Speech is so familiar a feature of daily life that we rarely pause to
define it. It seems as natural to man as walking, and only less so than
breathing. Yet it needs but a moment's reflection to convince us that
this naturalness of speech is but an illusory feeling. The process of
acquiring speech is, in sober fact, an utterly different sort of thing
from the process of learning to walk. In the case of the latter
function, culture, in other words, the traditional body of social usage,
is not seriously brought into play. The child is individually equipped,
by the complex set of factors that we term biological heredity, to make
all the needed muscular and nervous adjustments that result in walking.
Indeed, the very conformation of these muscles and of the appropriate
parts of the nervous system may be said to be primarily adapted to the
movements made in walking and in similar activities. In a very real
sense the normal human being is predestined to walk, not because his
elders will assist him to learn the art, but because his organism is
prepared from birth, or even from the moment of conception, to take on
all those expenditures of nervous energy and all those muscular
adaptations that result in walking. To put it concisely, walking is an
inherent, biological function of man.
Not so language. It is of course true that in a certain sense the
individual is predestined to talk, but that is due entirely to the
circumstance that he is born not merely in nature, but in the lap of a
society that is certain, reasonably certain, to lead him to its
traditions. Eliminate society and there is every reason to believe that
he will learn to walk, if, indeed, he survives at all. But it is just as
certain that he will never learn to talk, that is, to communicate ideas
according to the traditional system of a particular society. Or, again,
remove the new-born individual from the social environment into which he
has come and transplant him to an utterly alien one. He will develop the
art of walking in his new environment very much as he would have
developed it in the old. But his speech will be completely at variance
with the speech of his native environment. Walking, then, is a general
human activity that varies only within circumscribed limits as we pass
from individual to individual. Its variability is involuntary and
purposeless. Speech is a human activity that varies without assignable
limit as we pass from social group to social group, because it is a
purely historical heritage of the group, the product of long-continued
social usage. It varies as all creative effort varies--not as
consciously, perhaps, but none the less as truly as do the religions,
the beliefs, the customs, and the arts of different peoples. Walking is
an organic, an instinctive, function (not, of course, itself an
instinct); speech is a non-instinctive, acquired, "cultural" function.
There is one fact that has frequently tended to prevent the recognition
of language as a merely conventional system of sound symbols, that has
seduced the popular mind into attributing to it an instinctive basis
that it does not really possess. This is the well-known observation that
under the stress of emotion, say of a sudden twinge of pain or of
unbridled joy, we do involuntarily give utterance to sounds that the
hearer interprets as indicative of the emotion itself. But there is all
the difference in the world between such involuntary expression of
feeling and the normal type of communication of ideas that is speech.
The former kind of utterance is indeed instinctive, but it is
non-symbolic; in other words, the sound of pain or the sound of joy does
not, as such, indicate the emotion, it does not stand aloof, as it were,
and announce that such and such an emotion is being felt. What it does
is to serve as a more or less automatic overflow of the emotional
energy; in a sense, it is part and parcel of the emotion itself.
Moreover, such instinctive cries hardly constitute communication in any
strict sense. They are not addressed to any one, they are merely
overheard, if heard at all, as the bark of a dog, the sound of
approaching footsteps, or the rustling of the wind is heard. If they
convey certain ideas to the hearer, it is only in the very general sense
in which any and every sound or even any phenomenon in our environment
may be said to convey an idea to the perceiving mind. If the involuntary
cry of pain which is conventionally represented by "Oh!" be looked upon
as a true speech symbol equivalent to some such idea as "I am in great
pain," it is just as allowable to interpret the appearance of clouds as
an equivalent symbol that carries the definite message "It is likely to
rain." A definition of language, however, that is so extended as to
cover every type of inference becomes utterly meaningless.
