LANGUAGE
BY
LEONARD BLOOMFIELD
NEW YORK
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
PREFACE
This book is a revised version of the author’s Introduction to the Study of Language j which appeared in 1914 (New York, Henry Holt and Company). The new version is much larger than the old, because the science of language has in the interval made progress, and because both men of science and the educated public now at- tribute greater value to an understanding of human speech.
Like its predecessor, this book is intended for the general reader and for the student who is entering upon linguistic work. Without such an introduction, specialized treatises are unintelligible. For the general reader an orderly survey is probably more interesting than a discussion of selected topics, for these, after all, cannot be understood without their background. No one will ask for an anecdotal treatment who has once opened his eyes to the strange- ness, beauty, and import of human speech.
The deep-rooted things about language, which mean most to all of us, are usually ignored in all but very advanced studies; this book tries to tell about them in simple terms and to show their bearing on human affairs. In 1914 I based this phase of the ex- position on the psychologic system of Wilhelm Wundt, which was then widely accepted. Since that time there has been much up- heaval in psychology; we have learned, at any rate, what one of our masters suspected thirty years ago, namely, that we can pursue the study of language without reference to any one psychological doctrine, and that to do so safeguards our results and makes them more significant to workers in related fields. In the present book I have tried to avoid such dependence; only by way of elu- cidation I have told, at a few points, how the two main present- day trends of psychology differ in their interpretation. The men- talists would supplement the facts of language by a version in terms of mind, — a version which will differ in the various schools of mentalistic psychology. The mechanists demand that the facts be presented without any assumption of such auxiliary factors. I have tried to meet this demand not merely because I believe that mechanism is the necessary form of scientific dis- course, but also because an exposition which stands on its own
vlll
PREFACE
feet is more solid and more easily surveyed than one which is propped at various points by another and changeable doctrine.
I have tried ever3rwhere to present the accepted views, not even avoiding well-used standard examples; on disputed matters I have tried to state the point at issue; and in both cases I have given references, in the Notes and Bibliography, which will enable the reader to look into things, and, if he chooses, to arrive at an opinion of his own.
Thanks are due to many scholars who contributed help and in- formation, and to the publisher, the printer, and the very able typesetter, all of whom devoted great care to the making of this book.
Chicago, January 1933.
L. B.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER
1. The Study op Language 3
2. The Use op Language 21
3. Speech-Communities 42
4. The Languages op the Woeld 57
5. The Phoneme 74
6. Types op Phonemes 93
7. Modifications 109
8. Phonetic Structure 127
9. Meaning 139
10. Grammatical Forms 158
11. Sentence-Types 170
12. Syntax 184
13. Morphology 207
14. Morphologic Types 227
15. Substitution 247
16. Form-Classes and Lexicon 264
17. Written Eecoeds 281
18. The Comparative Method 297
19. Dialect Geography 321
20. Phonetic Change 346
21. Types op Phonetic Change 369
22. Fluctuation est the Frequency op Forms .... 392
23. Analogic Change 404
24. Semantic Change 425
25. Cultural Borrowing 444
26. Intimate Borrowing 461
27. Dialect Borrowing 476
28. Applications and Outlook 496
Notes 511
Bibliography 525
Table of Phonetic Symbols 547
Index 551
CHAPTEK 1
THE STUDY OF LANGUAGE
1. 1. Language plays a great part in our life. Perhaps because of its familiarity, we rarely observe it, taking it rather for granted, as we do breathing or walking. The effects of language are remarkable, and include much of what distinguishes man from the animals, but language has no place in our educational program or in the specula- tions of our philosophers.
There are some circumstances, however, in which the conven- tionally educated person discusses linguistic matters. Occasionally he debates questions of ^^correctness” — whether it is ^^better,” for instance, to say it's I or it's me. His discussion of such things follows a fairly rigid pattern. If possible, he looks to the conven- tions of writing for an answer — as, say, for the question whether a Hs to be pronounced in words like often or soften. Otherwise he appeals to authority: one way of speaking, he believes, is in- herently right, the other inherently wrong, and certain learned men, especially the authors of grammars and dictionaries, can tell us which is which. Mostly, however, he neglects to consult these authorities, and tries, instead, to settle the matter by a kind of philosophical reasoning, which operates with terms such as “sub- ject,” “object,” “predicate,” and so on. This is the common-sense way of dealing with linguistic matters. Like much else that mas- querades as common sense, it is in fact highly sophisticated, and derives, at no great distance, from the speculations of ancient and medieval philosophers.
It is only within the last century or so that language has been studied in a scientific way, by careful and comprehensive observa- tion; the few exceptions will occupy us in a moment. Linguistics ^ the study of language, is only in its beginnings. The knowledge it has gained has not yet become part of our traditional education; the “grammar” and other linguistic instruction in our schools confines itself to handing on the traditional notions. Many people have difficulty at the beginning of language -study, not in grasping the methods or results (which are simple enough), but in stripping
3
4
THE STUDY OF LANGUAGE
off the preconceptions which are forced on us by our popular- scholastic doctrine.
1. 2. The ancient Greeks had the gift of wondering at things that other people take for granted. They speculated boldly and persistently about the origin, history, and structure of language. Our traditional lore about language is due largely to them.
Herodotus, writing in the fifth century b.c., tells us that King Psammetichus of Egypt, in order to find out which was the oldest nation of mankind (whatever this may mean), isolated two new- born infants in a park; when they began to speak, they uttered the word bekosy which turned out to be Phrygian for 'bread.'
In his dialogue Cratylus, Plato (427-347 b.c.) discusses the origin of words, and particularly the question whether the relation between things and the words which name them is a natural and necessary relation or merely the result of a human convention. This dialogue gives us a first glimpse into a century-long contro- versy between the AnalogistSj who believed that language was natural and therefore at bottom regular and logical, and the AnomalistSj who denied these things and pointed out the irregular- ities of linguistic structure.
The Analogists believed that the origin and the true meaning of words could be traced in their shape; the investigation of this they called etymology. We may illustrate their theory by English ex- amples. The word blackbird obviously consists of black and bird: the species was named for its color, and, indeed, blackbirds are birds and are black. In the same way, the Greeks would have con- cluded that there was some deep-seated connection between a gooseberry and a goose: it was the etymologist's task to find this connection. The word mushroom would have presented a more diflacult problem. The components are often altered; thus, break- fast j in spite of the difference in sound, is evidently the meal by which we break om fast, and manly a shorter form of man-like.
In Greek, as in English, however, most words resist this kind of analysis. Thus, early ends like manly, but the rest of the word is obscure; woman resembles man, but what is the first syllable? Then there is a residue of short, simple words that do not resemble others — words such as man, boy, good, bad, eat, run. In such cases the Greeks and their pupils, the Romans, resorted to guesswork. For instance, they explained the Greek word lithos 'stone' as derived from the phrase lian theein 'to run too much,' because this
THE STUDY OP LANGUAGE
5
is what a stone does not do. A Latin example of this sort has be- come proverbial: lucus a non lucendo ^a grove Qucus) is so named on account of its not being light (lucendo) J
These etymologies show us, at any rate, that the Greeks realized that speech-forms change in the course of time. In the systematic study of this change modern students have found the key to most linguistic problems. The ancients never settled down to any careful study of linguistic change.
The ancient Greeks studied no language but their own; they took it for granted that the structure of their language embodied the universal forms of human thought or, perhaps, of the cosmic order. Accordingly, they made grammatical observations, but confined these to one language and stated them in philosophical form. They discovered the parts of speech of their language, its syntactic constructions, such as, especially, that of subject and predicate, and its chief inflectional categories: genders, numbers, cases, persons, tenses, and modes. They defined these not in terms of recognizable linguistic forms, but in abstract terms which were to tell the meaning of the linguistic class. These teachings appear most fully in the grammars of Dionysius Thrax (second century b.c.) and of Apollonius Dyscolus (second century a.d.).
The Greeks made also some observations of detail, but this phase of their work, unfortunately, had less effect upon posterity. Their great epic poems, the Iliad and the Odyssey, which they viewed somewhat as sacred scriptures, were composed in an ancient and otherwise unknown kind of Greek. In order to un- derstand these texts and to make correct copies, one had to study their language. Most famous in this work was Aristarchus (about 216-144 B.C.). Other works of Greek literature were composed in conventionalized forms of various regional dialects: the Greeks had the opportunity of comparing several divergent forms of their language. When the language of the great Athenian writers of the fourth century had become antiquated, it was made a special subject of study, since it represented the ideal form of written discourse. All this work demanded careful observation of details. Some of the later grammarians, notably Herodian, the son of ApoUonius Dyscolus, assembled valuable information on such topics as the inflection and accent of ancient Greek.
1. 3. The Greek generalizations about language were not im- proved upon until the eighteenth century, when scholars ceased
THE STUDY OF LANGUAGE
to view language as a direct gift of God, and put forth various theories as to its origin. Language was an invention of ancient heroes, or else the product of a mystical Spirit of the Folk. It began in man^s attempts to imitate noises (the “bow-wow’^ theory), or in his natural sound-producing responses (the ding- dong theory), or in violent outcries and exclamations (the pooh- pooh’^ theory).
In the etymological explanation of speech-forms there was no improvement. Voltaire is reported to have said that etymology is a science in which the vowels count for nothing and the con- sonants for very little.
' The Romans constructed Latin grammars on the Greek model; the most famous of these, the work of Donatus (fourth century A.D.) and of Priscian (sixth century a.d.), remained in use as text-books through the Middle Ages. In the Middle Ages, when Latin was changing from its ancient shape into the forms which we know today as the Romance languages (French, Italian, Spanish, and so on), the convention remained of writing, as well as one could, in the ancient classical form of Latin. The medieval scholar, accordingly, in both the Latin countries and others, studied only classical Latin. The scholastic philosophers dis- covered some features of Latin grammar, such as the distinc- tion between nouns and adjectives and the differences between concord, government, and apposition. They contributed much less than the ancients, who had, at any rate, a first-hand knowl- edge of the languages they studied. The medieval scholar saw in classical Latin the logically normal form of human speech. In more modern times this doctrine led to the writing of general gram- mars, which were to demonstrate that the structure of various languages, and especially of Latin, embodies universally valid canons of logic. The most famous of these treatises is the Gram- maire generals et raisonnee of the Convent of Port-Royal, which appeared in 1660. This doctrine persisted into the nineteenth century; it appears, for instance, in the classical scholar, Gott- fried Hermann’s work De emendanda ratione Graecae grammaticae (1801). It is still embodied in our school tradition, which seeks to apply logical standards to language. Philosophers, to this day, sometimes look for truths about the universe in what are really nothing but formal features of one or another language.
An unfortunate outgrowth of the general-grammar idea was
THE STUDY OF LANGUAGE
7
the belief that the grammarian or lexicographer, fortified by his powers of reasoning, can ascertain the logical basis of language and prescribe how people ought to speak. In the eighteenth century, the spread of education led many dialect-speakers to learn the upper-class forms of speech. This gave the authoritari- ans their chance: they wrote normative grammars, in which they often ignored actual usage in favor of speculative notions. Both the belief in authority and some of the fanciful rules (as, for instance, about the use of shall and will) stiU prevail in our schools.
For the medieval scholar, language meant classical Latin, as it appears in books; we find few traces of interest in any other form of speech. The horizon widened at the time of the Renaissance. At the end of the Middle Ages, the study of Greek came back into fashion; soon afterward, Hebrew and Arabic were added. What was more important, some scholars in various countries began to take an interest in the language of their own time.
The era of exploration brought a superficial knowledge of many languages. Travelers brought back vocabularies, and mission- aries translated religious books into the tongues of newly-discovered countries. Some even compiled grammars and dictionaries of ex- otic languages. Spanish priests began this work as early as in the sixteenth century; to them we owe a number of treatises on Ameri- can and Philippine languages. These works can be used only with caution, for the authors, untrained in the recognition of foreign speech-sounds, could make no accurate record, and, know- ing only the terminology of Latin grammar, distorted their ex- position by fitting it into this frame. Down to our own time, per- sons without linguistic training have produced work of this sort; aside from the waste of labor, much information has in this way been lost.
The increase of commerce and travel led also to the compila.- tion of grammars and dictionaries for languages closer at hand. The linguistic horizon at the end of the eighteenth century can be surveyed in the glossary of 285 words in two hundred languages of Europe and Asia which P. S. Pallas (1741-1811) edited at the behest of Empress Catharine of Russia in 1786. A second edi- tion of this, in 1791, added eighty more languages, including some African and American. In the years 1806 to 1817 there appeared a four-volume treatise under the title Mithridates, by J. C. Adelung
THE STUDY OF LANGUAGE
aad J. S. Vater, which contained the Lord’s Prayer in nearly five hrindred languages.
The Renaissance turned the interest of a few scholars to the oh^er records of their own languages, Franciscus Junius (1589- 1677) accomplished an enormous amount of work in the study of the ancient documents of English and of the closely related lan- guages, Frisian, Dutch, German, Scandinavian, and Gothic, This last — a language no longer spoken today — Junius knew from the famous Silver Codex, then recently discovered, a manuscript of the sixth century a.d. containing fragments of a Gospel transla- tion; Junius published its text, together with that of the Anglo- Saxon Gospels. George Hickes (1642-1715) continued this work, publishing a Gothic and Anglo-Saxon grammar and a Thesaurus of miscellaneous information about the older stages of English and the sister tongues.
1. 4. The development so far outlined shows us what eighteenth- century scholars knew about language. They stated the gram- matical features of language in philosophical terms and took no account of the structural difference between languages^ but ob- scured it by forcing their descriptions into the scheme of Latin grammar. They had not observed the sounds of speech, and con- fused them with the written symbols of the alphabet. This failure to distinguish between actual speech and the use of writing disr torted also their notions about the history of language. They saw that in medieval and modern times highly cultivated persons wrote (and even spoke) good Latin, while less educated or careless scribes made many mistakes: failing to see that this Latin- writing was an artificial and academic exercise, they concluded that lan- guages are preserved by the usage of educated and careful people and changed by the corruptions of the vulgar. In the case of modern languages like English, they believed, accordingly, that the speech-forms of books and of upper-class conversation repre- sented an older and purer level, from which the “vulgarisms” of the common people had branched off as “corruptions” by a process of “linguistic decay.” The grammarians felt free, therefore, to prescribe fanciful rules which they derived from considerations of logic.
These misconceptions prevented scholars from making use of the data that were at hand: the modern languages and dialects, the records of ancient languages, the reports about exotic Ian-
THE STUDY OF LANGUAGE
9
guages, and, above all, the documents which show us successive stages of one and the same language, as for instance of Anglo-Saxon (Old English) and modern English, or of Latin and the modem Komance languages. One knew that some languages resembled each other, but the doctrine of linguistic decay discouraged sys- tematic study of this relation, since the changes which led, say, from Latin to modern French, were viewed as haphazard corrup- tions.
The illusion that Latin had lived on, unchanged, beside the Romance languages, led scholars to derive contemporary languages one from the other. Mostly they took Hebrew to be the language from which all others had sprung, but some thought otherwise, as, for example, Goropius Becanus of Antwerp, who patriotically derived all languages from Dutch.
It was plain that the more familiar languages of Europe fell into throe groups by virtue of close resemblances within each group, resemblances such as appear in the following words:
Germanic group
^hand" English hand Dutch hand German Hand Danish haand Swedish hand
‘foot’ English foot Dutch voet German Fusz Danish fod Swedish fot
^ winter^ English winter Dutch winter German Winter Danish vinter Swedish vinter
Romance group
French main Italian mano Spanish mano
French pied Italian piede Spanish pie
French hiver Italian inverno Spanish invierno
Slavic group
Russian ruka Polish r^ka Bohemian ruka Serbian ruka
Russian noga Polish noga Bohemian noha Serbian noga
Russian zima Polish zima Bohemian zima Serbian zima
10
THE STUDY OF LANGUAGE
Germanic group Romance group Slavic group
'drink’
English drink Dutch drinken German trinken Danish drikke Swedish dricka
There was apparent also a less striking resemblance between these groups; this wider resemblance extended to some other lan- guages, such as, notably, Greek:
'mother’: Greek mUer, Latin mater (with its modern forms in the Romance languages), Russian mat^ (genitive case materi — with similar forms in the other Slavic languages), English mother (with similar forms in the other Germanic languages) ;
'two’: Greek duo, Latin duo, Russian dva, English two; 'three’: Greek treis, Latin tres, Russian tri, English three;
'is’: Greek esti, Latin est, Russian jesi’, English is (German ist), 1. 5. Outside the tradition of Europe, several nations had de- veloped linguistic doctrines, chiefly on an antiquarian basis. The Arabs had worked out a grammar of the classical form of their language, as it appears in the Koran; on the model of this, the Jews in Mohammedan countries constructed a Hebrew grammar. At the Renaissance, European scholars became acquainted with this tradition; the term root, for instance, as a designation for the central part of a word, comes from Hebrew grammar. In the Far East, the Chinese had gained a great deal of antiquarian linguistic knowledge, especially in the way of lexicography, A Japanese grammar seems to have grown up independently.
It was in India, however, that there arose a body of knowledge which was destined to revolutionize European ideas about lan- guage. The Brahmin religion guarded, as sacred texts, some very ancient collections of hymns; the oldest of these collections, the Rig-Veda, dates in part, at a conservative estimate, from about 1200 B.c. As the language of these texts grew antiquated, the proper way of pronouncing them, and their correct interpretation, became the task of a special class of learned men. The antiquarian interest in language which arose in this way, was carried over into a more practical sphere. Among the Hindus, as among us, different classes of society differed in speech. Apparently there
French boire Italian here Spanish heber
Russian pif Polish p^c’ Bohemian piti Serbian piti
THE STUDY OF LANGUAGE
11
were forces at work which led upper-class speakers to adopt lower- class forms of speech. We find the Hindu grammarians extending their interest from the Scriptures to the upper-caste language, and making rules and lists of forms descriptive of the correct type of speech, which they called Sanskrit. In time they worked out a systematic arrangement of grammar and lexicon. Generations of such labor must have preceded the writing of the oldest treatise that has come down to us, the grammar of Panini. This grammar, which dates from somewhere round 350 to 250 b.c., is one of the greatest monuments of human intelligence. It describes, with the minutest detail, every inflection, derivation, and composition, and every syntactic usage of its author^s speech. No other language, to this day, has been so perfectly described. It may have been due, in part, to this excellent codification that Sanskrit became, in time, the oflScial and literary language of aU of Brahmin India. Long after it had ceased to be spoken as anyone’s native language, it remained (as classical Latin remained in Europe) the artificial medixim for all writing on learned or religious topics.
Some knowledge of Sanskrit and of the Hindu grammar had reached Europe, through missionaries, in the sixteenth and seven- teenth centuries. In the eighteenth century, Englishmen in India transmitted more exact reports; round the beginning of the nine- teenth century, the knowledge of Sanskrit became part of the equipment of European scholars.
1. 6. The Indian grammar presented to European eyes, for the first time, a complete and accurate description of a language, based not upon theory but upon observation. Moreover, the dis- covery of Sanskrit disclosed the possibility of a comparative study of languages.
To begin with, the concept of related languages was strikingly confirmed by the existence, in far-off India, of a sister of the familiar languages of Europe; witness, for example, the Sanskrit equivalents of the words above cited: maid 'mother,’ accusative case mdtaram; dvdu 'two’; tray ah 'three’; asti 'he is.’
Even more important was the insight into linguistic structure which one got from the accurate and systematic Hindu grammar. Until now, one had been able to see only vague and fluid similar-
12
THE STUDY OF LANGUAGE
ities, for the current grammars, built on the Greek model, did not clearly set off the features of each language. The Hindu grammar taught Europeans to analyze speech-forms; when one compared the constituent parts, the resemblances, which hitherto had been vaguely recognized, could be set forth with certainty and precision.
The old confused notions of linguistic relationship lived on for a brief time in the opinion that the European languages were derived from Sanskrit, but this opinion soon gave way to the ob- viously correct explanation, namely, that Sanskrit, Latin, Greek, and so on, were divergent later forms of some one prehistoric lan- guage. This explanation seems to have been first stated by Sir William Jones (1746-1794), the first great European Sanskrit scholar, in an address delivered in 1786: Sanskrit bears a resem- blance to Greek and Latin which is too close to be due to chance, but shows, rather, that all three ^^have sprung from some common source which, perhaps, no longer exists,’^ and Gothic (that is, Germanic) and Celtic probably had the same origin.
