. Both the radical element, as such, and the grammatical element, therefore, are reached only by a process of abstraction. It seemed proper to symbolizesing-eras A + (b);hort-usmust be symbolized as (A) + (b).
So far, the first speech element that we have found which we can say actually “exists†is the word. Before defining the word, however, we must look a little more closely at the type of word that is illustrated bysing. Are we, after all, justified in identifying it with a radical element? Does it represent a simple correspondence between concept and linguistic expression? Is the elementsing-, that we have abstracted fromsings,singing, andsingerand to which we may justly ascribe a general unmodified conceptual value, actually the same linguistic fact as the wordsing? It would almost seem absurd to doubt it, yet a little reflection only is needed to convince us that the doubt is entirely legitimate. The wordsingcannot, as a matter of fact, be freely used to refer to its own conceptual content. The existence of such evidently related forms assangandsungat once shows that it cannot refer to past time, but that, for at least an important part of its range of usage, it is limited to the present. On the other hand, the use ofsingas an “infinitive†(in such locutions asto singandhe will sing) does indicate that there is a fairly strong tendency for the wordsingto represent the full, untrammeled amplitude of a specific concept. Yet ifsingwere,in any adequate sense, the fixed expression of the unmodified concept, there should be no room for such vocalic aberrations as we find insangandsungandsong, nor should we findsingspecifically used to indicate present time for all persons but one (third person singularsings).
The truth of the matter is thatsingis a kind of twilight word, trembling between the status of a true radical element and that of a modified word of the type ofsinging. Though it has no outward sign to indicate that it conveys more than a generalized idea, we do feel that there hangs about it a variable mist of added value. The formula A does not seem to represent it so well as A + (0). We might suspectsingof belonging to the A + (b) type, with the reservation that the (b) had vanished. This report of the “feel†of the word is far from fanciful, for historical evidence does, in all earnest, show thatsingis in origin a number of quite distinct words, of type A + (b), that have pooled their separate values. The (b) of each of these has gone as a tangible phonetic element; its force, however, lingers on in weakened measure. ThesingofI singis the correspondent of the Anglo-Saxonsinge; the infinitivesing, ofsingan; the imperativesingofsing. Ever since the breakdown of English forms that set in about the time of the Norman Conquest, our language has been straining towards the creation of simple concept-words, unalloyed by formal connotations, but it has not yet succeeded in this, apart, possibly, from isolated adverbs and other elements of that sort. Were the typical unanalyzable word of the language truly a pure concept-word (type A) instead of being of a strangely transitional type (type A + [0]), oursingandworkandhouseand thousands of others would compare with the genuine radical-wordsof numerous other languages.[3]Such a radical-word, to take a random example, is the Nootka[4]wordhamot“bone.†Our English correspondent is only superficially comparable.Hamotmeans “bone†in a quite indefinite sense; to our English word clings the notion of singularity. The Nootka Indian can convey the idea of plurality, in one of several ways, if he so desires, but he does not need to;hamotmay do for either singular or plural, should no interest happen to attach to the distinction. As soon as we say “bone†(aside from its secondary usage to indicate material), we not merely specify the nature of the object but we imply, whether we will or no, that there is but one of these objects to be considered. And this increment of value makes all the difference.
We now know of four distinct formal types of word: A (Nootkahamot); A + (0) (sing,bone); A + (b) (singing); (A) + (b) (Latinhortus). There is but one other type that is fundamentally possible: A + B, the union of two (or more) independently occurring radical elements into a single term. Such a word is the compoundfire-engineor a Sioux form equivalent toeat-stand(i.e., “to eat while standingâ€). It frequently happens, however, that one of the radical elements becomes functionally so subordinated to the other that it takes on the character of a grammatical element. We may symbolize this by A + b, a type that may gradually, by loss of external connection between the subordinated element b and its independent counterpart B merge with the commoner type A + (b). A word likebeautifulis an example of A + b, the-fulbarely preserving the impress of its lineage. A word likehomely, on the other hand, is clearly of the type A + (b), for no one but a linguistic student is aware of the connection between the-lyand the independent wordlike.
In actual use, of course, these five (or six) fundamental types may be indefinitely complicated in a number of ways. The (0) may have a multiple value; in other words, the inherent formal modification of the basic notion of the word may affect more than one category. In such a Latin word ascor“heart,†for instance, not only is a concrete concept conveyed, but there cling to the form, which is actually shorter than its own radical element (cord-), the three distinct, yet intertwined, formal concepts of singularity, gender classification (neuter), and case (subjective-objective). The complete grammatical formula forcoris, then, A + (0) + (0) + (0), though the merely external, phonetic formula would be (A)—, (A) indicating the abstracted “stemâ€cord-, the minus sign a loss of material. The significant thing about such a word ascoris that the three conceptual limitations are not merely expressed by implication as the word sinks into place in a sentence; they are tied up, for good and all, within the very vitals of the word and cannot be eliminated by any possibility of usage.