The mistake must not be made of identifying our conventional
interjections (our oh! and ah! and sh!) with the instinctive cries
themselves. These interjections are merely conventional fixations of the
natural sounds. They therefore differ widely in various languages in
accordance with the specific phonetic genius of each of these. As such
they may be considered an integral portion of speech, in the properly
cultural sense of the term, being no more identical with the instinctive
cries themselves than such words as "cuckoo" and "kill-deer" are
identical with the cries of the birds they denote or than Rossini's
treatment of a storm in the overture to "William Tell" is in fact a
storm. In other words, the interjections and sound-imitative words of
normal speech are related to their natural prototypes as is art, a
purely social or cultural thing, to nature. It may be objected that,
though the interjections differ somewhat as we pass from language to
language, they do nevertheless offer striking family resemblances and
may therefore be looked upon as having grown up out of a common
instinctive base. But their case is nowise different from that, say, of
the varying national modes of pictorial representation. A Japanese
picture of a hill both differs from and resembles a typical modern
European painting of the same kind of hill. Both are suggested by and
both "imitate" the same natural feature. Neither the one nor the other
is the same thing as, or, in any intelligible sense, a direct outgrowth
of, this natural feature. The two modes of representation are not
identical because they proceed from differing historical traditions, are
executed with differing pictorial techniques. The interjections of
Japanese and English are, just so, suggested by a common natural
prototype, the instinctive cries, and are thus unavoidably suggestive of
each other. They differ, now greatly, now but little, because they are
builded out of historically diverse materials or techniques, the
respective linguistic traditions, phonetic systems, speech habits of the
two peoples. Yet the instinctive cries as such are practically identical
for all humanity, just as the human skeleton or nervous system is to all
intents and purposes a "fixed," that is, an only slightly and
"accidentally" variable, feature of man's organism.
Interjections are among the least important of speech elements. Their
discussion is valuable mainly because it can be shown that even they,
avowedly the nearest of all language sounds to instinctive utterance,
are only superficially of an instinctive nature. Were it therefore
possible to demonstrate that the whole of language is traceable, in its
ultimate historical and psychological foundations, to the interjections,
it would still not follow that language is an instinctive activity. But,
as a matter of fact, all attempts so to explain the origin of speech
have been fruitless. There is no tangible evidence, historical or
otherwise, tending to show that the mass of speech elements and speech
processes has evolved out of the interjections. These are a very small
and functionally insignificant proportion of the vocabulary of language;
at no time and in no linguistic province that we have record of do we
see a noticeable tendency towards their elaboration into the primary
warp and woof of language. They are never more, at best, than a
decorative edging to the ample, complex fabric.
What applies to the interjections applies with even greater force to the
sound-imitative words. Such words as "whippoorwill," "to mew," "to caw"
are in no sense natural sounds that man has instinctively or
automatically reproduced. They are just as truly creations of the human
mind, flights of the human fancy, as anything else in language. They do
not directly grow out of nature, they are suggested by it and play with
it. Hence the onomatopoetic theory of the origin of speech, the theory
that would explain all speech as a gradual evolution from sounds of an
imitative character, really brings us no nearer to the instinctive level
than is language as we know it to-day. As to the theory itself, it is
scarcely more credible than its interjectional counterpart. It is true
that a number of words which we do not now feel to have a
sound-imitative value can be shown to have once had a phonetic form that
strongly suggests their origin as imitations of natural sounds. Such is
the English word "to laugh." For all that, it is quite impossible to
show, nor does it seem intrinsically reasonable to suppose, that more
than a negligible proportion of the elements of speech or anything at
all of its formal apparatus is derivable from an onomatopoetic source.
However much we may be disposed on general principles to assign a
fundamental importance in the languages of primitive peoples to the
imitation of natural sounds, the actual fact of the matter is that these
languages show no particular preference for imitative words. Among the
most primitive peoples of aboriginal America, the Athabaskan tribes of
the Mackenzie River speak languages in which such words seem to be
nearly or entirely absent, while they are used freely enough in
languages as sophisticated as English and German. Such an instance shows
how little the essential nature of speech is concerned with the mere
imitation of things.
The way is now cleared for a serviceable definition of language.
Language is a purely human and non-instinctive method of communicating
ideas, emotions, and desires by means of a system of voluntarily
produced symbols. These symbols are, in the first instance, auditory and
they are produced by the so-called "organs of speech." There is no
discernible instinctive basis in human speech as such, however much
instinctive expressions and the natural environment may serve as a
stimulus for the development of certain elements of speech, however much
instinctive tendencies, motor and other, may give a predetermined range
or mold to linguistic expression. Such human or animal communication, if
"communication" it may be called, as is brought about by involuntary,
instinctive cries is not, in our sense, language at all.
