We have seen that the mere phonetic framework of speech does not
constitute the inner fact of language and that the single sound of
articulated speech is not, as such, a linguistic element at all. For all
that, speech is so inevitably bound up with sounds and their
articulation that we can hardly avoid giving the subject of phonetics
some general consideration. Experience has shown that neither the purely
formal aspects of a language nor the course of its history can be fully
understood without reference to the sounds in which this form and this
history are embodied. A detailed survey of phonetics would be both too
technical for the general reader and too loosely related to our main
theme to warrant the needed space, but we can well afford to consider a
few outstanding facts and ideas connected with the sounds of language.
The feeling that the average speaker has of his language is that it is
built up, acoustically speaking, of a comparatively small number of
distinct sounds, each of which is rather accurately provided for in the
current alphabet by one letter or, in a few cases, by two or more
alternative letters. As for the languages of foreigners, he generally
feels that, aside from a few striking differences that cannot escape
even the uncritical ear, the sounds they use are the same as those he is
familiar with but that there is a mysterious "accent" to these foreign
languages, a certain unanalyzed phonetic character, apart from the
sounds as such, that gives them their air of strangeness. This naïve
feeling is largely illusory on both scores. Phonetic analysis convinces
one that the number of clearly distinguishable sounds and nuances of
sounds that are habitually employed by the speakers of a language is far
greater than they themselves recognize. Probably not one English speaker
out of a hundred has the remotest idea that the _t_ of a word like
_sting_ is not at all the same sound as the _t_ of _teem_, the latter
_t_ having a fullness of "breath release" that is inhibited in the
former case by the preceding _s_; that the _ea_ of _meat_ is of
perceptibly shorter duration than the _ea_ of _mead_; or that the final
_s_ of a word like _heads_ is not the full, buzzing _z_ sound of the _s_
in such a word as _please_. It is the frequent failure of foreigners,
who have acquired a practical mastery of English and who have eliminated
all the cruder phonetic shortcomings of their less careful brethren, to
observe such minor distinctions that helps to give their English
pronunciation the curiously elusive "accent" that we all vaguely feel.
We do not diagnose the "accent" as the total acoustic effect produced by
a series of slight but specific phonetic errors for the very good reason
that we have never made clear to ourselves our own phonetic stock in
trade. If two languages taken at random, say English and Russian, are
compared as to their phonetic systems, we are more apt than not to find
that very few of the phonetic elements of the one find an exact analogue
in the other. Thus, the _t_ of a Russian word like _tam_ "there" is
neither the English _t_ of _sting_ nor the English _t_ of _teem_. It
differs from both in its "dental" articulation, in other words, in being
produced by contact of the tip of the tongue with the upper teeth, not,
as in English, by contact of the tongue back of the tip with the gum
ridge above the teeth; moreover, it differs from the _t_ of _teem_ also
in the absence of a marked "breath release" before the following vowel
is attached, so that its acoustic effect is of a more precise,
"metallic" nature than in English. Again, the English _l_ is unknown in
Russian, which possesses, on the other hand, two distinct _l_-sounds
that the normal English speaker would find it difficult exactly to
reproduce--a "hollow," guttural-like _l_ and a "soft," palatalized
_l_-sound that is only very approximately rendered, in English terms, as
_ly_. Even so simple and, one would imagine, so invariable a sound as
_m_ differs in the two languages. In a Russian word like _most_ "bridge"
the _m_ is not the same as the _m_ of the English word _most_; the lips
are more fully rounded during its articulation, so that it makes a
heavier, more resonant impression on the ear. The vowels, needless to
say, differ completely in English and Russian, hardly any two of them
being quite the same.