Other complications result from a manifolding of parts. In a given word there may be several elements of the order A (we have already symbolized this by the type A + B), of the order (A), of the order b, and of the order (b). Finally, the various types may be combined among themselves in endless ways. A comparatively simple language like English, or even Latin, illustrates but a modest proportion of these theoretical possibilities.But if we take our examples freely from the vast storehouse of language, from languages exotic as well as from those that we are more familiar with, we shall find that there is hardly a possibility that is not realized in actual usage. One example will do for thousands, one complex type for hundreds of possible types. I select it from Paiute, the language of the Indians of the arid plateaus of southwestern Utah. The wordwii-to-kuchum-punku-rügani-yugwi-va-ntü-m(ü)[5]is of unusual length even for its own language, but it is no psychological monster for all that. It means “they who are going to sit and cut up with a knife a black cow (orbull),†or, in the order of the Indian elements, “knife-black-buffalo-pet-cut up-sit(plur.)-future-participle-animate plur.†The formula for this word, in accordance with our symbolism, would be (F) + (E) + C + d + A + B + (g) + (h) + (i) + (0). It is the plural of the future participle of a compound verb “to sit and cut upâ€â€”A + B. The elements (g)—which denotes futurity—, (h)—a participial suffix—, and (i)—indicating the animate plural—are grammatical elements which convey nothing when detached. The formula (0) is intended to imply that the finished word conveys, in addition to what is definitely expressed, a further relational idea, that of subjectivity; in other words, the form can only be used as the subject of a sentence, not in an objective or other syntactic relation. The radical element A (“to cut upâ€), before entering into combination with the coördinate element B (“to sitâ€), is itself compounded with two nominal elements or element-groups—an instrumentally used stem (F)(“knifeâ€), which may be freely used as the radical element of noun forms but cannot be employed as an absolute noun in its given form, and an objectively used group—(E) + C + d (“black coworbullâ€). This group in turn consists of an adjectival radical element (E) (“blackâ€), which cannot be independently employed (the absolute notion of “black†can be rendered only as the participle of a verb: “black-be-ingâ€), and the compound noun C + d (“buffalo-petâ€). The radical element C properly means “buffalo,†but the element d, properly an independently occurring noun meaning “horse†(originally “dog†or “domesticated animal†in general), is regularly used as a quasi-subordinate element indicating that the animal denoted by the stem to which it is affixed is owned by a human being. It will be observed that the whole complex (F) + (E) + C + d + A + B is functionally no more than a verbal base, corresponding to thesing-of an English form likesinging; that this complex remains verbal in force on the addition of the temporal element (g)—this (g), by the way, must not be understood as appended to B alone, but to the whole basic complex as a unit—; and that the elements (h) + (i) + (0) transform the verbal expression into a formally well-defined noun.
It is high time that we decided just what is meant by a word. Our first impulse, no doubt, would have been to define the word as the symbolic, linguistic counterpart of a single concept. We now know that such a definition is impossible. In truth it is impossible to define the word from a functional standpoint at all, for the word may be anything from the expression of a single concept—concrete or abstract or purely relational (as inoforbyorand)—to the expression of a completethought (as in Latindico“I say†or, with greater elaborateness of form, in a Nootka verb form denoting “I have been accustomed to eat twenty round objects [e.g., apples] while engaged in [doing so and so]â€). In the latter case the word becomes identical with the sentence. The word is merely a form, a definitely molded entity that takes in as much or as little of the conceptual material of the whole thought as the genius of the language cares to allow. Thus it is that while the single radical elements and grammatical elements, the carriers of isolated concepts, are comparable as we pass from language to language, the finished words are not. Radical (or grammatical) element and sentence—these are the primaryfunctionalunits of speech, the former as an abstracted minimum, the latter as the esthetically satisfying embodiment of a unified thought. The actualformalunits of speech, the words, may on occasion identify themselves with either of the two functional units; more often they mediate between the two extremes, embodying one or more radical notions and also one or more subsidiary ones. We may put the whole matter in a nutshell by saying that the radical and grammatical elements of language, abstracted as they are from the realities of speech, respond to the conceptual world of science, abstracted as it is from the realities of experience, and that the word, the existent unit of living speech, responds to the unit of actually apprehended experience, of history, of art. The sentence is the logical counterpart of the complete thought only if it be felt as made up of the radical and grammatical elements that lurk in the recesses of its words. It is the psychological counterpart of experience, of art, when it is felt, as indeed it normally is, as the finished play of word withword. As the necessity of defining thought solely and exclusively for its own sake becomes more urgent, the word becomes increasingly irrelevant as a means. We can therefore easily understand why the mathematician and the symbolic logician are driven to discard the word and to build up their thought with the help of symbols which have, each of them, a rigidly unitary value.