I have just referred to the "organs of speech," and it would seem at
first blush that this is tantamount to an admission that speech itself
is an instinctive, biologically predetermined activity. We must not be
misled by the mere term. There are, properly speaking, no organs of
speech; there are only organs that are incidentally useful in the
production of speech sounds. The lungs, the larynx, the palate, the
nose, the tongue, the teeth, and the lips, are all so utilized, but they
are no more to be thought of as primary organs of speech than are the
fingers to be considered as essentially organs of piano-playing or the
knees as organs of prayer. Speech is not a simple activity that is
carried on by one or more organs biologically adapted to the purpose. It
is an extremely complex and ever-shifting network of adjustments--in the
brain, in the nervous system, and in the articulating and auditory
organs--tending towards the desired end of communication. The lungs
developed, roughly speaking, in connection with the necessary
biological function known as breathing; the nose, as an organ of smell;
the teeth, as organs useful in breaking up food before it was ready for
digestion. If, then, these and other organs are being constantly
utilized in speech, it is only because any organ, once existent and in
so far as it is subject to voluntary control, can be utilized by man for
secondary purposes. Physiologically, speech is an overlaid function, or,
to be more precise, a group of overlaid functions. It gets what service
it can out of organs and functions, nervous and muscular, that have come
into being and are maintained for very different ends than its own.
It is true that physiological psychologists speak of the localization of
speech in the brain. This can only mean that the sounds of speech are
localized in the auditory tract of the brain, or in some circumscribed
portion of it, precisely as other classes of sounds are localized; and
that the motor processes involved in speech (such as the movements of
the glottal cords in the larynx, the movements of the tongue required to
pronounce the vowels, lip movements required to articulate certain
consonants, and numerous others) are localized in the motor tract
precisely as are all other impulses to special motor activities. In the
same way control is lodged in the visual tract of the brain over all
those processes of visual recognition involved in reading. Naturally the
particular points or clusters of points of localization in the several
tracts that refer to any element of language are connected in the brain
by paths of association, so that the outward, or psycho-physical, aspect
of language, is of a vast network of associated localizations in the
brain and lower nervous tracts, the auditory localizations being without
doubt the most fundamental of all for speech. However, a speechsound
localized in the brain, even when associated with the particular
movements of the "speech organs" that are required to produce it, is
very far from being an element of language. It must be further
associated with some element or group of elements of experience, say a
visual image or a class of visual images or a feeling of relation,
before it has even rudimentary linguistic significance. This "element"
of experience is the content or "meaning" of the linguistic unit; the
associated auditory, motor, and other cerebral processes that lie
immediately back of the act of speaking and the act of hearing speech
are merely a complicated symbol of or signal for these "meanings," of
which more anon. We see therefore at once that language as such is not
and cannot be definitely localized, for it consists of a peculiar
symbolic relation--physiologically an arbitrary one--between all
possible elements of consciousness on the one hand and certain selected
elements localized in the auditory, motor, and other cerebral and
nervous tracts on the other. If language can be said to be definitely
"localized" in the brain, it is only in that general and rather useless
sense in which all aspects of consciousness, all human interest and
activity, may be said to be "in the brain." Hence, we have no recourse
but to accept language as a fully formed functional system within man's
psychic or "spiritual" constitution. We cannot define it as an entity in
psycho-physical terms alone, however much the psycho-physical basis is
essential to its functioning in the individual.
From the physiologist's or psychologist's point of view we may seem to
be making an unwarrantable abstraction in desiring to handle the subject
of speech without constant and explicit reference to that basis.
However, such an abstraction is justifiable. We can profitably discuss
the intention, the form, and the history of speech, precisely as we
discuss the nature of any other phase of human culture--say art or
religion--as an institutional or cultural entity, leaving the organic
and psychological mechanisms back of it as something to be taken for
granted. Accordingly, it must be clearly understood that this
introduction to the study of speech is not concerned with those aspects
of physiology and of physiological psychology that underlie speech. Our
study of language is not to be one of the genesis and operation of a
concrete mechanism; it is, rather, to be an inquiry into the function
and form of the arbitrary systems of symbolism that we term languages.