I have gone into these illustrative details, which are of little or no
specific interest for us, merely in order to provide something of an
experimental basis to convince ourselves of the tremendous variability
of speech sounds. Yet a complete inventory of the acoustic resources of
all the European languages, the languages nearer home, while
unexpectedly large, would still fall far short of conveying a just idea
of the true range of human articulation. In many of the languages of
Asia, Africa, and aboriginal America there are whole classes of sounds
that most of us have no knowledge of. They are not necessarily more
difficult of enunciation than sounds more familiar to our ears; they
merely involve such muscular adjustments of the organs of speech as we
have never habituated ourselves to. It may be safely said that the total
number of possible sounds is greatly in excess of those actually in
use. Indeed, an experienced phonetician should have no difficulty in
inventing sounds that are unknown to objective investigation. One reason
why we find it difficult to believe that the range of possible speech
sounds is indefinitely large is our habit of conceiving the sound as a
simple, unanalyzable impression instead of as the resultant of a number
of distinct muscular adjustments that take place simultaneously. A
slight change in any one of these adjustments gives us a new sound which
is akin to the old one, because of the continuance of the other
adjustments, but which is acoustically distinct from it, so sensitive
has the human ear become to the nuanced play of the vocal mechanism.
Another reason for our lack of phonetic imagination is the fact that,
while our ear is delicately responsive to the sounds of speech, the
muscles of our speech organs have early in life become exclusively
accustomed to the particular adjustments and systems of adjustment that
are required to produce the traditional sounds of the language. All or
nearly all other adjustments have become permanently inhibited, whether
through inexperience or through gradual elimination. Of course the power
to produce these inhibited adjustments is not entirely lost, but the
extreme difficulty we experience in learning the new sounds of foreign
languages is sufficient evidence of the strange rigidity that has set in
for most people in the voluntary control of the speech organs. The point
may be brought home by contrasting the comparative lack of freedom of
voluntary speech movements with the all but perfect freedom of voluntary
gesture.[10] Our rigidity in articulation is the price we have had to
pay for easy mastery of a highly necessary symbolism. One cannot be both
splendidly free in the random choice of movements and selective with
deadly certainty.[11]
[Footnote 10: Observe the "voluntary." When we shout or grunt or
otherwise allow our voices to take care of themselves, as we are likely
to do when alone in the country on a fine spring day, we are no longer
fixing vocal adjustments by voluntary control. Under these circumstances
we are almost certain to hit on speech sounds that we could never learn
to control in actual speech.]
[Footnote 11: If speech, in its acoustic and articulatory aspect, is
indeed a rigid system, how comes it, one may plausibly object, that no
two people speak alike? The answer is simple. All that part of speech
which falls out of the rigid articulatory framework is not speech in
idea, but is merely a superadded, more or less instinctively determined
vocal complication inseparable from speech in practice. All the
individual color of speech--personal emphasis, speed, personal cadence,
personal pitch--is a non-linguistic fact, just as the incidental
expression of desire and emotion are, for the most part, alien to
linguistic expression. Speech, like all elements of culture, demands
conceptual selection, inhibition of the randomness of instinctive
behavior. That its "idea" is never realized as such in practice, its
carriers being instinctively animated organisms, is of course true of
each and every aspect of culture.]
There are, then, an indefinitely large number of articulated sounds
available for the mechanics of speech; any given language makes use of
an explicit, rigidly economical selection of these rich resources; and
each of the many possible sounds of speech is conditioned by a number of
independent muscular adjustments that work together simultaneously
towards its production. A full account of the activity of each of the
organs of speech--in so far as its activity has a bearing on
language--is impossible here, nor can we concern ourselves in a
systematic way with the classification of sounds on the basis of their
mechanics.[12] A few bold outlines are all that we can attempt. The
organs of speech are the lungs and bronchial tubes; the throat,
particularly that part of it which is known as the larynx or, in popular
parlance, the "Adam's apple"; the nose; the uvula, which is the soft,
pointed, and easily movable organ that depends from the rear of the
palate; the palate, which is divided into a posterior, movable "soft
palate" or velum and a "hard palate"; the tongue; the teeth; and the
lips. The palate, lower palate, tongue, teeth, and lips may be looked
upon as a combined resonance chamber, whose constantly varying shape,
chiefly due to the extreme mobility of the tongue, is the main factor in
giving the outgoing breath its precise quality[13] of sound.
[Footnote 12: Purely acoustic classifications, such as more easily
suggest themselves to a first attempt at analysis, are now in less favor
among students of phonetics than organic classifications. The latter
have the advantage of being more objective. Moreover, the acoustic
quality of a sound is dependent on the articulation, even though in
linguistic consciousness this quality is the primary, not the secondary,
fact.]