In order to work out the comparison of these languages, one needed, of course, descriptive data for each one of them. The prospect of comparison, however, with all that it revealed about ancient speech-forms and tribal migrations and the origin of peoples and customs, proved so alluring that no one undertook the humdrum task of analyzing the other languages on the model of Sanskrit. European scholars had a sound knowledge of Latin and Greek; most of them spoke some Germanic language as their mother-tongue. Confronting a precise statement of Sanskrit grammar or a carefully analyzed lexical form, they could usually recall a similar feature from some of the more familiar languages. In reality, of course, this was a makeshift; often enough the com- parer had to make a preliminary investigation to establish the facts, and sometimes he went astray for lack of methodically arranged data. If European scholars had possessed descriptions of the sister languages comparable to the Hindus’ description of Sanskrit, the comparative study of the Indo-European languages (as they are now called) would have progressed far more speedily and accurately. Yet, in spite of poor equipment, and thanks to the energy of its workers, the historical and comparative study of the Indo-European languages became one of the principal enter- prises, and one of the most successful, of European science in the nineteenth century.
THE STUDY OF LANGUAGE
13
The languages of Persia (the so-called Iranian languages) so closely resembled Sanskrit that their kinship was certain from the start. A similar relation, though less close, was found to exist between the Baltic languages (Lithuanian, Lettish, and Old Prussian) and the Slavic. Jones^ surmise that the Germanic lan- guages were related to Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit, at once proved true, as did later his surmise about Celtic (Irish, Welsh, Cornish, Breton, and the ancient language of Gaul). Later, Armenian and Albanese, and a few ancient languages known to us only from scant written records, proved also to belong to the Indo-European family.
Although there was some dispute as to details, the general pre- suppositions of historical and comparative language-study soon became clear. Languages change in the course of time. Apparent exceptions, such as the medieval and modern use of Latin (or, in India, of Sanskrit), amount only to this, that by long schooling people can be trained to imitate the language of ancient writings. This antiquarian feat is utterly diflFerent from the normal trans- mission of speech from parents to children. All writing, in fact, is a relatively recent invention, and has remained, almost to our day, the property of only a chosen few: the effect of writing upon the forms and the development of actual speech is very slight.
If a language is spoken over a large area, or thanks to migration, in several separate areas, then it will change differently in different places, and the result will be a set of related languages, like Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Roumanian, and the other Romance dialects. We infer that other groups of related languages, such as the Germanic (or the Slavic or the Celtic), which show a similar resemblance, have arisen in the same way; it is only an accident of history that for these groups we have no written records of the earlier state of the language, as it was spoken before the differen- tiation set in. To these unrecorded parent languages we give names like Primitive Germanic {Primitive Slavic, Primitive Celtic, and so on).^ In the same way, finding that all these languages and groups (Sanskrit, Iranian, Armenian, Greek, Albanese, Latin, Celtic, Germanic, Baltic, Slavic) resemble each other beyond the possibility of mere chance, we call them the Indo-European family
^ The word primitive is here poorly chosen, since it is intended to mean only that we happen to have no written records of the language. German scholars have a better device in their prefix ur- ‘primeval,’ with which they form, for this purpose, names like urgermanisch, urslavisch^ urkeltisch.
14
THE STUDY OF LANGUAGE
of languages, and conclude, with Jones, that they are divergent forms of a single prehistoric language, to which we give the name Primitive Indo-European,
The method of comparison, too, was clear from the start. In general, any feature that is common to all or to several of the related languages, must have been present in their common ante- cedent stage, in the '^parent language.^^ Thus, from the above cited forms of the word for ^mother, ^ it is clear that in Primitive Indo-European this word must have begun with the sound which we indicate in writing by means of the letter m. Where the related languages do not agree, some or all of them must have made some change. Thus, it is clear that the second consonant in the word for 'mother’ was in Primitive Indo-European a ^-sound, and that the ^A-sound in English (as well as the earlier d-sound in the Old English form, modor) must be due to change.
1. 7. The beginning of a systematic comparison of the Indo- European languages was a treatise on the inflectional endings of verbs in Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Persian, and Germanic, published in 1816 by Franz Bopp (1791-1867). In 1818 Rasmus Kristian Rask (1787-1832) showed that the words of the Germanic lan- guages bear a regular formal relation in matters of sound, to the words of the other Indo-European languages. For instance, where the others have p, the Germanic languages have /, as in father: Latin pater, foot: Latin pes, five: Greek pente, few: Latin pauci. In 1819 Jakob Grimm (1787-1863) published the first volume of his Deutsche Grammatik, which was not, as the title now- adays would indicate, a German grammar, but a comparative grammar of the Germanic languages (Gothic, Scandinavian, English, Frisian, Dutch, and German). In the second edition, in 1822, of this volume, Grimm presented a systematic exposi- tion of the correspondences of consonants between Germanic and the other Indo-European languages; since then, these correspond- ences have been known to English-speaking scholars as Grimm^s Law. These correspondences are a matter of historical detail, but their significance was overwhelming, since they showed that human action, in the mass, is not altogether haphazard, but may proceed with regularity even in so unimportant a matter as the manner of pronouncing the individual sounds within the flow of speech. Grimm’s comparison of the Germanic languages re- mains to this day unrivaled; three more volumes appeared in 1826,
THE STUDY OF LANGUAGE
16
1831, and 1837; a fifth volume^ which was to complete the syntax, never appeared.
In 1833 Bopp began the publication of a comprehensive treatise, a comparative grammar of the Indo-European languages. In the years 1833 to 1836 there appeared the first edition of the Etymological Investigations of August Friedrich Pott (1802-1887). The term etymology, here as in all modern discussions, has taken on a precise meaning: the etymology of a speech-form is simply its history, and is obtained by finding the older forms in the same language and the forms in related languages which are divergent variants of the same parent form. Thus, to state the etymology of the English word mother is to say that this form is the modern version of the ninth-century Old English modor; that this is re- lated to Old Norse moder, Old Frisian moder, Old Saxon modar, Old High German muoter (these are the forms in our oldest rec- ords of the respective languages), in the sense that all these are divergent variants of a single Primitive Germanic word, which we symbolize as ^moder; and that these Germanic forms are in turn related to (^'cognate with’O Sanskrit mdtd, Avestan (Old Iranian) mdtd, Old Armenian mair, ancient Greek meter, Albanese motrt (which, however, means ^sister'), Latin mater, Old Irish mdthir, Lithuanian mote (which means ^wifeO? Old Bulgarian (Slavic) mati, and with the other corresponding forms in each of the groups of languages here illustrated, in the sense that all these are divergent later forms of a single Primitive Indo-European word, which we symbolize as *mdter. As this example shows, ety- mologies, in the modern sense, do not necessarily show us an older, more transparent meaning of words. Our modern etymologies in the Indo-European languages are due largely to the researches of Pott.
During the following decades progress was so rapid that both smaller treatises and the great handbooks rapidly became anti- quated. Of the latter, Bopp's, in spite of new editions, was super- seded in 1861 by the Com'pendium of the Comparative Grammar of the Indo-European Languages of August Schleicher (1823-1868). In 1886 Karl Brugmann (1849-1919) and Berthold Delbriick (1842-1922) began the publication of their Outline of the Compara- tive Grammar of the Indo-European Languages; the standard work of reference today is the second edition of this, which appeared from 1897 to 1916.
16
THE STUDY OF LANGUAGE
As the work went on, other, more detailed treatises were de- voted to the separate branches of the Indo-European family, in the manner of Grimm’s great treatise on Germanic. Friedrich Diez (1794-1876) began the serious study of the Romance lan- guages in his Grammar of the Romance Languages (1836-1844); Johann Kaspar Zeuss (1806-1856) opened the field of the Celtic languages in his Grammatica Celtica (1853); Franz von Miklo- sich (1813-1891) wrote a Comparative Grammar of the Slavic Lan- guages (1852-1875).
1. 8. These studies could not fail to throw light upon many an aspect of history and archaeology, but their immediate interest lay in what they told about human speech. Although the various Indo-European languages had a common origin, their later careers were independent: the student had now a vast collection of de- tails concerning the changes in human speech, which enabled him to generalize on the manner of this change.
To draw the conclusions as to the way in which languages change, was to replace the speculation of earlier times by the results of scientific induction. William Dwight Whitney (1827-1894), an American scholar, wrote Language and the Study of Language (1867) and The Life and Growth of Language (1874). These books were translated into several European languages; today they seem incomplete, but scarcely antiquated, and still serve as an excellent introduction to language study. In 1880 there appeared the Principles of Linguistic History by Hermann Paul (1846-1921), which, in its successive editions (the fifth appeared in 1920), be- came the standard work on the methods of historical linguistics.
Paul’s book of Principles illustrates, with a wealth of examples, the process of linguistic change which had been revealed by Indo- European studies. Not so well written as Whitney’s, but more detailed and methodical, this book exercised a great influence on linguistic studies; students of a more recent generation are neg- lecting it, to their disadvantage. Aside from its very dry style, Paul’s Principles suffers from faults that seem obvious today, because they are significant of the limitations of nineteenth- century linguistics.
One of these faults is Paul’s neglect of descriptive language study. He admitted that descriptions of languages were neces- sary, but confined his actual discussion to matters of linguistic change. This shortcoming he shares with his epoch. We can study
THE STUDY OF LANGUAGE
17
linguistic change only by comparing related languages or dif- ferent historical stages of the same language. For instance, by noting the similarities and differences of English, Frisian, Dutch, German, Scandinavian, and Gothic, we can get a notion of the older language (“Primitive Germanic’’) from which they have differentiated in the course of time, and we can then study the changes which have occurred in each of these later languages. Or else, by comparing our records of Old Enghsh (say, in the writ- ings of King Alfred) with modern Enghsh, we can see how Eng- lish has changed in the last thousand years. Evidently our power of making this comparison depends upon our knowledge of the things to be compared. For example, our knowledge about the compounding of words (as in blackbird or footsore) in the several Germanic languages is decidedly incomplete; therefore we can- not go very far with a comparative study of this matter, which would tell us how words were compounded in Primitive Germanic, and how these habits have changed m the subsequent history of each Germanic language. The historical language students of the nineteenth century suffered under these limitations, but they seem not to have grasped the nature of the difficulty.
The other great weakness of Paul’s Principles is his insistence upon “psychological” interpretation. He accompanies his state- ments about language with a paraphrase in terms of mental processes which the speakers are supposed to have undergone. The only evidence for these mental processes is the linguistic process; they add nothing to the discussion, but only obscure it. In Paul’s book and largely to the present day, linguistics betrays its descent from the philosophical speculations of the ancient Greeks. Paul and most of his contemporaries dealt only with Indo-European languages and, what with their neglect of descriptive problems, refused to work with languages whose history was unknown. This limitation cut them off from a knowledge of foreign types of grammatical structure, which would have opened their eyes to the fact that even the fundamental features of Indo-European gram- mar, such as, especially, the part-of-speech system, are by no means universal in human speech. Believing these features to be universal, they resorted, whenever they dealt with fundamentals, to philosophical and psychological pseudo-explanations.
1. 9. Alongside the great stream of historical research, there ran, however, a small but accelerating current of general linguistic
18 THE STUDY OP LANGUAGE
study. The Hindu grammar of Sanskrit was never quite for- gotten; while many pupils used its results without knowing of its existence, the masters, who knew the antecedents of their science, appreciated its value. For the less-known Indo-European lan- guages descriptive studies could not be avoided. It is surely no accident that the best of these, in the field of the Slavic and Baltic languages, were furnished by August Leskien (1840-1916), a scholar who took a leading part in laying the foundations of historical methods of research.
For the most part, hov/ever, descriptive studies did not merge with the main stream of historical work. Some students were attracted by the structural peculiarities of languages outside the Indo-European group, even though the history of these languages was unknown. Other students examined a variety of languages in order to get a philosophical survey of human speech; in fact, much of the older descriptive work is almost unintelligible today because it is pervaded by philosophical notions that are no longer familiar to us.
The first great book on general linguistics was a treatise on the varieties of human speech by Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767- 1835), which appeared in 1836. H. Steinthal (1823-1899), beside more general writings on the fundamentals of language, published in 1861 a treatise on the principal types of language structure. G. von der Gabelentz’ (1840-1893) work on the science of language (1891) is much less philosophical. This direction of study cul- minated in a great work on language by the philosopher and psychologist, Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920), which appeared in 1900 as the first part of a treatise on social psychology. Wundt based his psychology of speech upon any and all accessible descrip- tions of languages. It is interesting today to read the Indo- Europeanist Delbriick^s critique and Wundt's rejoinder, both of which appeared in the following year. Delbriick objects to Wundt's use of languages whose history is unknown; for him the only aspect of language worth studying is its change in the course of time. Wundt, on the other hand, insists upon the importance of psycho- logical interpretation in terms of his system, while Delbriick says that it does not matter what particular system of psychology a linguist may choose.
Meanwhile some students saw more and more clearly the natural relation between descriptive and historical studies. Otto Bohtlingk
THE STUDY OF LANGUAGE 19
(1815-1904), who made the modem European edition of Panini, applied the descriptive technique to a language of totally different structure, the Yakut of Asiatic Russia (1851). Friedrich Muller (1834-1898) published an outline of linguistic science (1876- 1888) which contained brief sketches of the languages of the world, regardless of whether a historical treatment was possible. Fran^ Nikolaus Finck (1867-1910), both in a theoretical essay (1905) and in a little volume (1910) in v^hich he analyzed descriptively eight unrelated languages, insisted upon descriptive study as a basis for both historical research and philosophical generalization. Ferdi- nand de Saussure (1857-1913) had for years expounded this matter in his university lectures; after his death, they were published in book form (1915).
Most convincing in this respect was the historical treatment of language families other than the Indo-European. On the one hand, the need of descriptive data as a prerequisite for comparative work was here self-evident; on the other hand, the results showed that the processes of linguistic change were the same in all languages, regardless of their grammatical structure. The comparative study of the Finno-Ugrian languages (Finnish, Lappish, Hungarian, and their kin) began as early as 1799, and has been greatly elaborated. The second volume of Humboldt^s great treatise founded the comparative grammar of the Malayo-Polynesian language family. Today we have comparative studies of other families, such as the Semitic family and the Bantu family in Africa. Students of American languages could indulge in no self-deception as to the need of descriptive data: north of Mexico alone there are dozens of totally unrelated groups of languages, presenting the most varied types of structure. In the stress of recording utterly strange forms of speech one soon learned that philosophical prepossessions were only a hindrance.
The merging of these two streams of study, the historical- comparative and the philosophical-descriptive, has made clear some principles that were not apparent to the great Indo-European- ists of the nineteenth century, as represented, say, by Hermann Paul. All historical study of language is based upon the comparison of two or more sets of descriptive data. It can be only as accurate and only as complete as these data permit it to be. In order to describe a language one needs no historical knowledge whatever; in fact, the observer who allows such knowledge to affect his
20
THE STUDY OF LANGUAGE
description, is bound to distort his data. . Our descriptions must be unprejudiced, if they are to give a sound basis for comparative work.
The only useful generalizations about language are inductive generalizations. Features which we think ought to be universal may be absent from the very next language that becomes accessible. Some features, such as, for instance, the distinction of verb-like and noun-like words as separate parts of speech, are common to many languages, but lacking in others. The fact that some features are, at any rate, widespread, is worthy of notice and calls for an ex- planation; when we have adequate data about many languages, we shall have to return to the problem of general grammar and to explain these similarities and divergences, but this study, when it comes, will be not speculative but inductive.
As to change in language, we have enough data to show that the general processes of change are the same in all languages and tend in the same direction. Even very specific types of change occur in much the same way, but independently, in the most diverse languages. These things, too, will some day, when our knowledge is wider, lend themselves to a systematic survey and to fruitful generalization.
CHAPTER 2
THE USE OF LANGUAGE
2. 1. The most difficult step in the study of language is the first step. Again and again, scholarship has approached the study of language without actually entering upon it. Linguistic science arose from relatively practical preoccupations, such as the use of writing, the study of literature and especially of older records, and the prescription of elegant speech, but people can spend any amount of time on these things without actually entering upon linguistic study. As the individual student is likely to repeat the delays of history, we may do well to speak of these matters, so as to distinguish them from the subject of our study.
Writing is not language, but merely a way of recording language by means of visible marks. In some countries, such as China, Egypt, and Mesopotamia, writing was practised thousands of years ago, but to most of the languages that are spoken today it has been applied either in relatively recent times or not at all. More- over, until the days of printing, literacy was confined to a very few people. All languages were spoken through nearly all of their history by people who did not read or write; the languages of such peoples are just as stable, regular, and rich as the languages of literate nations. A language is the same no matter what system of writing may be used to record it, just as a person is the same no matter how you take his picture. The Japanese have three systems of writing and are developing a fourth. When the Turks, in 1928, adopted the Latin alphabet in place of the Arabic, they went on talking in just the same way as before. In order to study writing, we must know something about language, but the reverse is not true. To be sure, we get our information about the speech of past times largely from written records — and for this reason we shall, in another connection, study the history of writing — but we find this to be a handicap. We have to use great care in interpreting the written symbols into terms of actual speech; often we fail in this, and always we should prefer to have the audible word.
Literature, whether presented in spoken form or, as is now our
22
THE USE OF LANGUAGE
custom, in writing, consists of beautiful or otherwise notable ut« terances. The student of literature observes the utterances of cer- tain persons (say, of a Shakspere) and concerns himself with the content and with the unusual features of form. The interest of the philologist is even broader, for he is concerned with the cultural sig- nificance and background of what he reads. The linguist, on the other hand, studies the language of all persons alike; the individual features in which the language of a great writer differs from the ordinary speech of his time and place, interest the linguist no more than do the individual features of any other personas speech, and much less than do the features that are common to all speakers.
The discrimination of elegant or correct speech is a by-product of certain social conditions. The linguist has to observe it as he observes other linguistic phenomena. The fact that speakers label a speech-form as “good^’ or correct,^’ or else as ^'bad^^ or ^Mjicorrect,” is merely a part of the linguist’s data concerning this speech-form. Needless to say, it does not permit him to ignore part of his material or to falsify his records: he observes all speech- forms impartially. It is part of his task to find out under what circumstances the speakers label a form in one way or the other, and, in the case of each particular form, why they label it as they do: why, for example, many people say that ainH is “bad” and am not is “good.” This is only one of the problems of linguistics, and since it is not a fundamental one, it can be attacked only after many other things are known. Strangely enough, people without linguistic training devote a great deal of effort to futile discussions of this topic without progressing to the study of lan- guage, which alone could give them the key.
A student of writing, of literature or philology, or of correct speech, if he were persistent and methodical enough, might realize, after some waste of effort, that he had better first study language and then return to these problems. We can save ourselves this detour by turning at once to the observation of normal speech. We begin by observing an act of speech-utterance under very simple circumstances,
2. 2. Suppose that Jack and Jill are walking down a lane. Jill is hungry. She sees an apple in a tree. She makes a noise with her larynx, tongue, and lips. Jack vaults the fence, climbs the tree, takes the apple, brings it to Jill, and places it in her hand. Jill eats the apple.
THE USE OF LANGUAGE
23
This succession of events could be studied in many ways, but we, who are studying language, will naturally distinguish between the act of speech and the other occurrences, which we shall call practical events. Viewed in this way, the incident consists of three parts, in order of time:
A. Practical events preceding the act of speech.
B. Speech.
C. Practical events following the act of speech.
We shall examine first the practical events, A and C. The events in A concern mainly the speaker, Jill. She was hungry; that is, some of her muscles were contracting, and some fluids were being secreted, especially in her stomach. Perhaps she was also thirsty: her tongue and throat were dry. The light-waves reflected from the red apple struck her eyes. She saw Jack by her side. Her past dealings with Jack should now enter into the picture; let us suppose that they consisted in some ordinary relation, like that of brother and sister or that of husband and wife. All these events, which precede Jill’s speech and concern her, we call the speaker’s stimulus.
We turn now to C, the practical events which came after Jill’s speech. These concern mainly the hearer, Jack, and consist of his fetching the apple and giving it to Jill. The practical events which follow the speech and concern the hearer, we call the hear- er’s response. The events which follow the speech concern also Jill, and this in a very important way: she gets the apple into her grasp and eats it.
It is evident at once that our whole story depends upon some of the more remote conditions connected with A and C. Not every Jack and Jill would behave like these. If Jill were bashful or if she had had bad experiences of Jack, she might be hungry and see the apple and still say nothing; if Jack were ill disposed to- ward her, he might not fetch her the apple, even though she asked for it. The occurrence of a speech (and, as we shall see, the word- ing of it) and the whole course of practical events before and after it, depend upon the entire life-history of the speaker and of the hearer. We shall assume in the present case, that all these pre^ disposing factors were such as to produce the story as we have told it. Supposing this, we want to know what part the speech- utterance (B) played in this story.