I have already pointed out that the essence of language consists in the
assigning of conventional, voluntarily articulated, sounds, or of their
equivalents, to the diverse elements of experience. The word "house" is
not a linguistic fact if by it is meant merely the acoustic effect
produced on the ear by its constituent consonants and vowels, pronounced
in a certain order; nor the motor processes and tactile feelings which
make up the articulation of the word; nor the visual perception on the
part of the hearer of this articulation; nor the visual perception of
the word "house" on the written or printed page; nor the motor processes
and tactile feelings which enter into the writing of the word; nor the
memory of any or all of these experiences. It is only when these, and
possibly still other, associated experiences are automatically
associated with the image of a house that they begin to take on the
nature of a symbol, a word, an element of language. But the mere fact of
such an association is not enough. One might have heard a particular
word spoken in an individual house under such impressive circumstances
that neither the word nor the image of the house ever recur in
consciousness without the other becoming present at the same time. This
type of association does not constitute speech. The association must be
a purely symbolic one; in other words, the word must denote, tag off,
the image, must have no other significance than to serve as a counter to
refer to it whenever it is necessary or convenient to do so. Such an
association, voluntary and, in a sense, arbitrary as it is, demands a
considerable exercise of self-conscious attention. At least to begin
with, for habit soon makes the association nearly as automatic as any
and more rapid than most.
But we have traveled a little too fast. Were the symbol "house"--whether
an auditory, motor, or visual experience or image--attached but to the
single image of a particular house once seen, it might perhaps, by an
indulgent criticism, be termed an element of speech, yet it is obvious
at the outset that speech so constituted would have little or no value
for purposes of communication. The world of our experiences must be
enormously simplified and generalized before it is possible to make a
symbolic inventory of all our experiences of things and relations; and
this inventory is imperative before we can convey ideas. The elements of
language, the symbols that ticket off experience, must therefore be
associated with whole groups, delimited classes, of experience rather
than with the single experiences themselves. Only so is communication
possible, for the single experience lodges in an individual
consciousness and is, strictly speaking, incommunicable. To be
communicated it needs to be referred to a class which is tacitly
accepted by the community as an identity. Thus, the single impression
which I have had of a particular house must be identified with all my
other impressions of it. Further, my generalized memory or my "notion"
of this house must be merged with the notions that all other individuals
who have seen the house have formed of it. The particular experience
that we started with has now been widened so as to embrace all possible
impressions or images that sentient beings have formed or may form of
the house in question. This first simplification of experience is at the
bottom of a large number of elements of speech, the so-called proper
nouns or names of single individuals or objects. It is, essentially, the
type of simplification which underlies, or forms the crude subject of,
history and art. But we cannot be content with this measure of reduction
of the infinity of experience. We must cut to the bone of things, we
must more or less arbitrarily throw whole masses of experience together
as similar enough to warrant their being looked upon--mistakenly, but
conveniently--as identical. This house and that house and thousands of
other phenomena of like character are thought of as having enough in
common, in spite of great and obvious differences of detail, to be
classed under the same heading. In other words, the speech element
"house" is the symbol, first and foremost, not of a single perception,
nor even of the notion of a particular object, but of a "concept," in
other words, of a convenient capsule of thought that embraces thousands
of distinct experiences and that is ready to take in thousands more. If
the single significant elements of speech are the symbols of concepts,
the actual flow of speech may be interpreted as a record of the setting
of these concepts into mutual relations.
The question has often been raised whether thought is possible without
speech; further, if speech and thought be not but two facets of the same
psychic process. The question is all the more difficult because it has
been hedged about by misunderstandings. In the first place, it is well
to observe that whether or not thought necessitates symbolism, that is
speech, the flow of language itself is not always indicative of thought.
We have seen that the typical linguistic element labels a concept. It
does not follow from this that the use to which language is put is
always or even mainly conceptual. We are not in ordinary life so much
concerned with concepts as such as with concrete particularities and
specific relations. When I say, for instance, "I had a good breakfast
this morning," it is clear that I am not in the throes of laborious
thought, that what I have to transmit is hardly more than a pleasurable
memory symbolically rendered in the grooves of habitual expression. Each
element in the sentence defines a separate concept or conceptual
relation or both combined, but the sentence as a whole has no conceptual
significance whatever. It is somewhat as though a dynamo capable of
generating enough power to run an elevator were operated almost
exclusively to feed an electric door-bell. The parallel is more
suggestive than at first sight appears. Language may be looked upon as
an instrument capable of running a gamut of psychic uses. Its flow not
only parallels that of the inner content of consciousness, but parallels
it on different levels, ranging from the state of mind that is dominated
by particular images to that in which abstract concepts and their
relations are alone at the focus of attention and which is ordinarily
termed reasoning. Thus the outward form only of language is constant;
its inner meaning, its psychic value or intensity, varies freely with
attention or the selective interest of the mind, also, needless to say,
with the mind's general development. From the point of view of
language, thought may be defined as the highest latent or potential
content of speech, the content that is obtained by interpreting each of
the elements in the flow of language as possessed of its very fullest
conceptual value. From this it follows at once that language and thought
are not strictly coterminous. At best language can but be the outward
facet of thought on the highest, most generalized, level of symbolic
expression. To put our viewpoint somewhat differently, language is
primarily a pre-rational function. It humbly works up to the thought
that is latent in, that may eventually be read into, its classifications
and its forms; it is not, as is generally but naïvely assumed, the final
label put upon, the finished thought.