But is not the word, one may object, as much of an abstraction as the radical element? Is it not as arbitrarily lifted out of the living sentence as is the minimum conceptual element out of the word? Some students of language have, indeed, looked upon the word as such an abstraction, though with very doubtful warrant, it seems to me. It is true that in particular cases, especially in some of the highly synthetic languages of aboriginal America, it is not always easy to say whether a particular element of language is to be interpreted as an independent word or as part of a larger word. These transitional cases, puzzling as they may be on occasion, do not, however, materially weaken the case for the psychological validity of the word. Linguistic experience, both as expressed in standardized, written form and as tested in daily usage, indicates overwhelmingly that there is not, as a rule, the slightest difficulty in bringing the word to consciousness as a psychological reality. No more convincing test could be desired than this, that the naïve Indian, quite unaccustomed to the concept of the written word, has nevertheless no serious difficulty in dictating a text to a linguistic student word by word; he tends, of course, to run his words together as in actual speech, but if he is called to a halt and is made to understand what is desired, he can readily isolate the words as such, repeating them as units. He regularly refuses, on the other hand, to isolate the radical or grammaticalelement, on the ground that it “makes no sense.â€[6]What, then, is the objective criterion of the word? The speaker and hearer feel the word, let us grant, but how shall we justify their feeling? If function is not the ultimate criterion of the word, what is?
It is easier to ask the question than to answer it. The best that we can do is to say that the word is one of the smallest, completely satisfying bits of isolated “meaning†into which the sentence resolves itself. It cannot be cut into without a disturbance of meaning, one or the other or both of the severed parts remaining as a helpless waif on our hands. In practice this unpretentious criterion does better service than might be supposed. In such a sentence asIt is unthinkable, it is simply impossible to group the elements into any other and smaller “words†than the three indicated.Thinkorthinkablemight be isolated, but as neitherun-nor-ablenoris-unyields a measurable satisfaction, we are compelled to leaveunthinkableas an integral whole, a miniature bit of art. Added to the “feel†of the word are frequently, but by no means invariably, certain external phoneticcharacteristics. Chief of these isaccent. In many, perhaps in most, languages the single word is marked by a unifying accent, an emphasis on one of the syllables, to which the rest are subordinated. The particular syllable that is to be so distinguished is dependent, needless to say, on the special genius of the language. The importance of accent as a unifying feature of the word is obvious in such English examples asunthinkable,characterizing. The long Paiute word that we have analyzed is marked as a rigid phonetic unit by several features, chief of which are the accent on its second syllable (wii’-“knifeâ€) and the slurring (“unvoicing,†to use the technical phonetic term) of its final vowel (-mü, animate plural). Such features as accent, cadence, and the treatment of consonants and vowels within the body of a word are often useful as aids in the external demarcation of the word, but they must by no means be interpreted, as is sometimes done, as themselves responsible for its psychological existence. They at best but strengthen a feeling of unity that is already present on other grounds.
We have already seen that the major functional unit of speech, the sentence, has, like the word, a psychological as well as a merely logical or abstracted existence. Its definition is not difficult. It is the linguistic expression of a proposition. It combines a subject of discourse with a statement in regard to this subject. Subject and “predicate†may be combined in a single word, as in Latindico; each may be expressed independently, as in the English equivalent,I say; each or either may be so qualified as to lead to complex propositions of many sorts. No matter how many of these qualifying elements (words or functional parts of words) are introduced, the sentence does not lose its feeling of unity so long as each and every one of them falls in place as contributoryto the definition of either the subject of discourse or the core of the predicate[7]. Such a sentence asThe mayor of New York is going to deliver a speech of welcome in Frenchis readily felt as a unified statement, incapable of reduction by the transfer of certain of its elements, in their given form, to the preceding or following sentences. The contributory ideas ofof New York,of welcome, andin Frenchmay be eliminated without hurting the idiomatic flow of the sentence.The mayor is going to deliver a speechis a perfectly intelligible proposition. But further than this we cannot go in the process of reduction. We cannot say, for instance,Mayor is going to deliver.[8]The reduced sentence resolves itself into the subject of discourse—the mayor—and the predicate—is going to deliver a speech. It is customary to say that the true subject of such a sentence ismayor, the true predicateis goingor evenis, the other elements being strictly subordinate. Such an analysis, however, is purely schematic and is without psychological value. It is much better frankly to recognize the fact that either or both of the two terms of the sentence-proposition may be incapable of expression in the form of single words. There are languages that can convey all that is conveyed byThe-mayor is-going-to-deliver-a-speechin two words, a subject word and a predicate word, but English is not so highly synthetic. The point that we are really making here is that underlying the finishedsentence is a living sentence type, of fixed formal characteristics. These fixed types or actual sentence-groundworks may be freely overlaid by such additional matter as the speaker or writer cares to put on, but they are themselves as rigidly “given†by tradition as are the radical and grammatical elements abstracted from the finished word. New words may be consciously created from these fundamental elements on the analogy of old ones, but hardly new types of words. In the same way new sentences are being constantly created, but always on strictly traditional lines. The enlarged sentence, however, allows as a rule of considerable freedom in the handling of what may be called “unessential†parts. It is this margin of freedom which gives us the opportunity of individual style.