If Jill had been alone, she might have been just as hungry and
THE USE OF LANGUAGE
thirsty and might have seen the same apple. If she had sufficient strength and skill to get over the fence and climb the tree, she could get hold of the apple and eat it; if not, she would have to stay hungry. The lone Jill is in much the same position as the speechless animal. If the animal is hungry and sees or smells food, it moves toward the food; whether the animal succeeds in getting the food, depends upon its strength and skill. The state of hunger and the sight or smell of the food are the stimulus (which we symbolize by S) and the movements toward the food are the reaction (which we symbolize by R). The lone Jill and the speech- less animal act in only one way, namely
If this works, they get the food; if it does not work — if they are not strong or skilful enough to get the food by the actions R — they must stay hungry.
Of course, it is important for JilFs welfare that she get the apple. In most instances it is not a matter of life and death, though some- times it is; in the long run, however, the Jill (or the animal) that gets the food has far better chances of surviving and populating the earth. Therefore, any arrangement which adds to Jilhs chances of getting the apple, is enormously valuable for her. The speak- ing Jill in our story availed herself of just such an arrangement. She had, to begin with, the same chance of getting the apple as had the lone Jill or the speechless animal. In addition to this, however, the speaking Jill had a further chance which the others did not share. Instead of struggling with the fence and the tree, she made a few small movements in her throat and mouth, which produced a little noise. At once, Jack began to make the reactions for her; he performed actions that were beyond JilFs strength, and in the end Jill got the apple. Language enables one person to make a reaction (R) when another person has the stimulus {S).
In the ideal case, within a group of people who speak to each other, each person has at his disposal the strength and skill of every person in the group. The more these persons differ as to special skills, the wider a range of power does each one person control. Only one person needs to be a good climber, since he can get fruit for all the rest; only one needs to be a good fisherman, since he can supply the others with fish. The division of labor, and, with it, the whole working of human society, is due to language,
2. 3. We have yet to examine B, the speech-event in our story.
THE USE OF LANGUAGE
25
This, of course, is the part of the story with which we, as students of language, are chiefly concerned. In all of our work we are ob- serving B; A and C concern us only because of their connection with B. Thanks to the sciences of physiology and physics, we know enough about the speech-event to see that it consists of three parts :
(Bl) The speaker, Jill, moved her vocal chords (two little muscles inside the adam^s-apple), her lower jaw, her tongue, and so on, in a way which forced the air into the form of sound-weaves. These movements of the speaker are a reaction to the stimulus S. Instead of performing the 'practical (or handling) reaction R — namely, starting realistically off to get hold of the apple — she performed these vocal movements, a speech (or substitute) reaction, which we shall symbolize by a small letter r. In sum, then, Jill, as a speaking person, has not one but two ways of reacting to a stimulus:
SB (practical reaction)
SB >^r (linguistic substitute reaction).
In the present case she performed the latter.
(B2) The sound-waves in the air in JilFs mouth set the sur- rounding air into a similar w’-ave-motion.
(B3) These sound-waves in the air struck Jack^s ear-drums and set them vibrating, with an effect on Jack’s nerves: Jack heard the speech. This hearing acted as a stimulus on Jack: we saw him running and fetching the apple and placing it in JilFs grasp, much as if Jill’s hunger-and-apple stimulus had been act- ing on him. An observer from another planet, who did not know that there was such a thing as human speech, would have to con- clude that somewhere in Jack’s body there was a sense-organ which told him, Jill is hungry and sees an apple up there.” In short. Jack, as a speaking person, reacts to two kinds of stimuli: practical stimuli of the type S (such as hunger and the sight of food) and speech (or substitute) stimuli, certain vibrations in his ear-drums, which we shall S3rmbolize by a small letter s. When we seek Jack doing anything (fetching an apple, say), his action may be due not only, as are an animal’s actions, to a practical stimulus (such as hunger in his stomach, or the sight of an apple), but, just as often, to a speech-stimulus. His actions, R, may be prompted not by one, but by two kinds of proddings:
(practical stimulus) SB
(linguistic substitute stimulus) sB
26
THE USE OF LANGUAGE
It is evident that the connection between Jill’s vocal move- ments (Bl) and Jack’s hearing (B3) is subject to very little un- certainty or variation, since it is merely a matter of sound-waves passing through the air (B2). If we represent this connection by a dotted line, then we can symbolize the two human ways of responding to a stimulus by these two diagrams: speechless reaction: SB
reaction mediated by speech: SB sB >-R.
The difference between the two types is evident. The speechless reaction occurs always in the same person as does the stimulus; the person who gets the stimulus is the only one who can make the response. The response, accordingly, is limited to whatever actions the receiver of the stimulus can make. In contrast with this, the reaction mediated by speech may occur in a person who did not get the practical stimulus; the person who gets a stimulus can prompt another person to make a response, and this other person may be able to do things which the speaker cannot. The arrows in our diagrams represent the sequence of events within one person’s body — a sequence of events which we think is due to some property of the nervous system. Therefore the speechless reaction can take place only in the body which received the stim- ulus. In the reaction mediated by speech, on the other hand, there is the link, represented by a dotted line, which consists of sound- waves in the air: the reaction mediated by speech can take place in the body of any person who hears the speech; the possibilities of reaction are enormously increased, since different hearers may be capable of a tremendous variety of acts. The gap between the bodies of the speaker and the hearer — the discontinuity of the two nervous systems — is bridged by the sound-waves.
The important things, biologically, are the same in both the speechless and the speaking occurrence, namely S (the hunger and sight of the food) and R (movements which get the food or fail to get it). These are the practical phase of the affair. The
speech-occurrence, s r, is merely a means by which S and
R may occur in different individuals. The normal human being is interested only in S and R; though he uses speech, and thrives by it, he pays no attention to it. Saying the word apple or hearing it said, appeases no one’s hunger. It, along with the rest of speech, is only a way of getting one’s fellow-men to help. As students of language, however, we are concerned precisely with the speech
THE USE OF LANGUAGE
27
event (s r), worthless in itself, but a means to great ends.
We distinguish between language, the subject of our study, and real or practical events, stimuli and reactions. When anything apparently unimportant turns out to be closely connected with more important things, we say that it has, after all, a “meaning” ; namely, it “means” these more important things. Accordingly, we say that speech-utterance, trivial and unimportant in itself, is important because it has a meaning: the meaning consists of the important things with which the speech-utterance (B) is connected, namely the practical events (A and C).
2. 4. Up to a certain point, some animals respond to each others^ stimuli. Evidently the marvelous co-ordination in a group of ants or bees must be due to some form of interaction. Sounds as a means for this are common enough: crickets, for instance, call other crickets by stridulationj noisily rubbing the leg against the body. Some animals, like man, use vocal noises. Birds produce sound-waves by means of the syrinx^ a pair of reed-like organs at the head of the lungs. The higher mammals have a larynx, a box of cartilage (in man called the adam^s-apple) at the top of the wind-pipe. Inside the lar3mx, at the right and left, two shelf-like muscles run along the walls; when these muscles, the vocal chords, are stretched taut, the outgoing breath sets them into a regular vibration which produces sound. This sound we call the voice.
Human speech differs from the signal-like actions oi animals, even of those which use the voice, by its great differentiation. Dogs, for instance, make only two or three kinds of noise — say, barking, growling, and whining: a dog can set another dog acting by means of only these few different signals. Parrots can make a great many kinds of noise, but apparently do not make different responses to different sounds. Man utters many kinds of vocal noise and makes use of the variety: under certain types of stimuli he produces certain vocal sounds, and his fellows, hearing these same sounds, make the appropriate response. To put it briefly, in human speech, different sounds have different meanings. To study this co-ordination of certain sounds with certain meanings is to study language.
This co-ordination makes it possible for man to interact with great precision. When we tell someone, for instance, the address of a house he has never seen, we are doing something which no animal can do. Not only has each person at his service the abflitiesf
28
THE USE OF LANGUAGE
of many other persons, but this co-operation is very precise. The extent and accuracy of this working-together is the measure of success of our social organization. The term society or social or-- ganism is not a metaphor. A human social group is really a unit of a higher order than a single animal, just as a many-celled animal is a unit of a higher order than a single cell. The single cells in the many-celled animal co-operate by means of such arrangements as the nervous system; the individuals in a human society co-operate by means of sound-waves.
The different ways in which we profit by language are so obvious that we need mention only a few. We can relay communication. When some farmers or traders say We want a bridge over this stream^ this news may pass through a town meeting, a state legislature, a bureau of roads, an engineering staff, and a contractor's office, running through many speakers and many relays of speech, until at last, in response to the farmers^ original stimulus, a corps of workmen make the actual (practical) response movements of putting up a bridge. Closely connected with the relay character of speech is its abstraction. The relays of speech, between the practical stimulus and the practical response, have no immediate practical effect. Therefore they can be put into all kinds of forms, provided only one changes them back correctly before proceeding to the final, practical response. The engineer who plans the bridge does not have to handle the actual beams and girders; he works merely with speech-forms (such as numbers in calculation); if he makes a mistake, he does not destroy any materials; he need only replace the ill-chosen speech-form (say, a wrong figure) by a suit- able one before he begins the actual building. In this lies the value of talking to oneself or thinking. As children, we talk to ourselves aloud, but, under the correction of our elders, we soon learn to suppress the sound-producing movements and replace them by very slight inaudible ones: we ‘Hhink in words.” The usefulness of thinking can be illustrated by the process of counting. Our ability to estimate numbers without using speech, is extremely limited, as anyone may see by glancing, say, at a row of books on a shelf. To say that two sets of objects ^^have the same number” means that if we take one object from the first set and place it next to one object of the second set, and keep on doing this without using any object more than once, we shall have no unpaired ob- jects left over. Now, we cannot always do this. The objects may
THE USE OF LANGUAGE 29
be too heavy to move, or they may be in different parts of the world, or they may exist at different times (as, say, a flock of sheep before and after a storm). Here language steps in. The numerals one, two, three, four, and so on, are simply a series of words which we have learned to say in a fixed order, as substitutes for the above- described process. Using them, we can ^^count” any set of objects by placing them into one-to-one correspondence (as mathemati- cians call it) with the number-words, saying one for one of the objects, two for another, three for the next, and so on, taking care to use each object only once, until the objects of the set are ex- hausted. Suppose that when we had said nineteen, there were no more objects left. Thereafter, at any time or place, we can decide whether any set of objects has the same number as this first set, by merely repeating the counting process with the new set. Mathe- matics, the ideal use of language, consists merely of elaborations of this process. The use of numbers is the simplest and clearest case of the usefulness of talking to oneself, but there are many others. We think before we act.
2. 5. The particular speech-sounds which people utter under particular stimuli, differ among different groups of men; mankind speaks many languages. A group of people who use the same system of speech-signals is a speech-community. Obviously, the value of language depends upon people's using it in the same way. Every member of the social group must upon suitable occasion utter the proper speech-sounds and, when he hears another utter these speech-sounds, must make the proper response. He must speak intelligibly and must understand what others say. This holds good for even the least civilized communities; wherever we find man, he speaks.
Every child that is born into a group acquires these habits of speech and response in the first years of his life. This is doubt- less the greatest intellectual feat any one of us is ever required to perform. Exactly how children learn to speak is not known; the process seems to be something like this:
(1) Under various stimuli the child utters and repeats vocal sounds. This seems to be an inherited trait. Suppose he makes a noise which we may represent as da, although, of course, the actual movements and the resultant sounds differ from any that are used in conventional English speech. The sound-vibrations strike the child's ear-drums while he keeps repeating the move-
30
THE USE OF LANGUAGE
ments. This results in a habit: whenever a similar sound strikes his ear, he is likely to make these same mouth-movements, re- peating the sound da. This babbling trains him to reproduce vocal sounds which strike his ear.
(2) Some person, say the mother, utters in the child ^s presence a sound which resembles one of the child’s babbling syllables. For instance, she says doll. When these sounds strike the child’s ear, his habit (1) comes into play and he utters his nearest babbling syllable, da. We say that he is beginning to ''imitate.” Grown-ups seem to have observed this everywhere, for every language seems to contain certain nursery-words which resemble a child’s babbling — words like mama, dada: doubtless these got their vogue because children easily learn to repeat them.
(3) The mother, of course, uses her words when the appropriate stimulus is present. She says doll when she is actually showing or giving the infant his doll. The sight and handling of the doll and the hearing and saying of the word doll (that is, da) occur repeatedly together, until the child forms a new habit: the sight and feel of the doll suffice to make him say da. He has now the use of a word. To the adults it may not sound like any of their words, but this is due merely to its imperfection. It is not likely that children ever invent a word.
(4) The habit of sa3nng da at sight of the doll gives rise to further habits. Suppose, for instance, that day after day the child is given his doll (and says da, da, da) immediately after his bath. He has now a habit of saying da, da after his bath; that is, if one day the mother forgets to give him the doll, he may nevertheless cry da, da after his bath. "He is asking for his doll,” says the mother, and she is right, since doubtless an adult’s "asking for” or "wanting” things is only a more complicated type of the same situation. The child has now embarked upon abstract or displaced speech: he names a thing even when that thing is not present.
(5) The child’s speech is perfected by its results. If he says da, da well enough, his elders understand him; that is, they give him his doll. When this happens, the sight and feel of the doll act as an additional stimulus, and the child repeats and practises his successful version of the word. On the other hand, if he says his da, da imperfectly, — that is, at great variance from the adults’ conventional form doll, — then his elders are not stimulated to give him the doll. Instead of getting the added stimulus of seeing
THE USE OF LANGUAGE 3|
and handling the doll, the child is now subject to other distracting stimuli, or perhaps, in the unaccustomed situation of having no doll after his bath, he goes into a tantrum which disorders his recent impressions. In short, his more perfect attempts at speech are likel> to be fortified by repetition, and his failures to be wiped out in confusion. This process never stops. At a much later stage, if he says Daddy hringed itj he merely gets a disappointing answei such as No! You must say Daddy brought it^’; but if he says Dadd'^ brought it, he is likely to hear the form over again: Yes, Daddy brought it, and to get a favorable practical response.
At the same time and by the same process, the child learns also to act the part of a hearer. While he is handling the doll he hears himself say da, da and his mother say dolL After a time, hearing the sound may suj0Bice to make him handle the doll. The mother will say Wave your hand to Daddy, when the child is doing this of his own accord or while she is holding up the child^s arm and waving it for him. The child forms habits of acting in con- ventional ways when he hears speech.
This twofold character of the speech-habits becomes more and more unified, since the two phases always occur together. In
each case where the child learns the connection SB >*'r
(for instance, to say doll when he sees his doll), he learns also the
connection sB yR (for instance, to reach for his doll
or handle it when he hears the word doll). After he has learned a number of such twofold sets, he develops a habit by which one type always involves the other: as soon as he learns to speak a new word, he is also able to respond to it when he hears others speak it, and, vice versa, as soon as he learns how to respond to some new word, he is usually able, also, to speak it on proper occasion. The latter transference seems to be the more diSicult of the two; in later life, we find that a speaker understands many speech-forms which he seldom or never employs in his own speech..
2. 6. The happenings which in our diagram are represented by a dotted line, are fairly well understood. The speaker's vocal chords, tongue, lips, and so on, interfere with the stream of his outgoing breath, in such a way as to produce sound-waves; these waves are propagated through the air and strike the hearer’s ear-drums, which then vibrate in unison. The happenings, how- ever, which we have represented by arrows, are very obscure. We do not understand the mechanism which makes people say
32
THE USE OF LANGUAGE
oertain things in certain situations, or the mechanism which makes them respond appropriately when these speech-sounds strike their ear-drums. Evidently these mechanisms are a phase of our gen- eral equipment for responding to stimuli, be they speech-sounds or others. These mechanisms are studied in physiology and, especially, in psychology. To study them in their special bearing on language, is to study the psychology of speech, linguistic psychology. In the division of scientific labor, the linguist deals
only with the speech-signal (r s); he is not competent to
deal with problems of physiology or psychology. The findings of the linguist, who studies the speech-signal, will be all the more valuable for the psychologist if they are not distorted by any pre- possessions about psychology. We have seen that many of the older linguists ignored this; they vitiated or skimped their reports by trying to state everything in terms of some psychological the- ory. We shall all the more surely avoid this fault, however, if we survey a few of the more obvious phases of the psychology of language.
The mechanism which governs speech must be very complex and delicate. Even if we know a great deal about a speaker and about the immediate stimuli which are acting upon him, we usu- ally cannot predict whether he will speak or what he will say. We took our story of Jack and Jill as something known to us, after the fact. Had we been present, we could not have foretold whether Jill would say anything when she saw the apple, or, in case she did speak, what words she would utter. Even supposing she asked for the apple, we could not foretell whether she would preface her request by saying Fm hungry or whether she would say please or whether she would say I want that apple or Get me that apple or I was just wishing I had an apple j and so on: the possibilities are almost infinite. This enormous variability has led to two theories about human conduct, including speech.
The mentalistic theory, which is by far the older, and still pre- vails both in the popular view and among men of science, supposes that the variability of human conduct is due to the interference of some non-physical factor, a spirit or will or mind (Greek psyche^ hence the term psychology) that is present in every human being. This spirit, according to the mentalistic view, is entirely different from material things and accordingly follows some other kind of causation or perhaps none at all. Whether Jill will speak or what
THE USE OF LANGUAGE
33
words she will use, depends, then, upon some act of her mind oi will, and, as this mind or will does not follow the patterns of suc- cession (cause-and-effect sequences) of the material world, we cannot foretell her actions.
The materialistic (or, better, mechanistic) theory supposes that the variability of human conduct, including speech, is due only to the fact that the human body is a very complex system. Human actions, according to the materialistic view, are part of cause-and- effect sequences exactly like those which we observe, say in the study of physics or chemistry. However, the human body is so complex a structure that even a relatively simple change, such as, say, the impingement on the retina of light-waves from a red apple, may set off some very complicated chain of consequences, and a very slight difference in the state of the body may result in a great difference in its response to the light-waves. We could foretell a person’s actions (for instance, whether a certain stimulus will lead him to speak, and, if so, the exact words he will utter), only if we knew the exact structure of his body at the moment, or, what comes to the same thing, if we knew the exact make-up of his organism at some early stage — say at birth or before — and then had a record of every change in that organism, including every stimulus that had ever affected the organism.
The part of the human body responsible for this delicate and variable adjustment, is the nervous system. The nervous system is a very complex conducting mechanism, which makes it possible for a change in one part of the body, (a stimulus, say, in the eye) to result in a change in some other part (a response, say, of reach- ing with the arm, or of mo^ung the vocal chords and tongue). Further, it is clear that the nervous system is changed, for a time or even permanently, by this very process of conduction: our responses depend very largely upon our earlier dealings with the same or similar stimuli. Whether Jill will speak depends largely on her liking for apples and on her past experience of Jack. We remember and acquire habits and learn. The nervous system is evidently a trigger-mechanism: a very slight change may set the match to a large store of explosive material. To take the case that interests us, only so can we explain the fact that large-scale move- ments like Jack’s fetching the apple, are set off by very slight changes, such as the minute thrumming of air-waves on his ear- drum.
34 THE USE OF LANGUAGE
The working of the nervous system is not accessible to observa- tion from without, and the person himseh has no sense-organs (such as he has, for instance, for the working of the muscles in his hand) with which he himself could observe what goes on in his nerves. Therefore the psychologist must resort to indirect methods of approach.
2. 7. One such method is experiment. The psychologist submits numbers of people to carefully prearranged stimuli under the simplest conditions, and records their responses. Usually he also asks these persons to “introspect,’^ — that is, to describe as much as possible of what goes on inside them when they get the stimulus. At this point psychologists often go astray for want of linguistic knowledge. It is a mistake, for instance, to suppose that language enables a person to observe things for which he has no sense- organs, such as the workings of his own nervous system. An ob- server’s only advantage in reporting what goes on inside him is that he can report stimulations which an outsider cannot detect — say, a pain in his eye or a tickling in his throat. Even here, we must not forget that language is a matter of training and habit; a person may be unable to report some stimulations, simply because his stock of speech-habits provides no formula; this is the case with many of our less useful adventures, such as smaller goings-on in our internal organs. Often the very structure of our body leads to a false report; we show the physician exactly the spot where we feel a pain, and he finds the injury some distance away, at a point which his experience may teach him to locate at once from our false description. In this respect many psychologists go astray by actually training their observers to use a set of technical terms for obscure stimuli and then attaching significance to the observer’s use of these terms.
Abnormal conditions in which speech is disturbed, seem to reflect general maladjustments or lesions and to throw no light on the particular mechanism of language. Stuttering is probably due to imperfect specialization of the two cerebral hemispheres; in the normal speaker the left hemisphere (or, if he is left-handed, the right hemisphere) dominates more delicate actions, such as those of speech; in the stutterer this one-sided specialization is incomplete. Imperfect production of specific sounds {stammering)^ where it is not due to anatomical defects in the organs of speech, seems to result from similar maladjustments. Head- wounds and diseases
THE USE OF LANGUAGE
35
which injure the brain often result in aphasia, disturbances in the manner of making speech-responses and in responding to speech. Dr. Henry Head, who had unusually good opportunities for the study of aphasia in wounded soldiers, recognizes four types.