Most people, asked if they can think without speech, would probably
answer, "Yes, but it is not easy for me to do so. Still I know it can be
done." Language is but a garment! But what if language is not so much a
garment as a prepared road or groove? It is, indeed, in the highest
degree likely that language is an instrument originally put to uses
lower than the conceptual plane and that thought arises as a refined
interpretation of its content. The product grows, in other words, with
the instrument, and thought may be no more conceivable, in its genesis
and daily practice, without speech than is mathematical reasoning
practicable without the lever of an appropriate mathematical symbolism.
No one believes that even the most difficult mathematical proposition is
inherently dependent on an arbitrary set of symbols, but it is
impossible to suppose that the human mind is capable of arriving at or
holding such a proposition without the symbolism. The writer, for one,
is strongly of the opinion that the feeling entertained by so many that
they can think, or even reason, without language is an illusion. The
illusion seems to be due to a number of factors. The simplest of these
is the failure to distinguish between imagery and thought. As a matter
of fact, no sooner do we try to put an image into conscious relation
with another than we find ourselves slipping into a silent flow of
words. Thought may be a natural domain apart from the artificial one of
speech, but speech would seem to be the only road we know of that leads
to it. A still more fruitful source of the illusive feeling that
language may be dispensed with in thought is the common failure to
realize that language is not identical with its auditory symbolism. The
auditory symbolism may be replaced, point for point, by a motor or by a
visual symbolism (many people can read, for instance, in a purely visual
sense, that is, without the intermediating link of an inner flow of the
auditory images that correspond to the printed or written words) or by
still other, more subtle and elusive, types of transfer that are not so
easy to define. Hence the contention that one thinks without language
merely because he is not aware of a coexisting auditory imagery is very
far indeed from being a valid one. One may go so far as to suspect that
the symbolic expression of thought may in some cases run along outside
the fringe of the conscious mind, so that the feeling of a free,
nonlinguistic stream of thought is for minds of a certain type a
relatively, but only a relatively, justified one. Psycho-physically,
this would mean that the auditory or equivalent visual or motor centers
in the brain, together with the appropriate paths of association, that
are the cerebral equivalent of speech, are touched off so lightly during
the process of thought as not to rise into consciousness at all. This
would be a limiting case--thought riding lightly on the submerged crests
of speech, instead of jogging along with it, hand in hand. The modern
psychology has shown us how powerfully symbolism is at work in the
unconscious mind. It is therefore easier to understand at the present
time than it would have been twenty years ago that the most rarefied
thought may be but the conscious counterpart of an unconscious
linguistic symbolism.
One word more as to the relation between language and thought. The point
of view that we have developed does not by any means preclude the
possibility of the growth of speech being in a high degree dependent on
the development of thought. We may assume that language arose
pre-rationally--just how and on what precise level of mental activity we
do not know--but we must not imagine that a highly developed system of
speech symbols worked itself out before the genesis of distinct concepts
and of thinking, the handling of concepts. We must rather imagine that
thought processes set in, as a kind of psychic overflow, almost at the
beginning of linguistic expression; further, that the concept, once
defined, necessarily reacted on the life of its linguistic symbol,
encouraging further linguistic growth. We see this complex process of
the interaction of language and thought actually taking place under our
eyes. The instrument makes possible the product, the product refines the
instrument. The birth of a new concept is invariably foreshadowed by a
more or less strained or extended use of old linguistic material; the
concept does not attain to individual and independent life until it has
found a distinctive linguistic embodiment. In most cases the new symbol
is but a thing wrought from linguistic material already in existence in
ways mapped out by crushingly despotic precedents. As soon as the word
is at hand, we instinctively feel, with something of a sigh of relief,
that the concept is ours for the handling. Not until we own the symbol
do we feel that we hold a key to the immediate knowledge or
understanding of the concept. Would we be so ready to die for "liberty,"
to struggle for "ideals," if the words themselves were not ringing
within us? And the word, as we know, is not only a key; it may also be a
fetter.