[Footnote 13: By "quality" is here meant the inherent nature and
resonance of the sound as such. The general "quality" of the
individual's voice is another matter altogether. This is chiefly
determined by the individual anatomical characteristics of the larynx
and is of no linguistic interest whatever.]
The lungs and bronchial tubes are organs of speech only in so far as
they supply and conduct the current of outgoing air without which
audible articulation is impossible. They are not responsible for any
specific sound or acoustic feature of sounds except, possibly, accent or
stress. It may be that differences of stress are due to slight
differences in the contracting force of the lung muscles, but even this
influence of the lungs is denied by some students, who explain the
fluctuations of stress that do so much to color speech by reference to
the more delicate activity of the glottal cords. These glottal cords are
two small, nearly horizontal, and highly sensitive membranes within the
larynx, which consists, for the most part, of two large and several
smaller cartilages and of a number of small muscles that control the
action of the cords.
The cords, which are attached to the cartilages, are to the human speech
organs what the two vibrating reeds are to a clarinet or the strings to
a violin. They are capable of at least three distinct types of movement,
each of which is of the greatest importance for speech. They may be
drawn towards or away from each other, they may vibrate like reeds or
strings, and they may become lax or tense in the direction of their
length. The last class of these movements allows the cords to vibrate at
different "lengths" or degrees of tenseness and is responsible for the
variations in pitch which are present not only in song but in the more
elusive modulations of ordinary speech. The two other types of glottal
action determine the nature of the voice, "voice" being a convenient
term for breath as utilized in speech. If the cords are well apart,
allowing the breath to escape in unmodified form, we have the condition
technically known as "voicelessness." All sounds produced under these
circumstances are "voiceless" sounds. Such are the simple, unmodified
breath as it passes into the mouth, which is, at least approximately,
the same as the sound that we write _h_, also a large number of special
articulations in the mouth chamber, like _p_ and _s_. On the other hand,
the glottal cords may be brought tight together, without vibrating. When
this happens, the current of breath is checked for the time being. The
slight choke or "arrested cough" that is thus made audible is not
recognized in English as a definite sound but occurs nevertheless not
infrequently.[14] This momentary check, technically known as a "glottal
stop," is an integral element of speech in many languages, as Danish,
Lettish, certain Chinese dialects, and nearly all American Indian
languages. Between the two extremes of voicelessness, that of
completely open breath and that of checked breath, lies the position of
true voice. In this position the cords are close together, but not so
tightly as to prevent the air from streaming through; the cords are set
vibrating and a musical tone of varying pitch results. A tone so
produced is known as a "voiced sound." It may have an indefinite number
of qualities according to the precise position of the upper organs of
speech. Our vowels, nasals (such as _m_ and _n_), and such sounds as
_b_, _z_, and _l_ are all voiced sounds. The most convenient test of a
voiced sound is the possibility of pronouncing it on any given pitch, in
other words, of singing on it.[15] The voiced sounds are the most
clearly audible elements of speech. As such they are the carriers of
practically all significant differences in stress, pitch, and
syllabification. The voiceless sounds are articulated noises that break
up the stream of voice with fleeting moments of silence. Acoustically
intermediate between the freely unvoiced and the voiced sounds are a
number of other characteristic types of voicing, such as murmuring and
whisper.[16] These and still other types of voice are relatively
unimportant in English and most other European languages, but there are
languages in which they rise to some prominence in the normal flow of
speech.
[Footnote 14: As at the end of the snappily pronounced _no!_ (sometimes
written _nope!_) or in the over-carefully pronounced _at all_, where one
may hear a slight check between the _t_ and the _a_.]
[Footnote 15: "Singing" is here used in a wide sense. One cannot sing
continuously on such a sound as _b_ or _d_, but one may easily outline a
tune on a series of _b_'s or _d_'s in the manner of the plucked
"pizzicato" on stringed instruments. A series of tones executed on
continuant consonants, like _m_, _z_, or _l_, gives the effect of
humming, droning, or buzzing. The sound of "humming," indeed, is nothing
but a continuous voiced nasal, held on one pitch or varying in pitch, as
desired.]
[Footnote 16: The whisper of ordinary speech is a combination of
unvoiced sounds and "whispered" sounds, as the term is understood in
phonetics.]