Type 1 reacts well to other people’s speech, and in milder cases, uses words for the proper objects, but mispronounces or confuses his words; in extreme cases, the sufferer can say little more than yes and no. A patient reports, with, some difficulty: ^‘1 know it’s not the correct pronunciation .1 don’t al- ways corret it because I shouldn’t get it right
in five or six times unless someone says it for
me.” In a more serious case, the patient, when asked his name, answers Honus instead of ^Thomas,’ and says erst for ‘first’ and hend for ‘second.’
Type 2 reacts fairly well to simple speech, and pronounces appropriate words and short phrases, but not in the conventional constructions; he may talk an unintelligible jargon, although each word is correct enough. To the question “Have you played any games?” a patient answers: “Played games, yes, played one, day- time, garden.” He says, “Get out, lay down, go to sleep, some- times goes away. If sit in kitchen, moving about working, makes me getting worse on it.” He comments, “Funny thing, this worse, that sort of thing,” and by way of explanation, writes down the words as and at We shaU see later that the structure of normal language forces us to distinguish between lexical and grammatical habits of speech; the latter are disturbed in these patients.
Type 3 reacts with difficulty to the names of objects, and has trouble in finding the right words, especially names of things. His pronunciation and arrangement are good, but he has to use in- genious circumlocutions for the words he cannot find. For ‘scissors ' a patient says “what you cut with”; for ‘black’ he says: “people who are dead, — the other people who are not dead, have this color.” He may use the wrong word, as for ‘scissors.’ The words lost are chiefly the names of concrete objects. This state seems like an exaggeration of many normal persons’ difficulty in recalling people’s names and the designations of objects, especially xmder preoccupation, excitement, or fatigue.
Type 4 often does not respond correctly to the speech of others; he has no trouble in uttering single words, but he cannot finish a connected speech. It is significant that these patients suffer from
THE USE OF LANGUAGE
apraxia; they cannot find their way about and are confused by being set, say, on the opposite side of the street. One patient reports: don’t seem to understand all you say, and then I forget
what I’ve got to do.” Another patient says: '"When at table, I am very slow in picking out the object, say the milk-jug, which I want. I don’t spot it at once ... I see them all, but I don’t spot them. When I want the salt or the pepper or a spoon, I suddenly tumble to its presence,” The disturbance of speech appears in this answer of a patient: ^^Oh, yes! I know the differ- ence between the Nurse and the Sister by the dress: Sister blue; Nurse — oh! I get muddled, just ordinary nurse’s clothes, white, blue . . .”
Ever since 1861, when Broca showed that damage to the third frontal convolution in the left hemisphere of the brain was accom- panied by aphasia, there has been dispute as to whether Broca’s center” and other regions of the cortex act as specific centers for the activity of speech. Head finds some correlation between different points of lesion and each of his four types of aphasia. The demonstrable functional identifications of cortical areas always concern some specific organ: an injury in one area of the brain is accompanied by paralysis of the right foot, an injury in another area by failure to respond to stimulation in the left-hand side of the retina, and so on. Now, speech is a very complex activity, in which stimulation of every kind leads to highly specific movements of the throat and mouth; these last, moreover, are not, in a physi- ologic sense, ^^organs of speech,” for they serve biologically earlier uses in man and in speechless animals. Many injuries to the nerv- ous system, accordingly, will interfere with speech, and different injuries will result in different kinds of difficulty, but the points of the cortex are surely not correlated with specific socially significant features of speech, such as words or syntax; this appears plainly from the fluctuating and contradictory results of the search for various kinds of speech centers.” We may expect the physiologist to get better results when he looks for correlations between points of the cortex and specific physiologic activities concerned in speech, such as the movement of special muscles or the transmission of kinesthetic stimuli from the larynx and tongue. The error of seeking correlations between anatomically defined parts of the nervous system and socially defined activities appears clearly when we see some physiologists looking for a “visual word-center” which
THE USE OF LANGUAGE
37
is to control reading and writing: one might as well look for a specific brain-center for telegraphy or automobile-driving or the use of any modern invention. Physiologically, language is not a unit of function, but consists of a great many activities, whose union into a single far-reaching complex of habits results from repeated stimulations during the indmduars early life.
2. 8. Another way of studying human responses is to observe them in the mass. Some actions are highly variable in each per- son, but fairly constant in large groups of persons. We cannot predict whether any particular umnarried adult will marry dur- ing the next twelve months, or which particular persons will commit suicide, or which ones will get into prison, but, given a large enough community, and the figures for past years (and per- haps certain other data, such as those which concern economic conditions), statisticians can foretell the number of marriages, suicides, convictions for crime, and so on, which will take place. If we found it possible and worth while to register every speech- utterance in a large community, we should doubtless be able to foretell how many times any given utterance such as Good-morning or I love you or How much are oranges today? would be spoken within a fixed number of days. A detailed study of this kind would tell us a great deal, especially about the changes that are constantly going on in every language.
However, there is another and simpler way of studying human action in the mass: the study of conventional actions. When we go to a strange country, we soon learn many established modes of action, such as the system of currency and of weights and meas- ures, the rules of the road (does one keep to the right, as in Amer- ica and Germany, or to the left, as in England and Sweden?), good manners, hours for meals, and so on. The traveler does not gather statistics: a very few observations put him on the track, and these are confirmed or corrected by further experience. Here the hnguist is in a fortunate position: in no other respect are the activities of a group as rigidly standardized as in the forms of language. Large groups of people make up all their utterances out of the same stock of lexical forms and grammatical construc- tions. A linguistic observer therefore can describe the speech- habits of a community without resorting to statistics. Needless to say, he must work conscientiously and, in particular, he must record every form he can find and not try to excuse himself from
38
THE USE OF LANGUAGE
this task by appealing to the reader^s common sense or to the structure of some other language or to some psychological theory, and, above all, he must not select or distort the facts according to his views of what the speakers ought to be saying. Aside from its intrinsic value for the study of language, a relevant and un- prejudiced description of this kind, serves as a document of major importance for psychology. The danger here lies in mentalistic views of psychology, which may tempt the observer to appeal to purely spiritual standards instead of reporting the facts. To say, for instance, that combinations of words which are “felt to be^^ compounds have only a single high stress (e.g. blackbird as opposed to black bird)j is to tell exactly nothing, since we have no way of determining what the speakers may “feeU': the observer's task was to tell us, by some tangible criterion, or, if he found none, by a list, which combinations of words are pronounced with a single high stress. A worker who accepts the materialistic hypothesis in psychology is under no such temptation; it may be stated as a principle that in all sciences like linguistics, which observe some specific type of human activity, the worker must proceed exactly as if he held the materialistic view. This practical effectiveness is one of the strongest considerations in favor of scientific materialism.
The observer who, by this mass-observation, gives us a state- ment of the speech-habits of a community, can tell us nothing about the changes which are going on in the language of this as of every community. These changes could be observed only by means of genuinely statistical observation through a considerable length of time; for want of this, we are ignorant of many matters concerning linguistic change. In this respect, too, the science of language is fortunate, however, because comparative and geograph- ical methods of study, again through mass-observation, supply a good deal of what we should hope to get from statistics. The fortunate position of our science in these matters is due to the fact that language is the simplest and most fundamental of our social (that is, peculiarly human) activities. In another direction, however, the study of linguistic change profits by a mere accident, namely by the existence of written records of speech of the past.
2. 9. The stimulus which calls forth speech, leads also to some other reactions. Some of these are not visible from the outside; these are muscular and glandular actions which are of no imme- diate importance to the speaker’s fellow-men. Others are impor-
THE USE OF LANGUAGE
39
tant handling responses, such as locomotion or the displacement of objects. Still other responses are visible, but not directly im- portant; they do not change the lay-out of things, but they do, along with speech, serve as stimuli to the hearer. These actions are facial expression, mimicry, tone of voice (in so far as it is not prescribed by the conventions of the language), insignificant handling of objects (such as fiddling with a rubber band), and, above all, gesture.
Gesture accompanies all speech; in kind and in amount, it differs with the individual speaker, but to a large extent it is governed by social convention. Italians use more gesture than English-speaking people; in our civilization people of the privileged class gesticulate least. To some extent, individual gestures are con- ventional and differ for different communities. In saying good-by we wave the hand with palm outward; Neapolitans wave it with the back outward.
Most gestures scarcely go beyond an obvious pointing and pic- turing. American Indians of plains or woodland tribes will ac- company a story by unobtrusive gestures, foreign to us, but quite intelligible: the hand, palm in, thumb up, is held just under the eyes to represent spying; a fist is slapped into a palm for a shot; two fingers imitate a man walking, and four the running of a horse. Even where gestures are symbolic, they go little beyond the ob- vious, as when one points back over one’s shoulder to indicate past time.
Some communities have a gesture language which upon occasion they use instead of speech. Such gesture languages have been observed among the lower-class Neapolitans, among Trappist monks (who have made a vow of silence), among the Indians of our western plains (where tribes of different language met in commerce and war), and among groups of deaf-mutes.
It seems certain that these gesture languages are merely de- velopments of ordinary gestures and that any and all complicated or not immediately intelligible gestures are based on the conven- tions of ordinary speech. Even such an obvious transference as pointing backward to indicate past time, is probably due to a lin- guistic habit of using the same word for ^in the rear’ and Tn the past.’ Whatever may be the origins of the two, gesture has so long played a secondary role under the dominance of language that it has lost all traces independent character. Tales about peoples
40
THE USE OF LANGUAGE
whose language is so defective that it has to be eked out by gesture, are pure myths. Doubtless the production of vocal sound by ani- mals, out of which language has grown, originated as a response- movement (say, contraction of the diaphragm and constriction of the throat) which happened to produce noise. It seems certain, however, that in the further development, language always ran ahead of gesture.
If one gestures by moving some object so as to leave a trace on another object, one has entered upon marking and drawing. This kind of reaction has the value of leaving a permanent mark, which may serve as a stimulus repeatedly and even after intervals of time and can be transported to stimulate persons far away. For this reason, doubtless, many peoples attribute magic power to drawings, apart from their esthetic value, which is still with us.
In some parts of the world drawing has developed into writing. The details of this process will concern us later; the point of in- terest here is that the action of tracing an outline becomes sub- ordinate to language: drawing a particular set of lines becomes attached, as an accompaniment or substitute, to the utterance of a particular linguistic form.
The art of symbolizing particular forms of speech by means of particular visible marks adds a great deal to the effective uses of language. A speaker can be heard only a short ways and only for an instant or two. A written record can be carried to any place and preserved for any length of time. We can see more things at one time than we can hear, and we can deal better with visible things: charts, diagrams, written calculations, and similar devices, enable us to deal with very complex matters. The speech-stimuli of distant people, and especially of persons in the past, are available to us through writing. This makes possible an accumulation of knowledge. The man of science (but not always the amateur) surveys the results of earlier students and applies his energies at the point where they left off. Instead of always starting over again from the beginning, science progresses cumulatively and with acceleration. It has been said that, as we preserve more and more records of more and more speech-reactions of highly gifted and highly specialized individuals, we approach, as an ideal limit, a condition where all the events in the universe, past, present, and future, are reduced (in a symbolic form to which any reader may react) to the dimensions of a large library. It is no wonder that
THE USE OF LANGUAGE
41
the discovery of printing, which manifolds a written record to any desired number of copies, brought about, in all our manner of living, a revolution which has been under way for some centuries and is still in full swing.
There is no need of dilating upon the significance of other means for recording, transmitting, and multiplying speech, such as the telegraph, telephone, phonograph, and radio. Their importance for the simpler uses of language is obvious, as in the use of wireless telegraphy in cases of shipwreck.
In the long run, an3rthing which adds to the viability of lan- guage has also an indirect but more pervasive effect. Even acts of speech that do not prompt any particular immediate response, may change the predisposition of the hearer for further responses : a beautiful poem, for instance, may make the hearer more sensi- tive to later stimuli. This general refinement and intensification of human response requires a great deal of linguistic interaction. Education or culture, or whatever name we choose to give it, de- pends upon the repetition and publication of a vast amount of speech.
CHAPTER 3
SPEECH-COMMUNITIES
3. 1. A speech-community is a group of people who interact by means of speech (§ 2. 5). All the so-called higher activities of man — our specifically human activities — spring from the close ad- justment among individuals which we call society, and this ad- justment, in turn, is based upon language; the speech-community, therefore, is the most important kind of social group. Other phases of social cohesion, such as economic, political, or cultural groupings, bear some relation to the grouping by speech-commu- nities, but do not usually coincide with it; cultural features, espe- cially, are almost always more widespread than any one language. Before the coming of the white man, an independent Indian tribe which spoke a language of its own, formed both a speech-commu- nity and a political and economic unit; as to religion and general culture, however, it resembled neighboring tribes. Under more complex conditions there is less correlation between language and the other groupings. The speech-community which consists of all English-speaking people is divided into two political commu- nities: the United States and the British Empire, and each of these is in turn subdivided; economically, the United States and Canada are more closely united than politically; culturally, we are part of a great area which radiates from western Europe. On the other hand, even the narrowest of these groups, the political United States, includes persons who do not speak English: Amer- ican Indians, Spanish-speakers in the Southwest, and linguistically unassimilated immigrants. Colonial occupation, as in the Philip- pines or India, puts a speech-community into political and eco- nomic dependence upon a foreign speech-community. In some countries the population is divided into several speech-communities that exist together without local division: a town in Poland con- sists of Polish-speaking and German-speaking people; by religion, the former are Catholics, the latter Jews, and, until quite recently, very few persons in either group troubled themselves to under- stand the other group’s language.
42
SPEECH-COMMUNITIES
43
I have said nothing about biological grouping, because this does not, like the other groupings, depend upon language for its existence. Most matings, of course, take place between persons of like speech, so that a speech-community is always something of an inbred group; the exceptions, however, are very many, both in the mating of persons of different speech, one of whom usually acquires the other's language, and, what is more important, in the assimilation into a speech-community of whole groups of for- eigners, such as immigrants, conquered people, or captives. These deviations are so many that, if we had records, we should doubtless find very few persons whose ancestors of a few generations ago all spoke the same language. What concerns us most, however, is the fact that the features of a language are not inherited in the biologic sense. A child cries out at birth and would doubtless in any case after a time take to gurghng and babbling, but the par- ticular language he learns is entirely a matter of environment. An infant that gets into a group as a foundling or by adoption, learns the language of the group exactly as does a child of native parentage; as he learns to speak, his language shows no trace of whatever language his parents may have spoken. Whatever hereditary differences there may be in the structure of the larynx, mouth, Ups, and so on, of normal human beings, it is certain that these differences are not such as to affect the actions which make up language. The child learns to speak like the persons round him. The first language a human being learns to speak is his native language; he is a native speaker of this language.
3. 2. Speech-communities differ greatly in size. More than one American Indian tribe of only a few hundred persons spoke a language of its own. On the other hand, even before the coming of modern communication and travel, some speech-communities were very large: in the first centuries of the Christian Era, Latin and Greek were each spoken by millions of people over large areas round the Mediterranean. Under modern conditions, some speech- communities have grown to enormous size. Jespersen estimates the number of speakers of the principal European languages, in millions, for the years 1600 and 1912 as follows:
English German Russian French
6 10 3 14
150 90 106 47
1600
1912
Spanish Italian
8^ 9^
52 37
SPEECH-COMMUNITIES
Figures such as these have only a very indefinite value, because one cannot always tell which local groups form a single speech- community. Tesni^re, estimating the numbers round the year 1920, names Chinese as the largest speech-community, with 400 million speakers, but the term Chinese denotes a family of mutually unintelligible languages. Doubtless one of these. North Chinese, has today more native speakers than any other language, but I know no estimate of their number. Another language of this group, Cantonese, probably ranks among the largest speech- communities. In any case, English (to continue with Tesniere’s figures) ranks second, with 170 million native speakers. Russian comes third; Tesniere divides the figures between Great Russian (80 millions), Little Russian (Ukrainian, 34 millions), and White Russian (6|- millions), but these are mutually intelligible varieties, about as different as British and American English. Similarly, Tesniere splits the fourth-greatest language, German, into Ger- man (80 millions) and Judeo-German (7-| millions), although the rest of his figures do not consider dialectal differences; Jespersen’s figure of 90 millions is probably nearer right. Tesniere's remain- ing figures omit Javanese, which has at least 20 millions of native speakers. With these modifications his figures are: Spanish 65, Japanese 55, Bengali ^ 50, French 45, Italian 41, Turco-Tartar 39, Western Hindi ^ 38, Arabic 37, Bihari ^ 36, Portuguese 36, Eastern Hindi ^ 25, Telugu ^ 24, Polish 23, Javanese 20, Marathi ^ 19, Tamil 19, Korean 17, Panjabi ^ 16, Annamite 14, Roumanian 14, Rajasthani ^ 13, Dutch 13, Bohemian-Slovak 12, Canarese ^ 10, Oriya ^ 10, Hungarian 10.
Another element of uncertainty in figures like these arises from the differences within speech-communities. Dutch and German actually form only one speech-community, in the sense that there is no break between local speech-forms, but the extreme types are mutually unintelligible, and the political groups (on the one side Flemish Belgium and the Netherlands, and on the other side, Germany, Austria, and German Switzerland) have adopted two mutually unintelligible speech-forms. Standard Dutch-Flemish and Standard German, as their official languages. On the other hand, Turco-Tartar and some of the languages of India in our list prob-
Indo-European languages spoken in India; we should perhaps add Gujerati, with some 10 million speakers.
2 Dravidian languages spoken in India.
SPEECH-COMMUNITIES
45
ably include equally great differences, although the extremes may be connected by local gradations. A final and insurmountable diffi- culty lies in people’s acquisition of foreign languages. If we could determine a degree of proficiency which makes a student a member of a foreign speech-community, English, studied all over the world, would receive a much larger figure. Tesniere estimates that Malay is native to some three million people, but is spoken as a foreign language, especially in commerce, by some thirty millions.
3. 3. The difficulty or impossibility of determining in each case exactly what people belong to the same speech-community, is not accidental, but arises from the very nature of speech- communities. If we observed closely enough, we should find that no two persons — or rather, perhaps, no one person at different times — spoke exactly alike. To be sure, within a relatively homo- geneous set of speakers — say, the native speakers of English in the Middle Western part of the United States — the habits of speech are far more uniform than the needs of communication would demand. We see the proof of this when an outsider — say, a Southerner or an Englishman or a foreigner who has mastered English — comes into our midst: his speech may be so much like ours as to cause not the slightest difficulty in communication, and yet strikingly noticeable on accoxmt of inessential differences, such as ^^accent” and ^Tdiom.” Nevertheless there are great differences even among the native members of such a relatively uniform group as Middle Western American, and, as we have just seen, even greater differences within a speech-community (e.g. English) as a whole. These differences play a very important part in the history of languages; the linguist is forced to consider them very carefully, even though in some of his work he is forced provisionally to ignore them. When he does this, he is merely employing the method of abstraction, a method essential to scientific investigation, but the results so obtained have to be corrected before they can be used in most kinds of further work.
The difference between speakers is partly a matter of bodily make-up and perhaps of purely personal habit; we recognize our friends by their voices from the next room and over the telephone. Some people are more talented for speech than others : they remem- ber more words and turns of phrase, apply them better to the situation, and combine them in more pleasing style; the extreme
46
SPEECH-COMMUNITIES
case is the literary genius. Sometimes convention assigns certain speech-forms to certain speakers, as when the soldier, the well- trained servant, and the child in certain schools, learn to say sir or ma^m to certain persons, who do not reciprocate. Some ex- clamations, such as Goodness gracious! or Dear me! are largely re- served for the use of women. In some communities very differ- ent speech-forms are conventional for the sexes. The classical instance is that of the Carib Indians; a recently authenticated one is the language of the Yana Indians in northern California. Ex- amples of Yana words are:
^fire^
'my fire^ ^deer^
'grizzly-bear’
Men’s langxjage
^auna
^aunija
hana
fen’na
Women's language
^auh
^au^nich^
ha
The differences between the two sets of Yana forms can be stated by means of a fairly complex set of rules.
3. 4. The most important differences of speech within a com- munity are due to differences in density of communication. The infant learns to speak like the people round him, but we must not picture this learning as coming to any particular end: there is no hour or day when we can say that a person has finished learn- ing to speak, but, rather, to the end of his life, the speaker keeps on doing the very things which make up infantile language-learning. Our description of the latter (§ 2. 5) might be taken, in many respects, as a slow-motion picture of the ordinary processes of speech. Every speaker’s language, except for personal factors which we must here ignore, is a composite result of what he has heard other people say.