The habitual association of radical elements, grammatical elements, words, and sentences with concepts or groups of concepts related into wholes is the fact itself of language. It is important to note that there is in all languages a certain randomness of association. Thus, the idea of “hide†may be also expressed by the word “conceal,†the notion of “three times†also by “thrice.†The multiple expression of a single concept is universally felt as a source of linguistic strength and variety, not as a needless extravagance. More irksome is a random correspondence between idea and linguistic expression in the field of abstract and relational concepts, particularly when the concept is embodied in a grammatical element. Thus, the randomness of the expression of plurality in such words asbooks,oxen,sheep, andgeeseis felt to be rather more, I fancy, an unavoidable and traditional predicament than a welcome luxuriance. It is obvious that a language cannot go beyond a certain point in this randomness. Many languagesgo incredibly far in this respect, it is true, but linguistic history shows conclusively that sooner or later the less frequently occurring associations are ironed out at the expense of the more vital ones. In other words, all languages have an inherent tendency to economy of expression. Were this tendency entirely inoperative, there would be no grammar. The fact of grammar, a universal trait of language, is simply a generalized expression of the feeling that analogous concepts and relations are most conveniently symbolized in analogous forms. Were a language ever completely “grammatical,†it would be a perfect engine of conceptual expression. Unfortunately, or luckily, no language is tyrannically consistent. All grammars leak.
Up to the present we have been assuming that the material of language reflects merely the world of concepts and, on what I have ventured to call the “pre-rational†plane, of images, which are the raw material of concepts. We have, in other words, been assuming that language moves entirely in the ideational or cognitive sphere. It is time that we amplified the picture. The volitional aspect of consciousness also is to some extent explicitly provided for in language. Nearly all languages have special means for the expression of commands (in the imperative forms of the verb, for example) and of desires, unattained or unattainable (Would he might come!orWould he were here!) The emotions, on the whole, seem to be given a less adequate outlet. Emotion, indeed, is proverbially inclined to speechlessness. Most, if not all, the interjections are to be put to the credit of emotional expression, also, it may be, a number of linguistic elements expressing certain modalities, such as dubitative or potential forms, which may be interpreted as reflecting the emotionalstates of hesitation or doubt—attenuated fear. On the whole, it must be admitted that ideation reigns supreme in language, that volition and emotion come in as distinctly secondary factors. This, after all, is perfectly intelligible. The world of image and concept, the endless and ever-shifting picture of objective reality, is the unavoidable subject-matter of human communication, for it is only, or mainly, in terms of this world that effective action is possible. Desire, purpose, emotion are the personal color of the objective world; they are applied privately by the individual soul and are of relatively little importance to the neighboring one. All this does not mean that volition and emotion are not expressed. They are, strictly speaking, never absent from normal speech, but their expression is not of a truly linguistic nature. The nuances of emphasis, tone, and phrasing, the varying speed and continuity of utterance, the accompanying bodily movements, all these express something of the inner life of impulse and feeling, but as these means of expression are, at last analysis, but modified forms of the instinctive utterance that man shares with the lower animals, they cannot be considered as forming part of the essential cultural conception of language, however much they may be inseparable from its actual life. And this instinctive expression of volition and emotion is, for the most part, sufficient, often more than sufficient, for the purposes of communication.
There are, it is true, certain writers on the psychology of language[9]who deny its prevailingly cognitive character but attempt, on the contrary, to demonstrate the origin of most linguistic elements within the domain of feeling. I confess that I am utterly unable to followthem. What there is of truth in their contentions may be summed up, it seems to me, by saying that most words, like practically all elements of consciousness, have an associated feeling-tone, a mild, yet none the less real and at times insidiously powerful, derivative of pleasure or pain. This feeling-tone, however, is not as a rule an inherent value in the word itself; it is rather a sentimental growth on the word’s true body, on its conceptual kernel. Not only may the feeling-tone change from one age to another (this, of course, is true of the conceptual content as well), but it varies remarkably from individual to individual according to the personal associations of each, varies, indeed, from time to time in a single individual’s consciousness as his experiences mold him and his moods change. To be sure, there are socially accepted feeling-tones, or ranges of feeling-tone, for many words over and above the force of individual association, but they are exceedingly variable and elusive things at best. They rarely have the rigidity of the central, primary fact. We all grant, for instance, thatstorm,tempest, andhurricane, quite aside from their slight differences of actual meaning, have distinct feeling-tones, tones that are felt by all sensitive speakers and readers of English in a roughly equivalent fashion.Storm, we feel, is a more general and a decidedly less “magnificent†word than the other two;tempestis not only associated with the sea but is likely, in the minds of many, to have obtained a softened glamour from a specific association with Shakespeare’s great play;hurricanehas a greater forthrightness, a directer ruthlessness than its synonyms. Yet the individual’s feeling-tones for these words are likely to vary enormously. To sometempestandhurricanemay seem “soft,†literary words, the simplerstormhaving a fresh, rugged valuewhich the others do not possess (think ofstorm and stress). If we have browsed much in our childhood days in books of the Spanish Main,hurricaneis likely to have a pleasurably bracing tone; if we have had the misfortune to be caught in one, we are not unlikely to feel the word as cold, cheerless, sinister.