Language is primarily an auditory system of symbols. In so far as it is
articulated it is also a motor system, but the motor aspect of speech is
clearly secondary to the auditory. In normal individuals the impulse to
speech first takes effect in the sphere of auditory imagery and is then
transmitted to the motor nerves that control the organs of speech. The
motor processes and the accompanying motor feelings are not, however,
the end, the final resting point. They are merely a means and a control
leading to auditory perception in both speaker and hearer.
Communication, which is the very object of speech, is successfully
effected only when the hearer's auditory perceptions are translated into
the appropriate and intended flow of imagery or thought or both
combined. Hence the cycle of speech, in so far as we may look upon it as
a purely external instrument, begins and ends in the realm of sounds.
The concordance between the initial auditory imagery and the final
auditory perceptions is the social seal or warrant of the successful
issue of the process. As we have already seen, the typical course of
this process may undergo endless modifications or transfers into
equivalent systems without thereby losing its essential formal
characteristics.
The most important of these modifications is the abbreviation of the
speech process involved in thinking. This has doubtless many forms,
according to the structural or functional peculiarities of the
individual mind. The least modified form is that known as "talking to
one's self" or "thinking aloud." Here the speaker and the hearer are
identified in a single person, who may be said to communicate with
himself. More significant is the still further abbreviated form in which
the sounds of speech are not articulated at all. To this belong all the
varieties of silent speech and of normal thinking. The auditory centers
alone may be excited; or the impulse to linguistic expression may be
communicated as well to the motor nerves that communicate with the
organs of speech but be inhibited either in the muscles of these organs
or at some point in the motor nerves themselves; or, possibly, the
auditory centers may be only slightly, if at all, affected, the speech
process manifesting itself directly in the motor sphere. There must be
still other types of abbreviation. How common is the excitation of the
motor nerves in silent speech, in which no audible or visible
articulations result, is shown by the frequent experience of fatigue in
the speech organs, particularly in the larynx, after unusually
stimulating reading or intensive thinking.
All the modifications so far considered are directly patterned on the
typical process of normal speech. Of very great interest and importance
is the possibility of transferring the whole system of speech symbolism
into other terms than those that are involved in the typical process.
This process, as we have seen, is a matter of sounds and of movements
intended to produce these sounds. The sense of vision is not brought
into play. But let us suppose that one not only hears the articulated
sounds but sees the articulations themselves as they are being executed
by the speaker. Clearly, if one can only gain a sufficiently high degree
of adroitness in perceiving these movements of the speech organs, the
way is opened for a new type of speech symbolism--that in which the
sound is replaced by the visual image of the articulations that
correspond to the sound. This sort of system has no great value for most
of us because we are already possessed of the auditory-motor system of
which it is at best but an imperfect translation, not all the
articulations being visible to the eye. However, it is well known what
excellent use deaf-mutes can make of "reading from the lips" as a
subsidiary method of apprehending speech. The most important of all
visual speech symbolisms is, of course, that of the written or printed
word, to which, on the motor side, corresponds the system of delicately
adjusted movements which result in the writing or typewriting or other
graphic method of recording speech. The significant feature for our
recognition in these new types of symbolism, apart from the fact that
they are no longer a by-product of normal speech itself, is that each
element (letter or written word) in the system corresponds to a specific
element (sound or sound-group or spoken word) in the primary system.
Written language is thus a point-to-point equivalence, to borrow a
mathematical phrase, to its spoken counterpart. The written forms are
secondary symbols of the spoken ones--symbols of symbols--yet so close
is the correspondence that they may, not only in theory but in the
actual practice of certain eye-readers and, possibly, in certain types
of thinking, be entirely substituted for the spoken ones. Yet the
auditory-motor associations are probably always latent at the least,
that is, they are unconsciously brought into play. Even those who read
and think without the slightest use of sound imagery are, at last
analysis, dependent on it. They are merely handling the circulating
medium, the money, of visual symbols as a convenient substitute for the
economic goods and services of the fundamental auditory symbols.