Imagine a huge chart with a dot for every speaker in the com- munity, and imagine that every time any speaker uttered a sen- tence, an arrow were drawn into the chart pointing from his dot to the dot representing each one of his hearers. At the end of a given period of time, say seventy years, this chart would show us the density of communication within the community. Some speak- ers would turn out to have been in close communication: there would be many arrows from one to the other, and there would be many series of arrows connecting them by way of one, two, or three intermediate speakers. At the other extreme there would be
SPEECH-COMMUNITIES
widely separated speakers who had never heard each other speak and were connected only by long chains of arrows through many intermediate speakers. If we wanted to explain the hkeness and unlikeness between various speakers in the community, or, what comes to the same thing, to predict the degree of likeness for any two given speakers, our first step would be to count and evaluate the arrows and series of arrows connecting their dots. We shall see in a moment that this would be only the first step ; the reader of this book, for instance, is more Kkely to repeat a speech-form which he has heard, say, from a lecturer of great fame, than one which he has heard from a street-sweeper.
The chart we have imagined is impossible of construction. An insurmountable difficulty, and the most important one, would be the factor of time : starting with persons now alive, we should be compelled to put in a dot for every speaker whose voice had ever reached anyone now living, and then a dot for every speaker whom these speakers had ever heard, and so on, back beyond the days of King Alfred the Great, and beyond earliest history, back in- definitely into the primeval dawn of mankind: our speech depends entirely upon the speech of the past.
Since we cannot construct our chart, we depend mstead upon the study of mdirect results and are forced to resort to hypoth- esis. We believe that the differences in density of communica- tion within a speech-community are not only personal and in- dividual, but that the community is divided into various systems of sub-groups such that the persons within a sub-group speak much more to each other than to persons outside their sub-group. Viewing the system of arrows as a network, we may say that these sub-groups are separated by lines of weakness in this net of oral communication. The lines of weakness and, accordingly, the differences of speech within a speech-community are local — due to mere geographic separation — and non-local, or as we usually say, social. In countries over which a speech-community has recently spread and settled, the local differences are relatively small, as, say, in the United States (especially the western part) or Russia; in countries that have been long settled by the same speech-community the local differences are much greater, as, say, in England, where English has been spoken for some 1500 years, or m France where Latin (now called French) has been spoken foi two-thousand years.
48
SPEECH-COMMUNITIES
3, 5. We shall examine first the simpler case, as it appears in the United States. The most striking line of cleavage in our speech is one of social class. Children who are born into homes of priv- ilege, in the way of wealth, tradition, or education, become native speakers of what is popularly known as ''good” English; the linguist prefers to give it the non-committal name of standard English. Less fortunate children become native speakers of "bad” or "vulgar” or, as the linguist prefers to call it, non-standard English. For instance, I have none, I havenH any, I haven^t got any are standard ("good”) English, but I ainH got none is non-standard ("bad”) English.
These two main types of American English are by no means treated alike. The standard forms are used in school, in church, and in all discourse that officially concerns the whole community, as in law-courts and legislative assemblies. All our writing (except by way of jest) is based on the standard forms, and these forms are registered in grammars and dictionaries and presented in text-books to foreigners who want to learn our language. Both groups of speakers, standard and non-standard, agree in calling the standard forms "good” or "correct” and non-standard forms "bad,” "incorrect,” "vulgar,” or even, "not English.” The speaker of standard English does not trouble himself to learn the non-standard forms, but very many speakers of non-standard Eng- lish try to use the standard forms. A native of the less favored group who acquires prestige, say, in the way of wealth or political emi- nence, is almost sure to learn, as well as may be, the standard forms of speech; in fact, noticeable lapses in this respect — even a single I seen it or I done it — may endanger his newly acquired position.
Within the standard language there are minor differences. In this case again, the divergent forms are estimated as higher and lower. A Chicagoan, for instance, who uses the a/i- vowel of father instead of the more common a-vowel of man in words like laugh, half, hath, dance, can% is said to be speaking a "higher-class” kind of English. In cases like these, however, people's attitudes differ: many Chicagoans find these aMorms silly and affected. Speakers of standard English often dispute as to which of two forms is "better”: ifs I or ifs me, forehead or ^^forrid^ Since the disputants do not trouble themselves to agree on a definition of "better,” these disputes never reach any conclusion. This is a matter which will occupy us again.
SPEECH-COMMUNITIES
49
Within the standard language, further, there are differences that obviously depend upon density of communication: different economic classes, — say, the very rich and the so-called middle class’’ in its various gradations, — differ in speech. Then there are differences of education, in the way both of family tradition and of schooling. These differences are crossed by less important divisions of technical occupation: different kinds of craftsmen, merchants, engineers, lawyers, physicians, scientists, artists, and so on, differ somew^hat in speech. Sports and hobbies have at least their own vocabulary. The factor of age-groups will concern us later; it is a tremendous force, but works almost unseen, and scarcely appears on the level that now concerns us, except perhaps in young people’s fondness for slang.
The most stable and striking differences, even in the United States and even in our standard language, are geographic. In the United States we have three great geographic types of standard English: New England, Central-Western and Southern. Within these types there are smaller local differences: speakers of standard English from older-settled parts of the country can often tell a fellow-speaker’s home within fairly narrow limits. In matters of pronunciation, especially, the range of standard English in America is wide: greatly different pronunciations, such as those, say, of North Carolina and Chicago, are accepted equally as standard. Only from the stage do we demand a uniform pronunciation, and here our actors use a British type rather than an American. In England there are similar regional types, but they are not granted equal value. The highest social recognition is given to the public school” English of the south. The innumerable gradations from this toward the decidedly provincial t3pes of standard, enjoy less prestige as they depart from the most favored type. The social recognition of a speaker of standard English from Scotland or Yorkshire or Lancashire, depends in part upon how closely his pronunciation approaches the upper-class southern type. In England, but scarcely in the United States, provincial colorings of standard English are tied up with differences of social level.
3. 6. Non-standard speech shows greater variety than standard. The higher the social position of the non-standard speaker, the more nearly does he approach the standard language. At the top are the transitional speakers who use an almost standard form of speech, with only a sprinkling of non-standard forms, and perhaps
50
SPEECH-COMMUNITIES
a pronunciation with too provincial a twang. At the bottom are the unmistakably rustic or proletarian speakers who make no pretense at using standard forms.
Apart from this continuous gradation, various groups of non- standard speakers have their own speech-forms. Occupational groups, such as fishermen, dairy workers, bakers, brewers, and so on, have, at any rate, their own technical language. Especially, minor groups who are in any way cut off from the great mass, use clearly-marked varieties of speech. Thus, sea-faring men used to speak their own type of non-standard English. Tramps and some lands of law-breakers have many speech-forms of their own; so do circus people and other wandering entertainers. Among non- standard speakers of German, Christians and Jews, and in some places Catholics and Protestants, differ in many of their linguistic forms. If the special group is at odds with the rest of the commu- nity, it may use its peculiarities of speech as a secret dialect, as do the English-speaking Gipsies. Criminals in various countries have developed such secret dialects.
The greatest diversity in non-standard speech, however, is geographic. The geographic differences, which we hear even in the standard English of the United States, are more audible when we listen to non-standard speakers. In remote districts within the older-settled parts of the country these local characteristics are very pronounced, to the point where we may describe them as local dialects.
In older-settled speech-communities, the type exemplified by France, or by the British part of the English-speaking group, local dialects play a much greater part. In such communities the non- standard language can be divided, roughly, to be sure, and without a sharp demarcation, into substandard speech, intelligible at least, though not uniform, throughout the country, and local dialect^ which differs from place to place to such an extent that speakers living some distance apart may fail to understand each other. Sub- standard speech, in such countries, belongs to the 'Tower middle class,” — to the more ambitious small tradesfolk, mechanics, or city workmen, — and the local dialects are spoken by the peasants and the poorest people of the towns.
The local dialects are of paramount importance to the linguist, not merely because their great variety gives him work to do, but because the origin and history of the standard and sub-standard
SPEECH-COMMUNITIES
51
types of speech can be understood only in the light of the local dialects. Especially during the last decades, linguists have come to see that dialect geography furnishes the key to many problems.
In a country like France, Italy, or Germany — better studied in this respect than England — every village or, at most, every group of two or three villages, has its own local dialect. The differ- ences between neighboring local dialects are usually small, but recognizable. The villagers are ready to teU in what way their neighbors^ speech differs from theirs, and often tease their neighbors about these peculiarities. The difference from place to place is small, but, as one travels in any one direction, the differences accumulate, until speakers, say from opposite ends of the country, cannot understand each other, although there is no sharp line of linguistic demarcation between the places where they live. Any such geographic area of gradual transitions is called a dialect area.
Within a dialect area, we can draw lines between places which differ as to any feature of language. Such lines are called isoglosses. If a village has some unique peculiarity of speech, the isogloss based on this peculiarity will be simply a line round this village. On the other hand, if some peculiarity extends over a large part of the dialect area, the isogloss of this feature wiU appear as a long line, dividing the dialect area into two sections. In Germany, for in- stance, the northern dialects pronounce the word bite with a ^-sound, as we do in English, but the southern dialects pronounce it with an 5-sound (as in standard German beiszen) ; the isogloss which sepa- rates these two forms is a long and very irregular line, running east and west across the whole German speech area. In the north and northeast of England one can mark off an area where the past tense of bring has the form brang. Dialect atlases^ collections of maps of a speech area with isoglosses drawn in, are an important tool for the linguist.
The speakers’ attitude toward local dialects differs somewhat in different countries. In England the local dialects have little pres- tige; the upper-class speaker does not bother with them and the native speaker of a local dialect who rises socially will try to cast it off, even if only in exchange for some form of sub-standard speech. The Germans, on the other hand, have developed, within the last century, a kind of romantic fondness for local dialects. While the middle-class speaker, who is not quite sure of his social position, will shy away from them, some upper-class Germans make
52
SPEECH-COMMUNITIES
it a point to speak the local dialect of their home. In German Switzerland this goes farthest: even the upper-class Swiss, who is familiar with standard German, uses local dialect as the normal medium of communication in his family and with his neighbors.
3. 7. The main types of speech in a complex speech-community can be roughly classed as follows:
(1) literary standard^ used in the most formal discourse and in v/riting (example: I have none);
(2) colloquial standard, the speech of the privileged class (ex- ample: I haven’t any or I haven’t got any — in England only if spoken with the southern public schooP^ sounds and intonation);
(3) provincial standard, in the United States probably not to be differentiated from (2), spoken by the middle'^ class, very close to (2), but differing slightly from province to province (example: I haven’t any or I haven’t got any^ spoken, in England, with sounds or intonations that deviate from the public schooP^ standard);
(4) substandard, clearly different from (1), (2), and (3), spoken in European countries by the 'Tower middle'^ class, in the United States by almost all but the speakers of type (2-3), and differing topographically, without intense local difference (example: I ain’t got none);
(5) local dialect, spoken by the least privileged class; only slightly developed in the United States; in Switzerland used also, as a domestic language, by the other classes; differs almost from village to village; the varieties so great as often to be incomprehensible to each other and to speakers of (2-3-4) (Example: a hae nane).
3. 8. Our survey of differences within a speech-community has shown us that the members of a speech-community may speak so much alike that anyone can understand anyone else, or may differ so much that persons who live some distance apart may fail to understand each other. The former case is illustrated by an Indian tribe of a few hundred persons, the latter by a far- flung speech community Hke English, where an American and a dialect-speaking Yorkshireman, for instance, do not understand each other’s speech. Actually, however, we can draw no line between the two cases, because there are all kinds of gradations between understanding and failing to understand. Whether the American and the Yorkshireman understand each other, may depend on the intelligence of the two individuals concerned, upon their general experience with foreign dialects or languages, upon
SPEECH-COMMUNITIES
53
their disposition at the moment, upon the extent to which the situation clarifies the value of the speech-utterance, and so on. Again, there are endless gradations between local and standard speech; either or both persons may make concessions which aid understanding, and these concessions will usually run in the direc- tion of the standard language.
AU this prevents our drawing a plain line round the borders of many a speech community. The clear cases are those where two mutually unintelligible languages abut on each other, as do, say, English and Spanish in our Southwest. Here each person’s native language — if, for simplicity sake, we ignore the languages of Indians and recent immigrants — is either English or Spanish, and we can draw an imaginary line, a language boundary , which will separate the English-speakers from the Spanish-speakers. This language boundary will of course not appear as a simple and fixed line between two topographically solid communities. There will be Enghsh-speaking settlements thrown out, in the shape of speech-islands, into totally Spanish surroundings, and, vice versa, Spanish speech-islands surrounded by English-speaking communities. Families and individuals of either group will be found living among the other and will have to be enclosed in a separate fittle circle of our language boundary. Our language boundary, then, consists not only of a great irregular line, but also of many little closed curves around speech-islands, some of which contain only a single family or a single person. In spite of its geometrical complexity and of its instability from day to day, this language boundary at any rate represents a plain distinction. It is true that linguistic scholars have found enough resemblance between English and Spanish to prove beyond a doubt that these languages are related, but the resemblance and relationship are too distant to affect the question with which we are here concerned.
The same might be said, for instance, of German and Danish: across the Jutland peninsula, just north of the city of Flensburg, we could draw a boundary between the two languages, and this boundary would show, on a smaller scale, the same features as the English-Spanish boundary in our Southwest. In this case, however, the resemblance between the two languages is suffi- ciently close to warn us of further possibilities. The two languages are mutually unintelligible, but resemble each other so closely that it takes no linguistic research to see the relationship. If one
54
SPEECH-COMMUNITIES
can compare such things at all, the difference is no greater than the difference between, say, a German local dialect spoken in Sleswick and one spoken in Switzerland. German and Danish, where they abut on each other, show a difference no greater than the differences which may exist within a single locally differenti- ated speech-community — only that in the latter case the inter- mediate gradations intervene, while between German and Danish we find no intermediate dialects.
The purely relative nature of this distinction appears more plainly in other cases. We speak of French and Italian, of Swedish and Norwegian, of Polish and Bohemian as separate languages, because these communities are politically separate and use differ- ent standard languages, but the differences of local speech-forms at the border are in all these cases relatively slight and no greater than the differences which we find within each of these speech- communities. The question comes down to this: what degree of difference between adjoining speech-forms justifies the name of a language border? Evidently, we cannot weigh differences as accurately as all this. In some cases, certainly, our habits of nomen- clature will not apply to linguistic conditions. The local dialects justify no line between what we call German and what we call Dutch-Flemish : the Dutch-German speech area is linguistically a unit, and the cleavage is primarily political; it is linguistic only in the sense that the political units use different standard languages. In sum, the term speech-community has only a relative value. The possibility of communication between groups, or even between individuals, ranges all the way from zero up to the most delicate adjustment. It is evident that the intermediate degrees contribute very much to human welfare and progress.
3. 9. The possibilities of communication are enhanced and the boundaries of the speech-community are further obscured by another very important factor, namely, people's use of foreign languages. This is by no means a modern accomplishment; among peoples of simpler civilization, such as some tribes of American Indians, well-bred persons often speak more than one of the languages of neighboring tribes. The factor of foreign-language speaking does not lend itself to measurement, since proficiency ranges all the way down to a smattering so slight as to be of al- most no actual use. To the extent that the learner can communi- cate, he may be ranked as o, foreign speaker of a language. We have
SPEECH-COMMUNITIES
55
already seen that the usefulness of some languages, such as Eng- lish or Malay, is partly due to the adherence of foreign speakers. Often enough, as among the educated classes in India, English serves as the means of communication between foreign speakers who do not understand each other’s native languages.
Some people entirely give up the use of their native language in favor of a foreign one. This happens frequently among immi- grants in the United States. If the immigrant does not stay in a settlement of others from his own country, and especially if he marries outside his original nationality, he may have no occasion at all to use his native language. Especially, it would seem, in the case of less educated persons, this may result, after a time, in wholesale forgetting: people of this kind understand their native language when they chance to hear it spoken, but can no longer speak it freely or even intelligibly. They have made a shift oj language; their only medium of communication is now English, and it is for them not a native but an adopted language. Some- times these persons have nevertheless acquired English very im- perfectly and therefore are in the position of speaking no language w^ell.
Another, more common case of shift of language occurs in the children of immigrants. Very often the parents speak their native language at home, and make it the native language of their chil- dren, but the children, as soon as they begin to play out of doors or to attend school, refuse to speak the home language, and in time succeed in forgetting all but a smattering of it, and speak only English. For them, English has become what we may call their adult language. In general, they speak it perfectly — that is, in a manner indistinguishable from that of the surrounding native speakers — but in some cases they carry over foreign peculiarities from their native language. This latter they speak very imperfectly or not at all, but their passive understanding, when they hear it, is somewhat better. A study of similar cases in Wales, where the children of Welsh-speaking parents shift to English, seems to show that this process retards the child’s development,
3. 10. In the extreme case of foreign-language learning the speaker becomes so proficient as to be indistinguishable from the native speakers round him. This happens occasionally in adult shifts of language and frequently in the childhood shift just described. In the cases where this perfect foreign-language learn-
56
SPEECH-COMMUNITIES
ing is not accompanied by loss of the native language, it results in hilingualism, native-like control of two languages. After early childhood few people have enough muscular and nervous freedom or enough opportunity and leisure to reach perfection in a foreign language; yet bilingualism of this kind is commoner than one might suppose, both in cases like those of our immigrants and as a result of travel, foreign study, or similar association. Of course, one cannot define a degree of perfection at which a good foreign speaker becomes a bilingual: the distinction is relative.
More commonly the bilingual acquires his second language in early childhood. This happens frequently in communities near a language border, or where a family lives as a speech-island, or where the parents are of different speech. Many well-to-do Euro- pean families make their children bilingual by employing foreign nurses or governesses. The educated Swiss-German is bilingual in the sense that he speaks both the local dialect and the highly divergent standard German. In the United States, better-educated immigrants often succeed in making their children bilingual; this development contrasts with the shifting of language among less privileged groups. In all these cases, apparently, the two languages play somewhat different parts in the life of the bilingual. Ordina- rily one language is the home language, while the other serves a wider range, but other dispositions also occur. The apparent frequency with which one meets bilinguals among artists and men of science may indicate a favorable effect of bilingualism on the general development of the child; on the other hand, it may mean merely that bilingualism results from generally favorable child- hood surroundings.
CHAPTEE 4
THE LANGUAGES OF THE WORLD
4. 1. Among the languages that are spoken today, only few are even tolerably well known to science. Of many we have in- adequate information, of others none at all. The older stages of some present-day languages, and some languages no longer spoken are known to us from written records; these records, however, acquaint us with only an infinitesimal part of the speech-forms of the past. Some extinct languages are known from the scantiest of records, such as a few proper names, many more only by the name of the people who spoke them, and doubtless a vastly greater number has disappeared without a trace. More than one language now spoken, especially in Africa and in South America, will pass out of existence without being recorded.
The inadequacy of our knowledge makes it impossible to deter- mine the relationships that may exist between many languages. In general, students who deal with slightly-known languages, have a weakness for setting up relationships on insufficient evidence. By relationship of languages we mean, of course, resemblances that can be explained only on the assumption that the languages are divergent forms of a single older language. Such resemblances show themselves in phonetic correspondences like those cited in Chapter 1, correspondences which can be determined only on the basis of extensive and accurate data. The less known the lan- guages and the less expert the student, the greater is the danger of his making false assumptions of kinship. Even the most positive announcements often turn out, upon examination, to be based upon insufficient evidence.
4. 2. English is spoken by more native speakers than any other language except, presumably. North Chinese; if we count the important factor of foreign speakers, English is the most wide- spread of languages. The number of native speakers of English was estimated for 1920 at about 170 millions (§ 3.2). Almost all of these speakers use standard or sub-standard English; local dialects are of small extent and for the most part mutually intelligible.
57
58
THE LANGUAGES OE THE WORLD
English is unmistakably related to the other Germanic lan- guages, but at the same time differs plainly from all of them. History tells us that it came to Britain as the language of invaders, the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes, who conquered the island in the fifth century of our era. The marked difference of English from the Germanic speech along the continental shore of the North Sea is explained by the millennium and a half of separation. The oldest written records of English, dating from the eighth and ninth centuries, confirm this, for their language closely resembles that of the oldest records of continental Germanic speech, which date from about the same time. The splitting off of English is a classical example of the way in which a dialect area is divided by migration.
The resemblance is closest between English and the dialects of the Frisian area, spoken by some 350,000 persons on the coast and coastal islands along the North Sea. This resemblance ap- pears strikingly in the oldest Frisian texts, which date from the second half of the thirteenth century. We conclude that English is an offshoot of an Anglo-Frisian (or Ingweonic) dialect area, which must have been fairly extensive before the migration to Britain.