The feeling-tones of words are of no use, strictly speaking, to science; the philosopher, if he desires to arrive at truth rather than merely to persuade, finds them his most insidious enemies. But man is rarely engaged in pure science, in solid thinking. Generally his mental activities are bathed in a warm current of feeling and he seizes upon the feeling-tones of words as gentle aids to the desired excitation. They are naturally of great value to the literary artist. It is interesting to note, however, that even to the artist they are a danger. A word whose customary feeling-tone is too unquestioningly accepted becomes a plushy bit of furniture, acliché. Every now and then the artist has to fight the feeling-tone, to get the word to mean what it nakedly and conceptually should mean, depending for the effect of feeling on the creative power of an individual juxtaposition of concepts or images.
We have seen that the mere phonetic framework of speech does not constitute the inner fact of language and that the single sound of articulated speech is not, as such, a linguistic element at all. For all that, speech is so inevitably bound up with sounds and their articulation that we can hardly avoid giving the subject of phonetics some general consideration. Experience has shown that neither the purely formal aspects of a language nor the course of its history can be fully understood without reference to the sounds in which this form and this history are embodied. A detailed survey of phonetics would be both too technical for the general reader and too loosely related to our main theme to warrant the needed space, but we can well afford to consider a few outstanding facts and ideas connected with the sounds of language.
The feeling that the average speaker has of his language is that it is built up, acoustically speaking, of a comparatively small number of distinct sounds, each of which is rather accurately provided for in the current alphabet by one letter or, in a few cases, by two or more alternative letters. As for the languages of foreigners, he generally feels that, aside from a few striking differences that cannot escape even the uncritical ear, the sounds they use are the same as those he is familiar with but that there is a mysterious “accent†to these foreign languages, a certain unanalyzed phonetic character, apartfrom the sounds as such, that gives them their air of strangeness. This naïve feeling is largely illusory on both scores. Phonetic analysis convinces one that the number of clearly distinguishable sounds and nuances of sounds that are habitually employed by the speakers of a language is far greater than they themselves recognize. Probably not one English speaker out of a hundred has the remotest idea that thetof a word likestingis not at all the same sound as thetofteem, the latterthaving a fullness of “breath release†that is inhibited in the former case by the precedings; that theeaofmeatis of perceptibly shorter duration than theeaofmead; or that the finalsof a word likeheadsis not the full, buzzingzsound of thesin such a word asplease. It is the frequent failure of foreigners, who have acquired a practical mastery of English and who have eliminated all the cruder phonetic shortcomings of their less careful brethren, to observe such minor distinctions that helps to give their English pronunciation the curiously elusive “accent†that we all vaguely feel. We do not diagnose the “accent†as the total acoustic effect produced by a series of slight but specific phonetic errors for the very good reason that we have never made clear to ourselves our own phonetic stock in trade. If two languages taken at random, say English and Russian, are compared as to their phonetic systems, we are more apt than not to find that very few of the phonetic elements of the one find an exact analogue in the other. Thus, thetof a Russian word liketam“there†is neither the Englishtofstingnor the Englishtofteem. It differs from both in its “dental†articulation, in other words, in being produced by contact of the tip of the tongue with the upper teeth, not, as in English, by contact of the tongue back of thetip with the gum ridge above the teeth; moreover, it differs from thetofteemalso in the absence of a marked “breath release†before the following vowel is attached, so that its acoustic effect is of a more precise, “metallic†nature than in English. Again, the Englishlis unknown in Russian, which possesses, on the other hand, two distinctl-sounds that the normal English speaker would find it difficult exactly to reproduce—a “hollow,†guttural-likeland a “soft,†palatalizedl-sound that is only very approximately rendered, in English terms, asly. Even so simple and, one would imagine, so invariable a sound asmdiffers in the two languages. In a Russian word likemost“bridge†themis not the same as themof the English wordmost; the lips are more fully rounded during its articulation, so that it makes a heavier, more resonant impression on the ear. The vowels, needless to say, differ completely in English and Russian, hardly any two of them being quite the same.