The nose is not an active organ of speech, but it is highly important as
a resonance chamber. It may be disconnected from the mouth, which is
the other great resonance chamber, by the lifting of the movable part of
the soft palate so as to shut off the passage of the breath into the
nasal cavity; or, if the soft palate is allowed to hang down freely and
unobstructively, so that the breath passes into both the nose and the
mouth, these make a combined resonance chamber. Such sounds as _b_ and
_a_ (as in _father_) are voiced "oral" sounds, that is, the voiced
breath does not receive a nasal resonance. As soon as the soft palate is
lowered, however, and the nose added as a participating resonance
chamber, the sounds _b_ and _a_ take on a peculiar "nasal" quality and
become, respectively, _m_ and the nasalized vowel written _an_ in French
(e.g., _sang_, _tant_). The only English sounds[17] that normally
receive a nasal resonance are _m_, _n_, and the _ng_ sound of _sing_.
Practically all sounds, however, may be nasalized, not only the
vowels--nasalized vowels are common in all parts of the world--but such
sounds as _l_ or _z_. Voiceless nasals are perfectly possible. They
occur, for instance, in Welsh and in quite a number of American Indian
languages.
[Footnote 17: Aside from the involuntary nasalizing of all voiced sounds
in the speech of those that talk with a "nasal twang."]
The organs that make up the oral resonance chamber may articulate in two
ways. The breath, voiced or unvoiced, nasalized or unnasalized, may be
allowed to pass through the mouth without being checked or impeded at
any point; or it may be either momentarily checked or allowed to stream
through a greatly narrowed passage with resulting air friction. There
are also transitions between the two latter types of articulation. The
unimpeded breath takes on a particular color or quality in accordance
with the varying shape of the oral resonance chamber. This shape is
chiefly determined by the position of the movable parts--the tongue and
the lips. As the tongue is raised or lowered, retracted or brought
forward, held tense or lax, and as the lips are pursed ("rounded") in
varying degree or allowed to keep their position of rest, a large number
of distinct qualities result. These oral qualities are the vowels. In
theory their number is infinite, in practice the ear can differentiate
only a limited, yet a surprisingly large, number of resonance positions.
Vowels, whether nasalized or not, are normally voiced sounds; in not a
few languages, however, "voiceless vowels"[18] also occur.
[Footnote 18: These may be also defined as free unvoiced breath with
varying vocalic timbres. In the long Paiute word quoted on page 31 the
first _u_ and the final _ü_ are pronounced without voice.]
[Transcriber's note: Footnote 18 refers to line 1014.]
The remaining oral sounds are generally grouped together as
"consonants." In them the stream of breath is interfered with in some
way, so that a lesser resonance results, and a sharper, more incisive
quality of tone. There are four main types of articulation generally
recognized within the consonantal group of sounds. The breath may be
completely stopped for a moment at some definite point in the oral
cavity. Sounds so produced, like _t_ or _d_ or _p_, are known as "stops"
or "explosives."[19] Or the breath may be continuously obstructed
through a narrow passage, not entirely checked. Examples of such
"spirants" or "fricatives," as they are called, are _s_ and _z_ and _y_.
The third class of consonants, the "laterals," are semi-stopped. There
is a true stoppage at the central point of articulation, but the breath
is allowed to escape through the two side passages or through one of
them. Our English _d_, for instance, may be readily transformed into
_l_, which has the voicing and the position of _d_, merely by
depressing the sides of the tongue on either side of the point of
contact sufficiently to allow the breath to come through. Laterals are
possible in many distinct positions. They may be unvoiced (the Welsh
_ll_ is an example) as well as voiced. Finally, the stoppage of the
breath may be rapidly intermittent; in other words, the active organ of
contact--generally the point of the tongue, less often the
uvula[20]--may be made to vibrate against or near the point of contact.
These sounds are the "trills" or "rolled consonants," of which the
normal English _r_ is a none too typical example. They are well
developed in many languages, however, generally in voiced form,
sometimes, as in Welsh and Paiute, in unvoiced form as well.
[Footnote 19: Nasalized stops, say _m_ or _n_, can naturally not be
truly "stopped," as there is no way of checking the stream of breath in
the nose by a definite articulation.]