Outside of Frisian, the Germanic-spealdng area of the European mainland (excluding Scandinavia) shows no sharp cleavages. The nearest thing to a break is a heavy bundle of isoglosses running east and west across Germany: north of the bundle one speaks 29, k in words like hopej bite, make; south of it, sounds like/, s, kh, as in standard German hoffen, heiszen, machen. The speech of the northern type is known as Low German, that of the southern as High German; since the various isoglosses do not coincide, the distinction can be sharply drawn only if one resorts to an arbi- trary definition. This difference appears already in our oldest records, which date from about the same time as those of English. Various kinds of evidence show us that the divergence of the southern type is due to changes which took place in the south during the fifth and sixth centuries of our era. The Continental West Germanic dialects, as they are called in contrast with Anglo- Frisian, made a vigorous eastward expansion during the Middle Ages; to the east and southeast of the main area there are many speech-islands, especially of the High German type, such as Yiddish in Poland and Russia. Continental West Germanic is spoken today by over 100 millions of persons. It has developed two great
THE LANGUAGES OF THE WORLD 59
standard languages, Dutch-Fleyjiishj which is used in Belgium and the Netherlands and is based on w-estern coastal dialects of the Low-German type, and Neiv High German, based on eastern cen- tral dialects of the district that was gained by medieval expansion.
Anglo-Frisian and Continental West Germanic resemble each other closely enough to be view-ed as a West Germanic unit, in con- trast with the smaller Scandinavian (or Noidh Germanic) group. Within this group, Icelandic differs markedly from the rest, what with the thousand years of separation since Iceland was colonized from w^estern Norway. Icelandic is spoken today by some 100,000 speakers. The language of the Faroese Islands, with about 23,000 speakers, is close to Icelandic. The rest of the area, comprising Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Gotland, and part of the Finnish coast, shows no marked cleavages; the speakers number some 15 millions. Our oldest records of North Germanic speech are in- scriptions, some of which may date as early as the fourth century A.D.; the oldest manuscripts date from the twelfth century, but the wording of the texts, especially in the case of some Icelandic literature, may be several centuries older. The present-day stand- ard languages are Icelandic, Danish, Dano-Norwegian, Norwegian Landsmaal, and Swedish.
We have some information about Germanic languages that are no longer spoken, such as the languages of the Goths, Vandals, Burgundians, and Lombards. Parts of a Bible translation in the Gothic language of the Visigoths, made by Bishop Ulfila in the fourth century, are preserved to us in sixth-century manuscripts, notably the Silver Codex. While the language of the Lombards seems to have been of the West Germanic type, the others, in- cluding Gothic, were closer to Scandinavian and are usually set apart as an East Germanic group. East Germanic settlers seem to have kept their language in the Crimea and elsewhere on the Black Sea until the eighteenth century.
All the languages so far named resemble each other closely in contrast with all others, and accordingly constitute the Germanic family of languages; they are divergent modern forms of a single prehistoric language to which we give the name Primitive Ger- manic (§1.6).
4. 3. The kinship of the Germanic family, as a whole, with certain other languages and language families of Europe and Asia, is not superficially apparent, but has been fully established
60
THE LANGUAGES OF THE WORLD
by the researches of the last century; together, all these languages make up the Indo-European family (§ 1.6).
To the west of the Germanic languages we find today the rem- nants of the Celtic family. Irish is known to us from a manuscript literature since the eighth century of our era; a few inscriptions on stone are perhaps much earlier. Irish is spoken by some 400,000 people, and its offshoot, Scotch Gaelic^ by some 150,000; Manx^ as a home language, alongside English, by a few hundred. Another branch of the Celtic family consists of Welsh and Breton, each with about a million speakers and known through written records since the eighth century. The latter, spoken on the northwestern coast of France, was brought there from Britain, perhaps as early as the fourth century. Another language of this branch, Cornish, whose earliest records date from the ninth century, died out round the year 1800. History and the evidence of place-names show that Celtic was in earlier times spoken over a large part of Europe, including what is now Bohemia, Austria, southern Germany, northern Italy, and France. It was superseded in these regions by Latin, as a result of Roman conquests, and by Germanic languages, as a result of the great migrations in the early centuries of our era. We have a few scant inscriptions, dating from round 100 b.c. in the ancient Celtic language of Gaul.
Northeast of the Germanic languages lies the Baltic family. The two surviving languages of this family, Lithuanian, spoken by some 2^ million people, and Lettish, spoken by some 1|- millions, have written records dating from the sixteenth century; thanks to the political independence of Lithuania and Latvia, both of these dialect-groups are now developing vigorous standard lan- guages. A third language of this group, Old Prussian, is known to us from a few written documents of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries; it ceased to be spoken in the seventeenth century.
South of the Baltic languages, and east and southeast of the Germanic, we find the great Slamc family. The eastward expansion of German in the Middle Ages overlaid various languages of the West Slavic branch. One of these, Lusatian (Wendish, Sorbian), survives as a speech-island of some 30,000 persons in Upper Saxony; another, Polahian, survived into the eighteenth century and has left a few written texts; the rest have died out, leaving a trace only in Germanized place-names. As a result of the struggle, the two great surviving West Slavic dialect areas show a peculiar
THE LANGUAGES OF THE WORLD bl
geographic configuration: a narrow streak of speech-islands trails off northward from the main Polish area along the Vistula toward Danzig, and Bohemian juts out westward as a kind of peninsula into the domain of German. Polish, recorded since the fourteenth century, is spoken by more than 20 million people. The Bohemian area, dmded on the basis of standard languages, into Czech and Slovak, comprises perhaps 12 millions of speakers; the oldest records date from the thirteenth century. East Slavic consists of but one enormous dialect area, Russian ^ with at least 110 million speakers, and written records dating back to the tweKth century. The South Slavic branch is separated from the others by the inter- vention of Hungarian, an unrelated intruder. It consists of Bul-^ garian, with some 5 million speakers, Serbo-Croatianj with some 10 millions, and Slovene, with about 1~ millions. Our oldest written records of Slavic speech are Old Bulgarian records from the ninth century, preserved in manuscripts written at least a century later, and a scant tenth-century text in Old Slovene. Some students find a relatively close resemblance between the Baltic and Slavic groups, and include them together as a Balto-Slavic sub-group within the Indo-European family.
To the south of the Germanic languages, Romance languages are spoken: the Portuguese-Spanish-Catalan area (with three standard languages indicated by these names) comprising in all over 100 million speakers, the French area with 45 millions, the Italian with over 40 millions, and Ladin {Rhaeto-Romanic) in Switzerland, spoken by some 16,000 persons. A further group, the Dalmatian, is extinct: one of the dialects, Ragusan, died out in the fifteenth century; another, Veliote, survived into the nine- teenth. To the east, on the Black Sea, cut off from the western areas by the intrusion of South Slavic, lies the Roumanian area, estimated as having 14 millions of speakers. All the Romance languages, of course, are modern forms of Latin, the ancient dialect of the city of Rome. Our oldest records of Latin date from some- where round 300 b.c. In medieval and modern time, Latin has been used as an artificial medium for writing and learned discourse. Ancient inscriptions show us, in Italy, some sister languages of Latin, notably Oscan and Umbrian; these and others, which in the course of Roman expansion were superseded by Latin, belong, together with Latin, into the Italic family. Some scholars believe that Italic and Celtic are connected by special resemblances, so
62 THE LANGUAGES OF THE WORLD
as to form an Italo-Celtic sub-group within the Indo-European family.
East of the Adriatic, south of Serbo-Croatian, is the Alhanese area. Albanese, known from records only since the seventeenth century, is spoken by a population of 1| millions. Although Albanese is full of loan-words from the surrounding languages, the native nucleus of its forms shows it to be a separate branch of the Indo-European stock.
Greek is spoken today by some 7 millions of speakers, in many local dialects and in a widespread standard language. The modern dialects are almost entirely descended from the standard language (the so-called Koine) which prevailed in the first centuries of the Christian Era, having superseded the local and provincial dialects of ancient times. These Ancient Greek dialects are known to us from many inscriptions, beginning in the seventh century B.c., from fragments of writing on papyrus, beginning in the fourth century b.c., and from a copious literature (transmitted, to be sure, in much later manuscripts), whose oldest compositions, the Ho- meric poems, are at least as old as 800 b.c.
In Asia Minor we find one branch of the Indo-European stock, Armenian^ spoken today by 3 or 4 million people; our oldest written records of Armenian date from the fifth century a.d.
The great Asiatic offshoot of the Indo-European family is the Indo-Iranian group. This consists of two sub-groups, Iranian and Indie (or Indo-Aryan)j very different today, but in the forms of our earliest records so similar that we can with certainty view them as descendants of a Primitive Indo-Iranian parent language.
The principal dialect areas of modern Iranian are Persian (with a standard language of high prestige, spoken by perhaps 7 or 8 millions of people), the Caspian group, and Kurdish; then, eastward, the Pamir dialects, Afghan (Pushto) ^ with some 4 million speakers, and Baluchi; an isolated offshoot, far to the west is Ossete, in the Caucasus, spoken by some 225,000 persons. Our oldest records of Iranian are the rock inscriptions, in Old Persian, of King Darius the Great and his successors (from the sixth to the fourth centuries b.c.), and the sacred texts, in Avestan, of the Zoroastrian (Parsi) religion, whose oldest portions may have been composed as early as 600 b.c., though our manuscripts are quite modern and contain a text which has undergone serious ortho- graphic revision. Intermediate stages, except for Persian (Pehlevi),
THE LANGUAGES OF THE WORLD
oo
are less well known, but early in the present century discoveries of manuscript fragments in Chinese Turkestan gave us knowledge of other medieval Iranian languages, which have been identified as Parthiarij Sogdian, and Sakian.
The other sub-branch of Indo-Iranian, Indie, comprises a total of more than 230 millions of speakers, distributed among a number of dialect areas which cover the larger part of India and include such great languages as Marathi (19 millions), Gujerati (10 mil- lions), Panjabi (16 millions), Rajasthani (13 millions), Western Hindi (38 millions). Eastern Hindi (25 millions), Oriya (10 mil- lions), Bihari (36 millions), Bengali (50 millions). The language of the Gipsies (Romani) is an emigrant offshoot of the Paigachi area in northwestern India. Our oldest written records of Indie speech, the inscriptions of King A^oka, dating from the third century b.c., show us a number of Indie dialects in what is called the Prakrit (or Middle Indie) stage; Indie languages in the Prakrit stage are known to us also from later inscriptions and from manuscript texts; among these last is Pali, the language of the Buddhist scriptures. An even older stage of Indie speech, the Sanskritic (or Old Indie) stage, is known to us, strangely enough, from some- what later documents. Our oldest texts in this stage are the Yedie collections of hymns; the original composition of the oldest parts of the oldest collection, the Rig-Veda, is placed conservatively at 1200 B.c. These hymns form the basic part of the scriptures of the Brahmin religion. A second, slightly divergent type of Old Indie speech is known to us from the Brahmana^s, the prose texts of the Brahmin religion, and from the grammar of Panini (§ 1.5) and its ancillary works. This language, known as Sanskrit, was spoken round the fourth century b.c. by the upper class somewhere in northwestern India. As a standard dialect and later as a literary and scholastic language, it gradually came into oflicial use all over Brahmin India; in the inscriptions it appears first round 150 b.c. and a few centuries later entirely supersedes the dialects of the Prakrit type; from that time to the present, written according to the rules of Panini’s grammar, it has served as the medium of an enormous body of artistic and scholarly literature.
Beside the branches so far named, all of which are represented by languages spoken today, there must have existed at different times many other offshoots of Primitive Indo-European, some closely related to surviving branches, others intermediate between
64 THE LANGUAGES OF THE WORLD
them, and perhaps still others quite apart. Of some such languages we have a slight knowledge. Round the Adriatic, the Illyrian languages were spoken in ancient times: Illyrian^ in which we have only a few proper names, VenetiCj known from inscriptions that date from the fourth to the second centuries b.c., and Messapian in southern Italy, with inscriptions dating from 450 to 150 b.c. Of Thracian, in the western part of the Balkan peninsula, we have only a few names and words and a single inscription (round 400 B.C.); it seems to have been closely related to Phrygian, in Asia Minor, which is known to us from a set of inscriptions dating as early as the eighth century b.c. and another set from the first centuries of our era. Macedonian seems to have been closely related to Greek. Ligurian (round the present Riviera) and Sicilian in Sicily, may have been close to Italic. Tocharian, in Central Asia, is known to us from manuscript fragments of the sixth century a.b., found in Chinese Turkestan.
Primitive Indo-European, in its turn, must have been related to other languages; with one exception, however, these have either died out or else changed so much as to obscure the kinship. The one exception is Hittite, an ancient language of Asia Minor, known to us from cuneiform inscriptions that begin round 1400 b.c. This relationship, though distant, enables us to reconstruct some of the pre-history of Primitive Indo-European and some features of a presumable Primitive Indo-Hittite parent language.
4. 4. As the various languages of the Indo-European stock spread over their present vast territory, they must have obliterated many unrelated forms of speech. A remnant of such a language is Basque, spoken today by some half-million people in the western Pyrenees. Our oldest texts in Basque date from the sixteenth century. It is the only surviving form of ancient Iberian, once spoken over southern France and Spain, and known to us from inscriptions and place-names.
Of other such languages, now extinct, we have only scant in- formation. In Italy, Etruscan, a totally unrelated neighbor that exerted a powerful influence on the Latin people, has left us copious inscriptions, which begin as early as the sixth century b.c. They are in the Greek alphabet and can be read, but not under- stood. The inscriptions in ancient Rhaetian show this language to have been an offshoot of Etruscan. An inscription of about 600 b.c. on the island of Lemnos and a series of inscriptions of the
THE LANGUAGES OF THE WORLD 65
fourth and third centuries b.c., mostly from Sardis in Asia Minor, show that Etruscan was related to Lemnian and Lydian; the texts of only the last-named have been interpreted.
From ancient Crete we have several inscriptions in the Greek alphabet but in an unknown language, two from the fourth century B.c. and one (from the town of Praises) somewhat older. From a much earlier period, round 1500 b.c. we have Cretan inscriptions partly in picture-writing and partly in a simplified system derived from this.
From Asia Minor we have copious inscriptions in Lycian, from the fifth and fourth centuries b.c., and less extensive ones in Carian, from the seventh century b.c. The former are in a Greek alphabet and have been partly interpreted; the writing of the latter may be of the same provenience, but is undeciphered. In Syria and the adjacent part of Asia Minor copious inscriptions in picture-writing from about 1000 b.c. to about 550 b.c. have been attributed to the HiititeSj but there is no reason for believing that these undeciphered inscriptions were made by the same people as our Hittite cuneiform records (§ 4.3).
Cuneiform inscriptions on rock and clay from the Near East acquaint us with extinct languages of an older time: Sumerian in Mesopotamia, from 4000 b.c., Elamitic, in Persia, from 2000 b.c.; scant records of Cossean, east of Mesopotamia, from 1600 b.c., Mitanni, east of Mesopotamia, from round 1400 b.c.; the language of Van (near Lake Van) from the ninth and eighth centuries b.c,; and several uninterpreted languages within the Hittite empire in Asia Minor. Of the other languages represented in records of this type, we have already mentioned Old Persian and Hittite (§ 4.3), and shall immediately speak of Babylonian-Assyrian, a Semitic language.
4. 5. Of the present-day families which border upon Indo- European, one or more may be distantly akin; the Semitic-Hamitic and the Finno-Ugrian families seem to show some resemblance to Indo-European, but, in spite of much effort, no conclusive evi- dence has been found.
The Semitic-Hamitic family consists of four branches which resemble each other but distantly: Semitic, Egyptian, Berber, and Cushite.
The Semitic branch appears in two offshoots. The eastern, now extinct, consists of Babylonian-Assyrian, known to us from in-
66 THE LANGUAGES OF THE WORLD
scriptions on stone and clay in cuneiform writing, from about 2500 B.c. onward; this language was superseded by Aramaic before the beginning of the Christian Era. The western branch of Semitic is divided, again, into two main offshoots, a northern and a south- ern. The former appears in the Canaanite glosses in cuneiform tablets found at Tel-el-Amarna, dating round 1400 b.c., and in the Moabite of the famous inscription of King Mesha, ninth century b.c. Phoenician^ known first from inscriptions of the ninth century b.c., was spoken not only in Phoenicia, where it died out before the Christian Era, but also in the Phoenician colony of Carthage, where it lived some centuries longer. Hebrew is known from inscriptions of equal age and from the manuscript tradition of the Old Testament, whose earliest portion may have been composed by 1000 b.c. It was superseded by Aramaic in the second century b.c., but remained in written use through the Middle Ages; of late, there have been attempts to restore it, artificially, to the status of a spoken language. AramaiCj finally, consists of a group of dialects, first known from inscriptions of the eighth century b.c. In a tremendous wave of expansion, Aramaic, in the centuries just before the Christian Era, spread over Syria and large tracts of Asia, vying with Greek, and replacing many languages, among them Hebrew and Assyrian. For a millennium (from round 300 b.c. to round 650 A.n.) it served as the leading official and written language of the Near East; in the latter capac- ity it exercised a great effect upon Asiatic systems of writing. It was superseded, in its turn, by the spread of Arabic, and is spoken today in isolated patches by some 200,000 people. The southern branch of West Semitic is represented by several still flourishing languages. South Arabic, known from inscriptions ranging from about 800 b.c. to the sixth century A.n., is still spoken, in several dialects, along the southern coast of Arabia and on the island of Sokotra. Arabic, whose earliest record is an in- scription from 328 A.n., owes its expansion, since the seventh century of our era, to the conquests of the Mohammedan Arabs. It is spoken today by some 37 millions of people and, beyond this, has served for centuries as the sacred, literary, and official language of Islam. Ethiopian, on the east coast of Africa (Abyssinia), is first known to us from inscriptions beginning with the fourth cen- tury A.n.; the present-day languages of this group are Tigre, Tigrina, and Amharic.
THE LANGUAGES OF THE WORLD
The Egyptian, Berber, and Cushite branches of Semitic-Hamitic are usually included under the name of Hamitic languages.
Egyptian is recorded for us in hieroglyphic inscriptions from 4000 B.C.; the later form of the language, known as Coptic, appears in a manuscript literature of Christian times. Egyptian died out, superseded by Arabic, in the seventeenth century.
The Berber branch of Semitic-Hamitic, is known from ancient times through inscriptions in the Libyan language, from the fourth century b.c.; it is represented today by various languages, such as Tuareg and Kabyle, which have maintained themselves against Arabic in northern Africa and are said to total some 6 or 7 million speakers.
The fourth branch of Semitic-Hamitic is Cushite, south of Egypt; it includes a number of languages, among them Somali and Galla, the latter with some 8 million speakers.
4. 6. South of the Arab and Berber areas of northern Africa, a broad belt of many languages stretches across the continent from the Ethiopian and Cushite areas in the east to the Gulf of Guinea in the west. The languages of this vast belt, spoken by a popula- tion of presumably some 50 millions, are little known. Some scholars, upon very scant evidence, believe them all to be related; others connect some of these languages with Hamitic, or some with Bantu. Among the languages of this region that are more often named, we may mention Wolof and Ful in Senegal; Grebo, Ewe, and Yoruba along the Guinea coast; Haussa in the central region; and in the east, Nuba in a large territory round Khartoum, south of this, Dinka, and still further south, Masai,
South of this Guinean and Soudanese belt we come upon the vast Bantu family of languages, which before the European in- vasion covered all the rest of Africa except only a southwestern district. The languages of the Bantu family, totaling some 50 mil- lions of speakers, are very numerous; among the better known are Luganda, Swaheli, Kaffir, Zulu, Tebele, Subiya, Herero.
The portion of southwestern Africa that was not Bantu-speaking, belonged, before the coming of the European, to two unrelated hnguistic areas: the Bushman, with some 50,000 speakers, and the Hottentot, with some 250,000.
4. 7. Returning to the continent of Eurasia, we find, to the east of the Indo-European languages and in topographic alter- nation with them, the great Finno-Ugrian family. This family
68 THE LANGUAGES OF THE WORLD
consists of six major branches. The first is the Finnish-Lapponic. In the northerly parts of Norway, Sweden, and Finland, some 30,-. 000 people speak Lappish. The other languages of the Finnish- Lapponic branch form a closer group, the Finnish (or Baltic- Finnish). The largest language of this type is Finnish, recorded in a fragmentary way as early as the thirteenth century and in printed books since 1544; Finnish is native to some 3 million speakers. Esthonian, with earliest records of about the same dates, is spoken by about a million people. Both Finnish and Esthonian have standard languages which are official in the republics of Finland and Esthonia. The other languages of the Baltic branch, Carelian, Olonetsian, Ludian, Vepsian, Livonian, Ingrian, and Votian, are far smaller, and some of them are near extinction. Four further branches of the Finno-Ugrian stock lie in patches across the extent of European and Asiatic Russia; they are Mord- vine (a million speakers); Cheremiss (375,000); Permian, consist- ing of Votyak (420,000) and Zyrian (258,000), the latter with written records from the fourteenth century; Oh-Ugrian, consist- ing of Ostyak (18,000) and Vogule (5000). The sixth branch of Finno-Ugrian is Hungarian, brought by invaders at the end of the ninth century into central Europe. Aside from scattered words in Latin documents, the oldest written record of Hungarian dates from the thirteenth century. In a flourishing standard language and in a number of local dialects Hungarian is spoken by some 10 million persons.