I have gone into these illustrative details, which are of little or no specific interest for us, merely in order to provide something of an experimental basis to convince ourselves of the tremendous variability of speech sounds. Yet a complete inventory of the acoustic resources of all the European languages, the languages nearer home, while unexpectedly large, would still fall far short of conveying a just idea of the true range of human articulation. In many of the languages of Asia, Africa, and aboriginal America there are whole classes of sounds that most of us have no knowledge of. They are not necessarily more difficult of enunciation than sounds more familiar to our ears; they merely involve such muscular adjustments of the organs of speech as we have never habituated ourselves to. It may be safely said that the total number of possiblesounds is greatly in excess of those actually in use. Indeed, an experienced phonetician should have no difficulty in inventing sounds that are unknown to objective investigation. One reason why we find it difficult to believe that the range of possible speech sounds is indefinitely large is our habit of conceiving the sound as a simple, unanalyzable impression instead of as the resultant of a number of distinct muscular adjustments that take place simultaneously. A slight change in any one of these adjustments gives us a new sound which is akin to the old one, because of the continuance of the other adjustments, but which is acoustically distinct from it, so sensitive has the human ear become to the nuanced play of the vocal mechanism. Another reason for our lack of phonetic imagination is the fact that, while our ear is delicately responsive to the sounds of speech, the muscles of our speech organs have early in life become exclusively accustomed to the particular adjustments and systems of adjustment that are required to produce the traditional sounds of the language. All or nearly all other adjustments have become permanently inhibited, whether through inexperience or through gradual elimination. Of course the power to produce these inhibited adjustments is not entirely lost, but the extreme difficulty we experience in learning the new sounds of foreign languages is sufficient evidence of the strange rigidity that has set in for most people in the voluntary control of the speech organs. The point may be brought home by contrasting the comparative lack of freedom of voluntary speech movements with the all but perfect freedom of voluntary gesture.[10]Our rigidity inarticulation is the price we have had to pay for easy mastery of a highly necessary symbolism. One cannot be both splendidly free in the random choice of movements and selective with deadly certainty.[11]
There are, then, an indefinitely large number of articulated sounds available for the mechanics of speech; any given language makes use of an explicit, rigidly economical selection of these rich resources; and each of the many possible sounds of speech is conditioned by a number of independent muscular adjustments that work together simultaneously towards its production. A full account of the activity of each of the organs of speech—in so far as its activity has a bearing on language—is impossible here, nor can we concern ourselves in a systematic way with the classification of sounds on the basis of their mechanics.[12]A few bold outlines are all that we can attempt. The organs of speech are thelungs and bronchial tubes; the throat, particularly that part of it which is known as the larynx or, in popular parlance, the “Adam’s appleâ€; the nose; the uvula, which is the soft, pointed, and easily movable organ that depends from the rear of the palate; the palate, which is divided into a posterior, movable “soft palate†or velum and a “hard palateâ€; the tongue; the teeth; and the lips. The palate, lower palate, tongue, teeth, and lips may be looked upon as a combined resonance chamber, whose constantly varying shape, chiefly due to the extreme mobility of the tongue, is the main factor in giving the outgoing breath its precise quality[13]of sound.
The lungs and bronchial tubes are organs of speech only in so far as they supply and conduct the current of outgoing air without which audible articulation is impossible. They are not responsible for any specific sound or acoustic feature of sounds except, possibly,accent or stress. It may be that differences of stress are due to slight differences in the contracting force of the lung muscles, but even this influence of the lungs is denied by some students, who explain the fluctuations of stress that do so much to color speech by reference to the more delicate activity of the glottal cords. These glottal cords are two small, nearly horizontal, and highly sensitive membranes within the larynx, which consists, for the most part, of two large and several smaller cartilages and of a number of small muscles that control the action of the cords.
The cords, which are attached to the cartilages, are to the human speech organs what the two vibrating reedsare to a clarinet or the strings to a violin. They are capable of at least three distinct types of movement, each of which is of the greatest importance for speech. They may be drawn towards or away from each other, they may vibrate like reeds or strings, and they may become lax or tense in the direction of their length. The last class of these movements allows the cords to vibrate at different “lengths†or degrees of tenseness and is responsible for the variations in pitch which are present not only in song but in the more elusive modulations of ordinary speech. The two other types of glottal action determine the nature of the voice, “voice†being a convenient term for breath as utilized in speech. If the cords are well apart, allowing the breath to escape in unmodified form, we have the condition technically known as “voicelessness.†All sounds produced under these circumstances are “voiceless†sounds. Such are the simple, unmodified breath as it passes into the mouth, which is, at least approximately, the same as the sound that we writeh, also a large number of special articulations in the mouth chamber, likepands. On the other hand, the glottal cords may be brought tight together, without vibrating. When this happens, the current of breath is checked for the time being. The slight choke or “arrested cough†that is thus made audible is not recognized in English as a definite sound but occurs nevertheless not infrequently.[14]This momentary check, technically known as a “glottal stop,†is an integral element of speech in many languages, as Danish, Lettish, certain Chinese dialects, and nearly all American Indian languages. Between the two extremes of voicelessness, thatof completely open breath and that of checked breath, lies the position of true voice. In this position the cords are close together, but not so tightly as to prevent the air from streaming through; the cords are set vibrating and a musical tone of varying pitch results. A tone so produced is known as a “voiced sound.†It may have an indefinite number of qualities according to the precise position of the upper organs of speech. Our vowels, nasals (such asmandn), and such sounds asb,z, andlare all voiced sounds. The most convenient test of a voiced sound is the possibility of pronouncing it on any given pitch, in other words, of singing on it.[15]The voiced sounds are the most clearly audible elements of speech. As such they are the carriers of practically all significant differences in stress, pitch, and syllabification. The voiceless sounds are articulated noises that break up the stream of voice with fleeting moments of silence. Acoustically intermediate between the freely unvoiced and the voiced sounds are a number of other characteristic types of voicing, such as murmuring and whisper.[16]These and still other types of voice are relatively unimportant in English and most other European languages, but there are languages in which they rise to some prominence in the normal flow of speech.