[Footnote 20: The lips also may theoretically so articulate. "Labial
trills," however, are certainly rare in natural speech.]
The oral manner of articulation is naturally not sufficient to define a
consonant. The place of articulation must also be considered. Contacts
may be formed at a large number of points, from the root of the tongue
to the lips. It is not necessary here to go at length into this somewhat
complicated matter. The contact is either between the root of the tongue
and the throat,[21] some part of the tongue and a point on the palate
(as in _k_ or _ch_ or _l_), some part of the tongue and the teeth (as in
the English _th_ of _thick_ and _then_), the teeth and one of the lips
(practically always the upper teeth and lower lip, as in _f_), or the
two lips (as in _p_ or English _w_). The tongue articulations are the
most complicated of all, as the mobility of the tongue allows various
points on its surface, say the tip, to articulate against a number of
opposed points of contact. Hence arise many positions of articulation
that we are not familiar with, such as the typical "dental" position of
Russian or Italian _t_ and _d_; or the "cerebral" position of Sanskrit
and other languages of India, in which the tip of the tongue articulates
against the hard palate. As there is no break at any point between the
rims of the teeth back to the uvula nor from the tip of the tongue back
to its root, it is evident that all the articulations that involve the
tongue form a continuous organic (and acoustic) series. The positions
grade into each other, but each language selects a limited number of
clearly defined positions as characteristic of its consonantal system,
ignoring transitional or extreme positions. Frequently a language allows
a certain latitude in the fixing of the required position. This is true,
for instance, of the English _k_ sound, which is articulated much
further to the front in a word like _kin_ than in _cool_. We ignore this
difference, psychologically, as a non-essential, mechanical one. Another
language might well recognize the difference, or only a slightly greater
one, as significant, as paralleling the distinction in position between
the _k_ of _kin_ and the _t_ of _tin_.
[Footnote 21: This position, known as "faucal," is not common.]
The organic classification of speech sounds is a simple matter after
what we have learned of their production. Any such sound may be put into
its proper place by the appropriate answer to four main questions:--What
is the position of the glottal cords during its articulation? Does the
breath pass into the mouth alone or is it also allowed to stream into
the nose? Does the breath pass freely through the mouth or is it impeded
at some point and, if so, in what manner? What are the precise points of
articulation in the mouth?[22] This fourfold classification of sounds,
worked out in all its detailed ramifications,[23] is sufficient to
account for all, or practically all, the sounds of language.[24]
[Footnote 22: "Points of articulation" must be understood to include
tongue and lip positions of the vowels.]
[Footnote 23: Including, under the fourth category, a number of special
resonance adjustments that we have not been able to take up
specifically.]
[Footnote 24: In so far, it should be added, as these sounds are
expiratory, i.e., pronounced with the outgoing breath. Certain
languages, like the South African Hottentot and Bushman, have also a
number of inspiratory sounds, pronounced by sucking in the breath at
various points of oral contact. These are the so-called "clicks."]
The phonetic habits of a given language are not exhaustively defined by
stating that it makes use of such and such particular sounds out of the
all but endless gamut that we have briefly surveyed. There remains the
important question of the dynamics of these phonetic elements. Two
languages may, theoretically, be built up of precisely the same series
of consonants and vowels and yet produce utterly different acoustic
effects. One of them may not recognize striking variations in the
lengths or "quantities" of the phonetic elements, the other may note
such variations most punctiliously (in probably the majority of
languages long and short vowels are distinguished; in many, as in
Italian or Swedish or Ojibwa, long consonants are recognized as distinct
from short ones). Or the one, say English, may be very sensitive to
relative stresses, while in the other, say French, stress is a very
minor consideration. Or, again, the pitch differences which are
inseparable from the actual practice of language may not affect the word
as such, but, as in English, may be a more or less random or, at best,
but a rhetorical phenomenon, while in other languages, as in Swedish,
Lithuanian, Chinese, Siamese, and the majority of African languages,
they may be more finely graduated and felt as integral characteristics
of the words themselves. Varying methods of syllabifying are also
responsible for noteworthy acoustic differences. Most important of all,
perhaps, are the very different possibilities of combining the phonetic
elements. Each language has its peculiarities. The _ts_ combination, for
instance, is found in both English and German, but in English it can
only occur at the end of a word (as in _hats_), while it occurs freely
in German as the psychological equivalent of a single sound (as in
_Zeit_, _Katze_). Some languages allow of great heapings of consonants
or of vocalic groups (diphthongs), in others no two consonants or no two
vowels may ever come together. Frequently a sound occurs only in a
special position or under special phonetic circumstances. In English,
for instance, the _z_-sound of _azure_ cannot occur initially, while the
peculiar quality of the _t_ of _sting_ is dependent on its being
preceded by the _s_. These dynamic factors, in their totality, are as
important for the proper understanding of the phonetic genius of a
language as the sound system itself, often far more so.