To the east of the Ostyak area, along the Yenisei River, some 18,000 persons speak languages of the Samoyede family. These languages are dispersed over a wide area and show great local diversity. Some investigators believe that Samoyede and Finno- Ugrian are related.
4. 8. The Turkish {Turco-Tartar or Altaic) family of languages covers a vast main area, from Asia Minor, conquered, at the end of the Middle Ages, by the Ottoman Turks, all the way to the upper reaches of the Yenisei. These languages, with little dif- ferentiation, are spoken by some 39 millions of people; Turkish, Tartar, Kirgiz, Uzheg, Azerbaijani are the more familiar language- names. Our oldest texts are some Siberian inscriptions, dating from the eighth century a.d., a Turkish-Arabic vocabulary from the eleventh century, and a Latin-Persian-Turkish vocabulary from the fourteenth. Separated from the other languages of the
THE LANGUAGES OF THE WOULD
group, but not very different from them, is Yakut ^ spoken by over 200,000 people in northernmost Siberia. Some students believe that Turco-Tartar is related to the Mongol and Manchu families; others, on even slighter grounds, claim a relationship of all these with Finno-Ugrian and Samoyede (in what they call a Ural-Altaic family).
The Mongol languages He for the most part east of the Turco- Tartar, in Mongolia, but, in consequence of the former wander- ing and predatory habits of these tribes, scattered communities are found in various parts of Asia, and even in European Russia. The total number of speakers is estimated at 3 millions. The old- est known written record is an inscription from the time of Gengis Khan, in the thirteenth century.
The Tunguse-Manchu family lies to the north of the Mongol, dividing Yakut from the rest of the Turco-Tartar area. Tunguse is spoken by some 70,000 persons dwelling over a relatively large tract in Siberia. The number of actual speakers of Manchu is uncertain, since most of the so-called Manchus in China speak only Chinese; Deny estimates it at well under a million. As a literary and official language, Manchu has been printed since 1647 ; the manuscript tradition goes back to an even earlier date.
The great Indo-Chinese (or Sino-Tibetan) family consists of three branches. One of these is Chinese^ spoken by some 400 mil- lions of people; it forms really a vast dialect area containing many, in part mutually unintelligible, dialects or languages. These have been classified into four main groups: the Mandarin group {North Chinese, including the language of Peking; Middle Chinese, including Nanking; West Chinese, in Szechuen), the Central Coastal group {Shanghai, Ningpo, Hangkow), the Kiangsi group, and the South Chinese group {Foochow; Amoy-Swatow; Cantonese-Hakka), Our oldest texts are inscriptions, some of which may date as far back as 2000 b.c., but since Chinese writing uses a separate sym- bol for each word, with little indication of sounds, even an in- telligible document may tell us little or nothing of the language: our knowledge of Chinese speech, therefore, does not set in be- fore about 600 A.D. The second branch of Indo-Chinese is the Tai family, which includes Siamese, spoken by some 7 millions of people; the oldest record is an inscription from 1293 a.d. The third branch is Tibeto-Burman, consisting of four groups: in the Tibetan group, the language of the same name, with rec-
70 THE LANGUAGES OF THE WORLD
ords reaching back to the ninth century a.d., is the most impor- Lt; in the Burmese group, Burmese, with some 8 million speakers, holds a similar position; the other two groups, Bodo-Naga-Kachm
and Lo4o, consist of lesser dialects.
k Hyperborean family, in the extreme northeastern corner of Asia, insists of Chukchi, spoken by some 10,000 persons Eoryafc. with almost as many speakers, and Kamchadal, with
^Tlong the Yenisei River, Yenisd-Ostyok, with some 1000 speakers, and Cottian, probably by this time extinct, form an
Nfr^tionsSf has been found for several other languages of eastern Asia. Gilyak is spoken m the northern part of Sakhahn IslaMand round the mouth of the Amur River. is spoken
by some 20,000 persons in Japan. Japanese has 56 milhon speak- ers bitten records begin in the eighth century. Kcrrean has
Tm^r^utheastward from Europe, we find in the Cau- casus region a great variety of languages. Apart from Ossete, an Iranian langLge (§4.3), these are generaUy classed into two Mies, North Cauoadan and South Cav^as.an vnth between 1 and 2 million speakers in each. The best known of these languages, Georgian, belongs to the latter group; the written records begm
as early as the tenth century a.d.
In India, south of the Indo-Aryan languages, hes the great
Draddian famUy, including, beside many lesser ^
great speech-areas (and standard literary lan^ages of Tamd (18 milhons), Malayalam (6 miffions), Cawarese (10 inmions; oldest inscriptions from the fifth century a.d.), Telugu (24 mfihons). A single Dravidian language, Brahui (with 174,000 speakers) is snoken, far off from the rest, in the mountains of Baluchistan it^ seems to be a relic of a time when Dravidian occupied a muc wider territory, before the invasion of Indo-Aryan and Iraman
^^Th^languages of the Mwnda family are spoken by 3 millions of persons in two separate parts of India, namely, on the southern slope of the Himalayas and round the plateau of Chota Nagpur
famfiy lies in patches over southeastern Asia, including the Nicobar Islands and some districts m the Malay
THE LANGUAGES OF THE WORLD
VI
Peninsula. Our oldest records are inscriptions in Camhogian, dating from the seventh century a.d. This family includes at present one great cultural language, Annamite, spoken by 14 millions of people. Some scholars believe both the Munda and the Mon-Edimer families to be related to the Malayo-Polynesian family (forming the so-called Austric family of languages).
The Malayo-Polynesian (or Austronesian) family extends from the Malay Peninsula across the Pacific to Easter Island. It consists of four branches. The Malayan (or Indonesian) branch includes Malay , with some 3 million native speakers and wide use as a language of commerce and civilization; further, it embraces the languages of the great islands of the East, such as Formosan, Javanese (20 millions), Sundanese (6|- millions), Maduran (3 mil- lions), Balinese (1 million), and the many Philippine languages, among them Bisaya (2| millions) and Tagalog (1^ millions) ; a dis- tant offshoot is Malagasy, the language of Madagascar, spoken by some 3 million people. The second, Melanesian, branch of Malayo-Polynesian includes many languages of smaller island groups, such as the languages of the Solomon Islands and Fijian, The Micronesian branch contains the languages of a smaller tract, the Gilbert, Marshall, Caroline, and Marianne archipelagos and the Island of Yap, The fourth, Polynesian branch includes Maori, the native language of New Zealand, and the languages of the more easterly Pacific islands, such as Samoan, Tahitian, Hawaiian, and the language of Easter Island.
The other families of this part of the earth have been little studied; the Papuan family, on New Guinea and adjacent islands, and the Australian languages.
4. 10. There remains the American continent.
It is estimated that the territory north of Mexico was inhabited, before the coming of the white man, by nearly 1,500,000 Indians; in this same territory the number of speakers of American lan- guages today cannot be much over a quarter of a million, with English making ever more rapid encroachment. As the languages have been insufficiently studied, they can be but tentatively grouped into families: estimates vary between twenty-five and fifty entirely unrelated families of languages for the region north of Mexico. Most of this region is covered by great linguistic stocks, but some areas, notably the region round Puget Sound and the coastal district of California, were closely packed with
72 THE LANGUAGES OF THE WORLD
small unrelated speech-communities. At least half a dozen lin- guistic stocks are known to have died out. Of those that still exist, we may name a few of the largest. In the far north, the Eskimo family, ranging from Greenland over Baffinland and Alaska to the Aleutian Islands, forms a fairly close-knit dialect-group. The Algonquian family covers the northeastern part of the con- tinent and includes the languages of eastern and central Canada (Micmac, Montagnais, Cree), of New England (Penohscotj Massa- chusetts, Natick, Narraganset, Mohican, and so on, with Delaware to the south), and of the Great Lakes region {Ojibwa, Potawatomi, Menomini, Sauk, Fox, Kickapoo, Peoria, Illinois, Miami, and so on), as well as a few detached languages in the west: Blackfoot, Cheyenne, and Arapaho. The Athabascan family covers all but the coastal fringe of northwestern Canada {Chipewyan, Beaver, Dogrib, Sarsi, etc.), a number of isolated groups in California (such as Hupa and Matole), and a third, large area in the south, the Apache and Navajo languages. The Iroquoian family was spoken in a dis- trict surrounded by Algonquian; it includes, among others, the Huron (or Wyandot) language, and the languages of the Iroquois type {Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca, Tuscarora) ; in a detached region to the south Cherokee was spoken. The Musko- gean family includes, among other languages, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, and Seminole. The Siouan family includes many languages, such as Dakota, Teton, Oglala, Assiniboine, Kansa, Omaha, Osage, Iowa, Missouri, Winnebago, Mandan, Crow. A Uto-Aztecan family has been proposed, on the basis of a probable relationship, to include, as three branches, the Piman family (east of the Gulf of California), the Shoshonean family (in southern California and eastward, including Ute, Paiute, Shoshone, Comanche, and Hopi), and the great Nahuatlan family in Mexico, including Aztec, the language of an ancient civilization.
The number of speakers of American languages in the rest of America is uncertain: a recent estimate places the figure for Mexico alone at 4^ millions and for Peru and Brazil at over 3 millions each, with a total of over 6 millions for Mexico and Central America and of over 8^ millions for South America. The number of languages and their relationships are quite unknown; some twenty or so independent families have been set up for Mexico and Central America, and round eighty for South America. In the former region, beside Nahuatlan, we may mention the Mayan
THE LANGUAGES OF THE WORLD
76
family in Yucatan as the bearer of an ancient civilization. In South America, we note, in the northwest, the Arawak and Carih families, which once prevailed in the West Indies; the Tupi- Guarani, stretched along the coast of Brazil, the Araucanian in Chile, and Kechuan, the language of the Inca civilization. Both the Aztec and the Maya had developed systems of writing; as both the systems were largely hieroglyphic and have been only in part deciphered, these records do not give us information about the older forms of speech.
CHAPTEE 5
THE PHONEME
5. 1. In Chapter 2 we distinguished three successive events in an act of speech: A, the speaker’s situation; B, his utterance of speech-sound and its impingement on the hearer’s ear-drums; and C, the hearer’s response. Of these three types of events, A and C include all the situations that may prompt a person to speak and all the actions which a hearer may perform in response; in sum, A and C make up the world in which we live. On the other hand, B, the speech-sound, is merely a means which enables us to re- spond to situations that would otherwise leave us unaffected, or to respond more accurately to situations that otherwise might prompt less useful responses. In principle, the student of language is concerned only with the actual speech (B) ; the study of speakers’ situations and hearers’ responses (A and C) is equivalent to the sum total of human knowledge. If we had an accurate knowledge of every speaker’s situation and of every hearer’s response — and this would make us little short of omniscient — we could simply register these two facts as the meaning (A~C) of any given speech- utterance (B), and neatly separate our study from all other do- mains of knowledge. The fact that speech-utterances themselves often play a part in the situation of a speaker and in the response of a hearer, might complicate things, but this difficulty would not be serious. Linguistics, on this ideal plane, would consist of two main investigations: 'phonetics, in which we studied the speech- event without reference to its meaning, investigating only the sound-producing movements of the speaker, the sound-waves, and the action of the hearer’s ear-drum, and semantics, in which we studied the relation of these features to the features of meaning, showing tha.t a certain type of speech-sound was uttered in certain types of situations and led the hearer to perform certain types of response.
Actually, however, our knowledge of the world in which we live is so imperfect that we can rarely make accurate statements about the meaning of a speech-form. The situations (A) which lead to
74
THE PHONEME
75
an utterance; and the hearer’s responses (C), include many things that have not been mastered by science. Even if we knew much more than we do about the external world, we should still have to reckon with the predispositions of the speaker and the hearer. We cannot foretell whether, in a given situation, a person will speak, or if so, what words he will use, and we cannot foretell how he will respond to a given speech.
It is true that we are concerned not so much with each individual as with the whole community. We do not inquire into the minute nervous processes of a person who utters, say, the word apple, but content ourselves rather with determining that, by and large, for all the members of the community, the word apple means a certain kind of fruit. However, as soon as we try to deal accurately with this matter, we find that the agreement of the community is far from perfect, and that every person uses speech-forms in a unique way.
6. 2. The study of language can be conducted without special assumptions only so long as we pay no attention to the meaning of w’'hat is spoken. This phase of language study is known as phonetics (experimental phonetics, laboratory phonetics). The pho- netician can study either the sound-producing movements of the speaker {physiological phonetics) or the resulting sound-waves {physical or acoustic phonetics) ; we have as yet no means for study- ing the action of the hearer’s ear-drum.
Physiological phonetics begins with inspection. The laryngoscope, for instance, is a mirror-device which enables an observer to see another person’s (or his own) vocal chords. Like other devices of the sort, it interferes with normal speech and can serve only for very limited phases of observation. The x-ray does good service where its limitations can be overcome; tongue-positions can be photographed, for instance, if one lays a thin metal strip or chain along the upper surface of the tongue. Other devices give a trans- ferred record. For instance, a false palate covered with coloring- matter is put into the mouth; after the speaker utters a sound, the places where the tongue has touched the palate are recogniz- able by the removal of the coloring-matter. In most devices of this sort a bulb is attached to some part of the speaker’s vocal organs, say to the adam’s-apple; the mechanism transforms the movement into up-and-down movements of a pen-point which touches a strip of paper. The strip of paper is kept moving at an
76
THE PHONEME
even rate of speed, so that the up-and-down movement of the pen-point appears on the paper as a wavy line. This recording device is called a kymograph. In acoustic phonetics one secures imprints of the sound-waves. Records of this kind are familiar to us in the form of phonograph-disks; phoneticians have not yet succeeded in analyzing most features of such records.
A considerable part of our information about speech-sounds is due to the methods we have just outlined. However, laboratory phonetics does not enable us to connect speech-sounds with mean- ings; it studies speech-sounds only as muscular movements or as disturbances in the air, without regard to their use in communica- tion. On this plane we find that speech-sounds are infinitely complex and infinitely varied.
Even a short speech is continuous; it consists of an unbroken succession of movements and sound-waves. No matter into how many successive parts we break up our record for purposes of minute study, an even finer analysis is always conceivable. A speech-utterance is what mathematicians call a continuum; it can be viewed as consisting of any desired number of successive parts.
Speech-utterances are infinitely varied. Everyday experience tells us that different persons speak differently, for we can recog- nize people by their voices. The phonetician finds that no two utterances are exactly alike.
Evidently the working of language is due to a resemblance be- tween successive utterances. Utterances which in ordinary life we describe as consisting of “the same” speech-forms — say, successive utterances of the sentence Fm hungry — evidently contain some constant features of sound-wave, common to all utterances of this “same” speech-form. Only on this assumption can we account for our ordinary use of language. The phonetician, however, cannot make sure of these constant features, as long as he ignores the meaning of what is said. Suppose, for instance, that he had records of an utterance which we could identify as representing the syllable man, spoken on two different pitch- schemes. If the language of these utterances were English, we should say that both contained the same speech-form, namely, the word man, but if the language were Chinese, the two records might represent two different speech-forms, since in Chinese dif- ferences of pitch-scheme are connected with different meanings:
THE PHONEME
77
the word man with a high rising pitch, for instance means deceive, ^ and the word man with a falling pitch means ^slow/ As long as we pay no attention to meanings, we cannot decide w'hether two uttered forms are ‘'the same” or “different.” The phonetician cannot tell us which features are significant for communication and which features are immaterial. A feature which is significant in some languages or dialects, may be indifferent in others.
5. 3. The fact that two utterances of the syllable man with different pitch-schemes are “the same” speech-form in English, but “different” speech-forms in Chinese, shows us that the work- ing of language depends upon our habitually and conventionally discriminating some features of sound and ignoring all others. The features of sound in any utterance, as they might be recorded in the laboratory, are the gross acoustic features of this utterance. Part of the gross acoustic features are indifferent {non-distinctive) , and only a part are connected with meanings and essential to communication {distinctive). The difference between distinctive and non-distinctive features of sound lies entirely in the habit of the speakers. A feature that is distinctive in one language, may be non-distinctive in another language.
Since we can recognize the distinctive features of an utterance only when we know the meaning, we cannot identify them on the plane of pure phonetics. We know that the difference between the English forms man and men is distinctive, because we know from ordinary life that these two forms are used under different circumstances. It is possible that some science other than lin- guistics may define this difference in accurate terms, providing even for the case where we use man for more than one individual {man wants hut little here below). In any case, however, this dif- ference cannot be recognized by purely phonetic observation: the difference between the vowel sounds of man and men is in some languages non-distinctive.
To recognize the distinctive features of a language, we must leave the ground of pure phonetics and act as though science had progressed far enough to identify all the situations and responses that make up the meaning of speech-forms. In the case of our own language, we trust to our everyday knowledge to tell us whether speech-forms are “the same” or “different.” Thus, we find that the word man spoken on various pitch-schemes is in Enelish still “the same” word, with one and the same meaningj
78
THE PHONEME
but that man and men (or pan and pen) are different'^ words^ with different meanings. In the case of a strange language we have to learn such things by trial and error, or to obtain the mean- ings from someone that knows the language.
The study of significant speech-sounds is phonology or practical phonetics. Phonology involves the consideration of meanings. The meanings of speech-forms could be scientifically defined only if all branches of science, including, especially, psychology and physiology, were close to perfection. Until that time, phonology and, with it, all the semantic phase of language study, rests upon an assumption, the fundamental assumption of linguistics: we must assume that in every speech-community some utterances are alike in form and meaning.
5. 4. A moderate amount of experimenting will show that the significant features of a speech-form are limited in number. In this respect, the significant features contrast with the gross acoustic features, which, as we have seen, form a continuous whole and can be subdivided into any desired number of parts. In order to recognize the distinctive features of forms in our own language, we need only determine which features of sound are ^ different” for purposes of communication. Suppose, for instance, that we start with the word pin: a few experiments in saying words out loud soon reveal the following resemblances and differences:
(1) pin ends with the same sound as fin^ sin, tin^ but begins differently; this kind of resemblance is familiar to us because of our tradition of using end-rime in verse;
(2) pin contains the sound of in, but adds something at the beginning;
(3) pin ends with the same sound as man, sun, hen, but the resemblance is smaller than in (1) and (2) ;
(4) pin begins with the same sound as pig, pill, pit, but ends differently;
(5) pin begins with the same sound as pat, push, peg, but the resemblance is smaller than in (4);
(6) pin begins and ends like pen, pan, pun, but the middle part is different;
(7) pin begins and ends differently from dig, fish, mill, but the middle part is the same.
In this way, we can find forms which partially resemble pin, by altering any one of three parts of the word. We can alter first
THE PHONEME
79
one and then a second of the three parts and still have a partial resemblance : if we alter the first part and then the second, we get a series like pin4in4an; if we alter the first part and then the third, we get a series like pm4in4ick; if we alter the second part and then the third, we get a series like pin-pan-pack: and if we alter all three parts, no resemblance is left, as in pin-tin-tan-tack.
Further experiment fails to reveal any more replaceable parts in the word pin: we conclude that the distinctive features of this word are three indivisible units. Each of these units occurs also in other combinations, but cannot be further analyzed by partial resemblances: each of the three is a minimum unit of distinctive sound-feature, a phoneme. Thus we say that the word pin consists of three phonemes: the first of these occurs also in pet, pack, push, and many other words; the second also vafig, hit, miss, and many other words; the third also in tan, run, hen, and many other words. In the case of pin our alphabetic writing represents the three phonemes by three letters, p, i, and n, but our conventions of writing are a poor guide; in the word thick, for instance, our writ- ing represents the first phoneme by the two-letter group th and the third by the two-letter group ck.
A little practice will enable the observer to recognize a phoneme even when it appears in different parts of words, as pin, apple, mop. Sometimes our stock of words does not readily bring out the resemblances and differences. For instance, the word then evi- dently consists of three phonemes, but (especially under the in- fluence of our way of writing) we might question whether the initial phoneme was or was not the same as in thick; once we hit upon the pair thigh and thy, or upon mouth and mouthe, we see that they are different.