The nose is not an active organ of speech, but it is highly important as a resonance chamber. It may bedisconnected from the mouth, which is the other great resonance chamber, by the lifting of the movable part of the soft palate so as to shut off the passage of the breath into the nasal cavity; or, if the soft palate is allowed to hang down freely and unobstructively, so that the breath passes into both the nose and the mouth, these make a combined resonance chamber. Such sounds asbanda(as infather) are voiced “oral†sounds, that is, the voiced breath does not receive a nasal resonance. As soon as the soft palate is lowered, however, and the nose added as a participating resonance chamber, the soundsbandatake on a peculiar “nasal†quality and become, respectively,mand the nasalized vowel writtenanin French (e.g.,sang,tant). The only English sounds[17]that normally receive a nasal resonance arem,n, and thengsound ofsing. Practically all sounds, however, may be nasalized, not only the vowels—nasalized vowels are common in all parts of the world—but such sounds aslorz. Voiceless nasals are perfectly possible. They occur, for instance, in Welsh and in quite a number of American Indian languages.
The organs that make up the oral resonance chamber may articulate in two ways. The breath, voiced or unvoiced, nasalized or unnasalized, may be allowed to pass through the mouth without being checked or impeded at any point; or it may be either momentarily checked or allowed to stream through a greatly narrowed passage with resulting air friction. There are also transitions between the two latter types of articulation. The unimpeded breath takes on a particular color or quality in accordance with the varying shape of the oral resonance chamber. This shape is chiefly determined by theposition of the movable parts—the tongue and the lips. As the tongue is raised or lowered, retracted or brought forward, held tense or lax, and as the lips are pursed (“roundedâ€) in varying degree or allowed to keep their position of rest, a large number of distinct qualities result. These oral qualities are the vowels. In theory their number is infinite, in practice the ear can differentiate only a limited, yet a surprisingly large, number of resonance positions. Vowels, whether nasalized or not, are normally voiced sounds; in not a few languages, however, “voiceless vowelsâ€[18]also occur.
The remaining oral sounds are generally grouped together as “consonants.†In them the stream of breath is interfered with in some way, so that a lesser resonance results, and a sharper, more incisive quality of tone. There are four main types of articulation generally recognized within the consonantal group of sounds. The breath may be completely stopped for a moment at some definite point in the oral cavity. Sounds so produced, liketordorp, are known as “stops†or “explosives.â€[19]Or the breath may be continuously obstructed through a narrow passage, not entirely checked. Examples of such “spirants†or “fricatives,†as they are called, aresandzandy. The third class of consonants, the “laterals,†are semi-stopped. There is a true stoppage at the central point of articulation, but the breath is allowed to escape through the two side passages or through one of them. Our Englishd, for instance, may be readily transformed intol,which has the voicing and the position ofd, merely by depressing the sides of the tongue on either side of the point of contact sufficiently to allow the breath to come through. Laterals are possible in many distinct positions. They may be unvoiced (the Welshllis an example) as well as voiced. Finally, the stoppage of the breath may be rapidly intermittent; in other words, the active organ of contact—generally the point of the tongue, less often the uvula[20]—may be made to vibrate against or near the point of contact. These sounds are the “trills†or “rolled consonants,†of which the normal Englishris a none too typical example. They are well developed in many languages, however, generally in voiced form, sometimes, as in Welsh and Paiute, in unvoiced form as well.
The oral manner of articulation is naturally not sufficient to define a consonant. The place of articulation must also be considered. Contacts may be formed at a large number of points, from the root of the tongue to the lips. It is not necessary here to go at length into this somewhat complicated matter. The contact is either between the root of the tongue and the throat,[21]some part of the tongue and a point on the palate (as inkorchorl), some part of the tongue and the teeth (as in the Englishthofthickandthen), the teeth and one of the lips (practically always the upper teeth and lower lip, as inf), or the two lips (as inpor Englishw). The tongue articulations are the most complicated of all, as the mobility of the tongue allows various points on its surface, say the tip, to articulate against a number of opposed points of contact. Hence arise many positionsof articulation that we are not familiar with, such as the typical “dental†position of Russian or Italiantandd; or the “cerebral†position of Sanskrit and other languages of India, in which the tip of the tongue articulates against the hard palate. As there is no break at any point between the rims of the teeth back to the uvula nor from the tip of the tongue back to its root, it is evident that all the articulations that involve the tongue form a continuous organic (and acoustic) series. The positions grade into each other, but each language selects a limited number of clearly defined positions as characteristic of its consonantal system, ignoring transitional or extreme positions. Frequently a language allows a certain latitude in the fixing of the required position. This is true, for instance, of the Englishksound, which is articulated much further to the front in a word likekinthan incool. We ignore this difference, psychologically, as a non-essential, mechanical one. Another language might well recognize the difference, or only a slightly greater one, as significant, as paralleling the distinction in position between thekofkinand thetoftin.