We have already seen, in an incidental way, that phonetic elements or
such dynamic features as quantity and stress have varying psychological
"values." The English _ts_ of _fiats_ is merely a _t_ followed by a
functionally independent _s_, the _ts_ of the German word _Zeit_ has an
integral value equivalent, say, to the _t_ of the English word _tide_.
Again, the _t_ of _time_ is indeed noticeably distinct from that of
_sting_, but the difference, to the consciousness of an English-speaking
person, is quite irrelevant. It has no "value." If we compare the
_t_-sounds of Haida, the Indian language spoken in the Queen Charlotte
Islands, we find that precisely the same difference of articulation has
a real value. In such a word as _sting_ "two," the _t_ is pronounced
precisely as in English, but in _sta_ "from" the _t_ is clearly
"aspirated," like that of _time_. In other words, an objective
difference that is irrelevant in English is of functional value in
Haida; from its own psychological standpoint the _t_ of _sting_ is as
different from that of _sta_ as, from our standpoint, is the _t_ of
_time_ from the _d_ of _divine_. Further investigation would yield the
interesting result that the Haida ear finds the difference between the
English _t_ of _sting_ and the _d_ of _divine_ as irrelevant as the
naïve English ear finds that of the _t_-sounds of _sting_ and _time_.
The objective comparison of sounds in two or more languages is, then, of
no psychological or historical significance unless these sounds are
first "weighted," unless their phonetic "values" are determined. These
values, in turn, flow from the general behavior and functioning of the
sounds in actual speech.
These considerations as to phonetic value lead to an important
conception. Back of the purely objective system of sounds that is
peculiar to a language and which can be arrived at only by a painstaking
phonetic analysis, there is a more restricted "inner" or "ideal" system
which, while perhaps equally unconscious as a system to the naïve
speaker, can far more readily than the other be brought to his
consciousness as a finished pattern, a psychological mechanism. The
inner sound-system, overlaid though it may be by the mechanical or the
irrelevant, is a real and an immensely important principle in the life
of a language. It may persist as a pattern, involving number, relation,
and functioning of phonetic elements, long after its phonetic content is
changed. Two historically related languages or dialects may not have a
sound in common, but their ideal sound-systems may be identical
patterns. I would not for a moment wish to imply that this pattern may
not change. It may shrink or expand or change its functional
complexion, but its rate of change is infinitely less rapid than that of
the sounds as such. Every language, then, is characterized as much by
its ideal system of sounds and by the underlying phonetic pattern
(system, one might term it, of symbolic atoms) as by a definite
grammatical structure. Both the phonetic and conceptual structures show
the instinctive feeling of language for form.[25]
[Footnote 25: The conception of the ideal phonetic system, the phonetic
pattern, of a language is not as well understood by linguistic students
as it should be. In this respect the unschooled recorder of language,
provided he has a good ear and a genuine instinct for language, is often
at a great advantage as compared with the minute phonetician, who is apt
to be swamped by his mass of observations. I have already employed my
experience in teaching Indians to write their own language for its
testing value in another connection. It yields equally valuable evidence
here. I found that it was difficult or impossible to teach an Indian to
make phonetic distinctions that did not correspond to "points in the
pattern of his language," however these differences might strike our
objective ear, but that subtle, barely audible, phonetic differences, if
only they hit the "points in the pattern," were easily and voluntarily
expressed in writing. In watching my Nootka interpreter write his
language, I often had the curious feeling that he was transcribing an
ideal flow of phonetic elements which he heard, inadequately from a
purely objective standpoint, as the intention of the actual rumble of
speech.]