6. 5. Among the gross acoustic features of any utterance, then, certain ones are distinctive, recurring in recognizable and rela- tively constant shape in successive utterances. These distinctive features occur in lumps or bundles, each one of which we call a phoneme. The speaker has been trained to make sound-producing movements in such a way that the phoneme-features will be present in the sound-waves, and he has been trained to respond only to these features and to ignore the rest of the gross acoustic mass that reaches his ears.
It would be useless to try to produce the distinctive features in a pure state, free from non-distinctive accompaniments. For ex-
80
THE PHONEME
ample, an English word, as such, has no distinctive pitch-scheme — the features of pitch which appear in any utterance of it are non-distinctive — but of course we cannot speak a word like man without any features of pitch: in any one utterance of it there will be some pitch-scheme — even, rising, falling, high, middle, low, and so on. The phonemes of a language are not sounds, but merely features of sound which the speakers have been trained to produce and recognize in the current of actual speech-sound — just as motorists are trained to stop before a red signal, be it an electric signal-light, a lamp, a flag, or what not, although there is no disembodied redness apart from these actual signals.
In fact, when we observe closely, especially in a language foreign to us, we often notice the wide range of non-distinctive features and the relatively slight consistency of the distinctive features. The Menomini Indian, in a word like that for ^ water,' which I shall here render as nipew, seems to us to be speaking the middle consonant sometimes as a p and sometimes as a 6. For his language, the phonemic (that is, essential) feature is merely a closure of the lips without escape of breath through the nose. Everything else, including the features by which English distinguishes between p and 6, is non-distinctive. On the other hand, a slight puff of breath before the consonant, or else a slight catch in the throat — either of which will probably escape the ear of an English hearer — would produce in the Menomini language two entirely different phonemes, each of which contrasts with the plain p-h phoneme.
In the same way, a Chinese observer who bad not been fore- warned, would probably have some trouble before he realized that English words have the same meaning (are 'Hhe same”) regardless of their pitch-scheme.
In part, the non-distinctive features receive a fairly conventional treatment. When a foreign speaker reproduces the phonemic values of our language so as to make himself understood, but does not distribute the non-distinctive features in accordance with our habit, we say that he speaks our language well enough, but with a foreign ^^accent." In English, for instance, we produce the initial phonemes of words like pm, tiUj kick with a slight puff of breath (aspiration) after the opening of the closure, but when an s pre- cedes, as in spm, sticky skin, we usually leave off this puff of breath. As this difference is not distinctive, a foreign speaker who fails to reproduce it, is still intelligible, but his speech will seem queer to
THE PHONEME
81
us. Frenchmen are likely to fail in this matter, because in French the phonemes which resemble our p, k are spoken always without aspiration. On the other hand, an Englishman or American w^ho speaks French well enough to be understood, is likely still to dis- please his hearers by using the aspiration after p, t, k,
Non-distinctive features occur in ah manner of distributions. In most types of American English, the if-phoneme in words like water or butter is often reduced to an instantaneous touch of the tongue-tip against the ridge behind the upper gums: in our habit, the sound so produced sufl&ces to represent the phoneme. In England this variant is unknown, and is likely to be interpreted as a variant of the phoneme d, — so that the American may find that he is not understood when he asks for water.
In the ordinary case, there is a hmit to the variability of the non- distinctive features: the phoneme is kept distinct from all other phonemes of its language. Thus, we speak the vowel of a word like 'pen in a great many ways, but not in any way that belongs to the vowel of pin, and not in any way that belongs to the vowel of pan: the three types are kept rigidly apart.
5. 6. The fact that distinctions which are phonemic in one language or dialect are indifferent in others, and the fact that the borders between different phonemes differ in different languages and dialects, appears most clearly when we hear or try to speak a foreign language or dialect. We have just seen an instance of how American English may be misunderstood in England. The vowel of words like /o6, bomb, hot is in American English much closer than in British English to the vowel of words like /ar, balniy pa; in some kinds of American English the two sets of words have in fact the same vowel. The Englishman of the south, moreover, has lost the r-sound in words like Jar. A London cabman did not understand me when I asked to be driven to the Comedy Theatre: 1 had forgotten myself and spoken the American form of the first vowel in comedy ^ and this the Englishman could take only as a representative of the vowel phoneme in a word like car — so that I was really asking for a Carmody Theatre, which does not exist.
When we try to speak a foreign language or dialect, we are likely to replace its phonemes by the most similar phonemes of our own language or dialect. Sometimes our native phoneme and the foreign one overlap, so that part of the time our reproduction is correct, but part of the time it falls outside the range of the foreign sound.
82
THE PHONEME
Thus, an American who pronounces the French word meme (^same’) with the vowel of the English word ma^m, will only part of the time produce a sound which meets the conventional require- ments of the French phoneme; most of the time he will be produc- ing a sound which differs decidedly from the vowel which the Frenchman is accustomed to hear.
What saves the situation in such cases is the native^s complemen- tary inaccuracy. When we hear foreign speech-sounds we respond to them as if they contained the characteristics of some acoustically similar phoneme of our native language. The discrepancy disturbs us, and we say that the foreigner speaks indistinctly or with a strange '^accent,” but we do not know where the difference lies. In our example, accordingly, the Frenchman will mostly under- stand the American’s pronunciation of m^me, even when it con- tains a vowel sound that would never occur in the Frenchman’s own pronunciation. However, if our rendition deviates too far from the foreign phoneme, and especially if it comes close to some other phoneme of the foreign language, we shall be misunderstood; thus, some varieties of the American’s ma’m which he uses for French meme, will be unintelligible because the Frenchman accepts them as renditions of a different phoneme which occurs, for in- stance, in words like lame blade’).
The confusion is more serious when two or three of the foreign phonemes resemble some one native phoneme of ours. Our infantile language-learning trains us to ignore differences that are not phonemic in our language. The English-speaker will not hear any difference between the Menomini forms a’ kah ^yes, indeed,’ and ahkdh ^kettle,’ and the first part of the word akdhsemen ^plum.’ In the first of these forms, the phoneme which resembles our k is preceded by a slight catch in the throat (a glottal stop) which I have designated here by an apostrophe; in the second, the k is preceded by a puff of breath (aspiration), which I have desig- nated by h; in the third form these features are absent. The English-speaker was trained in childhood not to respond to a catch in the throat or a slight huskiness before a consonant sound: if a fellow-speaker occasionally produces such a noise, we pay no attention to it.
The Menomini, for his part, cannot distinguish differences like that of our t and d. Words like had and hat sound alike to him. This appears, for instance, in the fact that the Menomini have
THE PHONEME
5^
translated the word Swede into their language as if it were sweet, by the term sayewenet ^one who is sweet/ There is a Menomini phoneme which resembles both our t and d, and doubtless the Menomini speaker often utters variants of this phoneme which fall within the range of our ^phoneme, and occasionally variants which fall within the range of our d-phoneme, but his infantile training taught him to ignore these differences of sound.
When we try to speak a foreign language, we reproduce, in such cases, several foreign phonemes by one single phoneme of our own. The native speaker, in turn, responds to our phoneme as if it were one of his. Thus, the German hears no difference between the initial phoneme of tin and that of thin, since both of them resemble one of his native phonemes. When he speaks English, he uses this German phoneme. Hearing him, we respond to it as though it were our ^-phoneme; we are right, at any rate, in con- cluding that he does not distinguish between tin and thin. In quite the same way, when the English-speaker hears German, he will respond to two different phonemes of that language as though they were identical with the English phoneme that is initial in words like cat, and he will fail, in consequence, to distinguish be- tween some words that are quite different in the habits of the German.
In other cases, the one phoneme which we substitute for sev- eral phonemes of the foreign language, is acoustically intermediate, and to the native speaker we seem to be interchanging the sounds. For instance, many Germans (such as Alsatians) have only one phoneme, of intermediate acoustic quality, in the sphere of our p and h, and in speaking our language they use this for both of our phonemes. When they do this in a word like pie, we are struck by the deviation in the direction of h and respond as though to the word huy; on the other hand, when they use their intermediate phoneme in a word like huy, we are struck by the deviation in the direction of p, and respond as though we had heard pie. Hence it seems to us (or to a Frenchman) that the German can pronounce both p and b, but perversely keeps interchanging the two.
The greatest dij0S.culty arises where a language makes signifi- cant use of features that play no such part in our language. An English-speaker who hears Chinese (or any of quite a few other languages), will fail to understand or to speak intelligibly, until he discovers and trains himself to hear and to reproduce the dis-
84
THE PHONEME
tinctions of relative pitch which are significant in every syllable. He does not respond to them at first, because as an infant he was trained not to notice the different pitch-schemes which occur in successive utterances of a word like man; the Chinese infant, on the other hand, was trained to respond to several types of such pitch-schemes.
When the foreign language has only one phoneme in a general acoustic type where our language has more than one, it often seems to us as if the foreigner were using very different sounds without a reasonable distinction. Thus, the Menomini's or the Alsatian’s one p-o phoneme will strike our ears now as p and now as h.
Some persons have an aptitude for hearing and reproducing foreign speech-sounds ; we say that such persons are good imitators or have a ^^good ear.’’ Most other people, if they hear enough of a foreign language, or if they are carefully instructed, will in time learn to understand and make themselves understood. Practical phoneticians sometimes acquire great virtuosity in discriminating and reproducing all manner of strange sounds. In this, to be sure, there lies some danger for linguistic work. Having learned to discriminate many kinds of sounds, the phonetician may turn to some language, new or familiar, and insist upon recording all the distinctions he has learned to discriminate, even when in this language they are non-distinctive and have no bearing whatever. Thus, having learned, say in the study of Chinese, to hear the difference between an aspirated p, <5, k, (as we usually have it in words like pin, tin, kick) and a similar sound without aspiration (as a Frenchman forms it, and as we usually have it in words like spin, stick, skin), the phonetician may clutter up his record of English by marking the aspiration wherever he hears it, while in reality its presence or absence has nothing to do with the mean- ing of what is said. The chief objection to this procedure is its inconsistency. The phonetician’s equipment is personal and ac- cidental; he hears those acoustic features which are discriminated in the languages he has observed. Even his most exact” record is bound to ignore innumerable non-distinctive features of sound; the ones that appear in it are selected by accidental and personal factors. There is no objection to a linguist’s describing all the acoustic features that he can hear, provided he does not confuse these with the phonemic features. He should remember that his
hearing of non-distinctive features depends upon the accident of his personal equipment, and that his most elaborate account can- not remotely approach the value of a mechanical record.
Only two kinds of linguistic records are scientifically relevant. One is a mechanical record of the gross acoustic features, such as is produced in the phonetics laboratory. The other is a record in terms of phonemes, ignoring all features that are not distinctive in the language. Until our knowledge of acoustics has progressed far beyond its present state, only the latter kind of record can be used for any study that takes into consideration the meaning of what is spoken.
In fact, the laboratory phonetician usually knows, from other sources, the phonemic character of the speech-sounds he is study- ing; he usually formulates his problems not in purely acoustic terms, but rather in terms which he has borrowed from practical phonetics.
6. 7. In order to make a record of our observations, we need a system of written symbols which provides one sign for each phoneme of the language we are recording. Such a set of symbols is a phonetic alphabet, and a record of speech in the shape of these symbols is a phonetic transcription (or, simply, a transcription).
The principle of a symbol for each phoneme is approached by our traditional alphabetic writing, but our traditional writing does not carry it out sufficiently for the purposes of linguistic study. We write sun and son differently, although the phonemes are the same, but lead (noun) and lead (verb) alike, though the phonemes are different. The words oh, owe, so, sew, sow, hoe, beau, though all end with the same phoneme, variously represented in writing; the words though, bough, through, cough, tough, hiccough end with dif- ferent phonemes but are all written with the letters -ough. Our letter x is superfluous because it represents the same phonemes as ks (as in tax) or gz (as in examine) ; our letter c is superfluous because it represents the same phoneme as k (in cat) or as s (in cent). Although we have the letter j for the initial phoneme in jam, we also use the letter g (as in gem) for this same phoneme. Standard English, as spoken in Chicago, has thirty-two simple primary phonemes: the twenty-six letters of our alphabet are too few for a phonetic record. For some phonemes we use combina- tions of two letters (digraphs), as th for the initial phoneme in thin, ch for that in chin, sh for that in shin, and ng for the final
86
THE PHONEME
phoneme in sing. This leads to further inconsistencies: in then we use th for a different phoneme, and in hothouse for the two phonemes which are normally represented by the separate let- ters t and h; in Thomas the th has the value of the phoneme or- dinarily represented by t. In singer we use ng for a single phoneme, as in sing, but in finger the letters ng represent this phoneme plus the phoneme ordinarily represented by the letter g, as in go. Traditional alphabetic writing is accurate only in the case of a few languages, such as Spanish, Bohemian, Polish, and Finnish, where it has been shaped or revised by persons who had worked out the phonemic system of their language.
6. 8. On account of the imperfections of traditional writing and the lack of a sufficient number of characters in our (so-called
Latin”) alphabet, scholars have devised many phonetic al- phabets.
Some of these schemes depart entirely from our traditional habits of writing. BelFs ‘^Visible Speech” is the best-known of these, chiefly because Henry Sweet (1845-1912) used it. The sym- bols of this alphabet are simplified and conventionalized diagrams of the vocal organs in position for the utterance of the various phonemes. Visible Speech is hard to write and very costly to print.
Another system which departs from the historical tradition fe Jespersen^s ‘^Analphabetic Notation.” Here every phoneme is represented by a whole set of symbols which consist of Greek letters and Arabic numerals, with Latin letters as exponents. Each Greek letter indicates an organ and each numeral a degree of opening; thus, a indicates the lips and 0 indicates closure, so that aO will appear in the formula for any phoneme during whose utterance the lips are closed, such as our p, ??, and m phonemes. The formula for the English m phoneme, as in man, is aO 52 el, where 52 means that the back of the palate is lowered, and el means that the vocal chords are in vibration. The advan- tages of this notation are evident, but of course it is not intended for the recording of whole utterances.
Most phonetic alphabets are modifications of the traditional alphabet. They supplement the ordinary letters by such devices as small capitals, letters of the Greek alphabet, distorted forms of conventional letters, a.nd letters with little marks, diacritical signs, attached to them (e.g. a and a). There are many alphabets of this
THE PHONEME
87
type, such as that of Lepsius, used for African languages; of Lundell, used for Swedish dialects; of Bremer, used for German dialects; of the American Anthropological Association, used for American Indian languages. In this book we shall use the alphabet of the International Phonetic Association; this alphabet was de- veloped by Ellis, Sweet, Passy, and Daniel Jones. A crude form of phonetic alphabet appears in the “keys to pronunciation’’ of most dictionaries. Similar devices have grown up in the tradi- tional writing of some languages, devices such as the two dots over vowel letters in German writing (a, o, u) or the diacritical marks in Bohemian writing (c for our cA, s for our 8h) ; the Russian and Serbian alphabets supplement the Greek alphabet v/ith a number of extra letters.
In principle, one phonetic alphabet is about as good as another, since all we need is a few dozen symbols, enough to supply one for each phoneme of whatever language we are recording. In their application, however, all phonetic alphabets suffer from serious drawbacks. When they were invented, the principle of the phoneme had not been clearly recognized. The inventors meant their alpha- bets to be rich and flexible enough to offer a symbol for every acoustic variety that could be heard in any language. It is evident, today, that a record of this kind would amount to nothing less than a mechanical recording of the sound-waves, which would be the same for no two utterances. In practice, the phonemic principle somehow slipped in: usually one wrote a symbol for each phoneme, but these symbols were highly differentiated and cluttered up with diacritical marks, for the purpose of indicating “exact” acoustic values. The varieties that were in this way distinguished, were merely those which phoneticians happened to have noticed. Henry Sweet devised a relatively simple system, based on the Latin alphabet, which he called Romic, for use alongside of Visible Speech. When the phonemic principle became clear to him, he realized that his Romic notation would still be sufficient if one greatly simplified it. Accordingly he used a simplified form, with a symbol for each phoneme, and called it Broad Romic; he still believed, however, that the more complex form. Narrow Romic, was somehow “more accurate” and better suited to scientific purposes.
Out of Sweet’s Romic there has grown the alphabet of the In- ternational Phonetic Association, which consists, accordingly, of
88
THE PHONEME
the Latin sy mbols, supplemented by a number of artificial letters, and a few diacritical marks. In a modified form, we shall use it in this book, placing between square brackets, as is customary, every- thing that is piinted in phonetic symbols.
5. 9. The principle on which the International Alphabet is based, is to emifioy ordinary letters in values approximating the values they have in some of the chief European languages, and to supplement these letters by artificial signs or by the use of dia- critical marks whenever the number of phonemes of a type ex- ceeds the number of ordinary letters. Thus, if a language has one phoneme of the general type of our ^-sound, we symbolize this phoneme by the ordinary letter [t], regardless of whether this phoneme is acoustically quite like the English or the French t- sound, but if the language has two phonemes of this general type, we can symbolize only one of them by [v], and for the second one we must resort to the use of a capital [t], or an italic [if], or some other similar device. If a language has two phonemes of the general type of our e-sound as in pen, we use the letter [e] for one of them, and the supplementary symbol [e] for the other, as in pan [pen].
Th'ese principles, which the International Phonetic Association formulated as early as 1912, have been neglected even by its members; most students have failed to break away from the tradi- tion of the time when the phonemic principle had not yet been recognized, ihus, we find most writers using queer symbols for English phonemes because it has been recognized that English phonemes differ from the most similar types of French phonemes. For instance, having pre-empted the symbol [o] for the phoneme of French eau [o] water 0, these authors do not use this letter for recording the English vowel in son, because this English phoneme is unlike the French phoneme. In this and some other respects, I shall depart in this book from the usage (but not from the prin- ciples) of the International Phonetic Association.
Where several languages or dialects are under discussion, each one must be recorded in terms of its own phonemes; the differ- ences, so far as we are able to state them, may deserve a verbal description, but must not be allowed to interfere with our symbols. Thus, even a phonetician who thinks he can describe in accurate terms the differences between the phonemes of standard English as spoken in Chicago and as spoken in London, will add nothing to the value of his statements by using queer symbols for one or the
:e phoneme
89
other of these two sets of phonemes, and he will only make things still harder if he uses outlandish symbols for both of them, because he happens to know that the ordinary letters have been used for recording the somewhat different phonemes of some other language.
The principle of a single s3anbol for a single phoneme may be modified without harm only where no ambiguity can result. It may be advisable, where no ambiguity can result, to depart from the strict principle when this saves the use of extra symbols that might be disturbing to the reader or costly to print. In some lan- guages, sounds like our [p, t, k] with a slight puff of breath after them, are distinct from sounds like the French [p, t, k] without this aspiration; if the language has no phoneme designated by [h], or if it has such a phoneme but this phoneme never occurs after [p, t, k], then it is safe and economical to use the compound symbols [ph, th, kh] for the former type.
5. 10. The matter of recording languages is complicated not only by the existence of several phonetic alphabets and by in- consistencies in their application, but also by the frequent use of two other devices alongside phonetic transcription.
One of these devices is the citation of forms in their traditional orthography. This is often done where the language in question uses the Latin alphabet. The author either supposes that his reader knows the pronunciation, or else, in the case of ancient languages, he may not care to guess at the pronunciation. Citation is often helpful to readers who are familiar with the ordinary orthography; it is only fair, however, to add a transcription, e.g. French eau [o] ^ water.' Even in the case of ancient languages it is often useful to add a guess at the pronunciation, e.g. Old English geoc [jok] ^yoke.' Only in the case of languages like Bohemian or Finnish, whose traditional orthography is entirely phonetic, can one dispense with a transcription. In the case of Latin, a citation with a macron over long vowels is sufficient (e.g. amdre Ho love'), since, so far as we know, Latin orthography was phonetic except that it failed to indicate the distinction between long and short vowels.
For languages which use alphabets other than the Latin, citation is less often employed. It is customary in the case of Greek, less often of Russian, but is in every way to be deplored. Some luxurious publications indulge even in Hebrew, Arabic, and Sanskrit type for citing these languages. The only reasonable exceptions here are
90
THE PHONEME
forms of writing like the Chinese and the ancient Egyptian, whose symbols, as we shall see, have meaning-values that cannot be represented in phonetic terms.
For languages which use writing of some form other than the Latin alphabet, transliteration is often employed instead of tran- scription. Transliteration consists in assigning some letter of the Latin alphabet (or some group of letters or some artificial symbol) to each character of the original alphabet, and thus reproducing the traditional orthography in terms of Latin letters. Unfortu- nately, different traditions have grown up for transliterating differ- ent languages. Thus, in transliterating Sanskrit, the Latin letter c is used to represent a Sanskrit letter which seems to have des- ignated a phoneme much like our initial phoneme in words like c/im, but in transliterating the Slavic alphabet, the letter c is