The possibilities of linguistic transfer are practically unlimited. A
familiar example is the Morse telegraph code, in which the letters of
written speech are represented by a conventionally fixed sequence of
longer or shorter ticks. Here the transfer takes place from the written
word rather than directly from the sounds of spoken speech. The letter
of the telegraph code is thus a symbol of a symbol of a symbol. It does
not, of course, in the least follow that the skilled operator, in order
to arrive at an understanding of a telegraphic message, needs to
transpose the individual sequence of ticks into a visual image of the
word before he experiences its normal auditory image. The precise method
of reading off speech from the telegraphic communication undoubtedly
varies widely with the individual. It is even conceivable, if not
exactly likely, that certain operators may have learned to think
directly, so far as the purely conscious part of the process of thought
is concerned, in terms of the tick-auditory symbolism or, if they happen
to have a strong natural bent toward motor symbolism, in terms of the
correlated tactile-motor symbolism developed in the sending of
telegraphic messages.
Still another interesting group of transfers are the different gesture
languages, developed for the use of deaf-mutes, of Trappist monks vowed
to perpetual silence, or of communicating parties that are within seeing
distance of each other but are out of earshot. Some of these systems are
one-to-one equivalences of the normal system of speech; others, like
military gesture-symbolism or the gesture language of the Plains Indians
of North America (understood by tribes of mutually unintelligible forms
of speech) are imperfect transfers, limiting themselves to the rendering
of such grosser speech elements as are an imperative minimum under
difficult circumstances. In these latter systems, as in such still more
imperfect symbolisms as those used at sea or in the woods, it may be
contended that language no longer properly plays a part but that the
ideas are directly conveyed by an utterly unrelated symbolic process or
by a quasi-instinctive imitativeness. Such an interpretation would be
erroneous. The intelligibility of these vaguer symbolisms can hardly be
due to anything but their automatic and silent translation into the
terms of a fuller flow of speech.
We shall no doubt conclude that all voluntary communication of ideas,
aside from normal speech, is either a transfer, direct or indirect, from
the typical symbolism of language as spoken and heard or, at the least,
involves the intermediary of truly linguistic symbolism. This is a fact
of the highest importance. Auditory imagery and the correlated motor
imagery leading to articulation are, by whatever devious ways we follow
the process, the historic fountain-head of all speech and of all
thinking. One other point is of still greater importance. The ease with
which speech symbolism can be transferred from one sense to another,
from technique to technique, itself indicates that the mere sounds of
speech are not the essential fact of language, which lies rather in the
classification, in the formal patterning, and in the relating of
concepts. Once more, language, as a structure, is on its inner face the
mold of thought. It is this abstracted language, rather more than the
physical facts of speech, that is to concern us in our inquiry.
There is no more striking general fact about language than its
universality. One may argue as to whether a particular tribe engages in
activities that are worthy of the name of religion or of art, but we
know of no people that is not possessed of a fully developed language.
The lowliest South African Bushman speaks in the forms of a rich
symbolic system that is in essence perfectly comparable to the speech of
the cultivated Frenchman. It goes without saying that the more abstract
concepts are not nearly so plentifully represented in the language of
the savage, nor is there the rich terminology and the finer definition
of nuances that reflect the higher culture. Yet the sort of linguistic
development that parallels the historic growth of culture and which, in
its later stages, we associate with literature is, at best, but a
superficial thing. The fundamental groundwork of language--the
development of a clear-cut phonetic system, the specific association of
speech elements with concepts, and the delicate provision for the formal
expression of all manner of relations--all this meets us rigidly
perfected and systematized in every language known to us. Many primitive
languages have a formal richness, a latent luxuriance of expression,
that eclipses anything known to the languages of modern civilization.
Even in the mere matter of the inventory of speech the layman must be
prepared for strange surprises. Popular statements as to the extreme
poverty of expression to which primitive languages are doomed are simply
myths. Scarcely less impressive than the universality of speech is its
almost incredible diversity. Those of us that have studied French or
German, or, better yet, Latin or Greek, know in what varied forms a
thought may run. The formal divergences between the English plan and the
Latin plan, however, are comparatively slight in the perspective of what
we know of more exotic linguistic patterns. The universality and the
diversity of speech lead to a significant inference. We are forced to
believe that language is an immensely ancient heritage of the human
race, whether or not all forms of speech are the historical outgrowth of
a single pristine form. It is doubtful if any other cultural asset of
man, be it the art of drilling for fire or of chipping stone, may lay
claim to a greater age. I am inclined to believe that it antedated even
the lowliest developments of material culture, that these developments,
in fact, were not strictly possible until language, the tool of
significant expression, had itself taken shape.