The organic classification of speech sounds is a simple matter after what we have learned of their production. Any such sound may be put into its proper place by the appropriate answer to four main questions:—What is the position of the glottal cords during its articulation? Does the breath pass into the mouth alone or is it also allowed to stream into the nose? Does the breath pass freely through the mouth or is it impeded at some point and, if so, in what manner? What are the precise points of articulation in the mouth?[22]This fourfoldclassification of sounds, worked out in all its detailed ramifications,[23]is sufficient to account for all, or practically all, the sounds of language.[24]
The phonetic habits of a given language are not exhaustively defined by stating that it makes use of such and such particular sounds out of the all but endless gamut that we have briefly surveyed. There remains the important question of the dynamics of these phonetic elements. Two languages may, theoretically, be built up of precisely the same series of consonants and vowels and yet produce utterly different acoustic effects. One of them may not recognize striking variations in the lengths or “quantities†of the phonetic elements, the other may note such variations most punctiliously (in probably the majority of languages long and short vowels are distinguished; in many, as in Italian or Swedish or Ojibwa, long consonants are recognized as distinct from short ones). Or the one, say English, may be very sensitive to relativestresses, while in the other, say French, stress is a very minor consideration. Or, again, the pitch differences which are inseparable from the actual practice of language may not affect the word as such, but, as in English, may be a more or less random or, at best, but a rhetorical phenomenon, while in other languages, as in Swedish, Lithuanian, Chinese, Siamese, and the majority of African languages, they may be more finely graduated and felt as integral characteristics of the words themselves. Varying methodsof syllabifying are also responsible for noteworthy acoustic differences. Most important of all, perhaps, are the very different possibilities of combining the phonetic elements. Each language has its peculiarities. Thetscombination, for instance, is found in both English and German, but in English it can only occur at the end of a word (as inhats), while it occurs freely in German as the psychological equivalent of a single sound (as inZeit,Katze). Some languages allow of great heapings of consonants or of vocalic groups (diphthongs), in others no two consonants or no two vowels may ever come together. Frequently a sound occurs only in a special position or under special phonetic circumstances. In English, for instance, thez-sound ofazurecannot occur initially, while the peculiar quality of thetofstingis dependent on its being preceded by thes. These dynamic factors, in their totality, are as important for the proper understanding of the phonetic genius of a language as the sound system itself, often far more so.
We have already seen, in an incidental way, that phonetic elements or such dynamic features as quantity and stress have varying psychological “values.†The Englishtsoffiatsis merely atfollowed by a functionally independents, thetsof the German wordZeithas an integral value equivalent, say, to thetof the English wordtide. Again, thetoftimeis indeed noticeably distinct from that ofsting, but the difference, to the consciousness of an English-speaking person, is quite irrelevant. It has no “value.†If we compare thet-sounds of Haida, the Indian language spoken in the Queen Charlotte Islands, we find that precisely the same difference of articulation has a real value. In such a word assting“two,†thetis pronounced preciselyas in English, but insta“from†thetis clearly “aspirated,†like that oftime. In other words, an objective difference that is irrelevant in English is of functional value in Haida; from its own psychological standpoint thetofstingis as different from that ofstaas, from our standpoint, is thetoftimefrom thedofdivine. Further investigation would yield the interesting result that the Haida ear finds the difference between the Englishtofstingand thedofdivineas irrelevant as the naïve English ear finds that of thet-sounds ofstingandtime. The objective comparison of sounds in two or more languages is, then, of no psychological or historical significance unless these sounds are first “weighted,†unless their phonetic “values†are determined. These values, in turn, flow from the general behavior and functioning of the sounds in actual speech.
These considerations as to phonetic value lead to an important conception. Back of the purely objective system of sounds that is peculiar to a language and which can be arrived at only by a painstaking phonetic analysis, there is a more restricted “inner†or “ideal†system which, while perhaps equally unconscious as a system to the naïve speaker, can far more readily than the other be brought to his consciousness as a finished pattern, a psychological mechanism. The inner sound-system, overlaid though it may be by the mechanical or the irrelevant, is a real and an immensely important principle in the life of a language. It may persist as a pattern, involving number, relation, and functioning of phonetic elements, long after its phonetic content is changed. Two historically related languages or dialects may not have a sound in common, but their ideal sound-systems may be identical patterns. I would not for a moment wish to imply that this pattern may not change. It mayshrink or expand or change its functional complexion, but its rate of change is infinitely less rapid than that of the sounds as such. Every language, then, is characterized as much by its ideal system of sounds and by the underlying phonetic pattern (system, one might term it, of symbolic atoms) as by a definite grammatical structure. Both the phonetic and conceptual structures show the instinctive feeling of language for form.[25]