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Language by Edward Sapir

E >> Edward Sapir >> Language




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 naively 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.




II

THE ELEMENTS OF SPEECH


We have more than once referred to the "elements of speech," by which we
understood, roughly speaking, what are ordinarily called "words." We
must now look more closely at these elements and acquaint ourselves with
the stuff of language. The very simplest element of speech--and by
"speech" we shall hence-forth mean the auditory system of speech
symbolism, the flow of spoken words--is the individual sound, though, as
we shall see later on, the sound is not itself a simple structure but
the resultant of a series of independent, yet closely correlated,
adjustments in the organs of speech. And yet the individual sound is
not, properly considered, an element of speech at all, for speech is a
significant function and the sound as such has no significance. It
happens occasionally that the single sound is an independently
significant element (such as French _a_ "has" and _a_ "to" or Latin _i_
"go!"), but such cases are fortuitous coincidences between individual
sound and significant word. The coincidence is apt to be fortuitous not
only in theory but in point of actual historic fact; thus, the instances
cited are merely reduced forms of originally fuller phonetic
groups--Latin _habet_ and _ad_ and Indo-European _ei_ respectively. If
language is a structure and if the significant elements of language are
the bricks of the structure, then the sounds of speech can only be
compared to the unformed and unburnt clay of which the bricks are
fashioned. In this chapter we shall have nothing further to do with
sounds as sounds.

The true, significant elements of language are generally sequences of
sounds that are either words, significant parts of words, or word
groupings. What distinguishes each of these elements is that it is the
outward sign of a specific idea, whether of a single concept or image or
of a number of such concepts or images definitely connected into a
whole. The single word may or may not be the simplest significant
element we have to deal with. The English words _sing_, _sings_,
_singing_, _singer_ each conveys a perfectly definite and intelligible
idea, though the idea is disconnected and is therefore functionally of
no practical value. We recognize immediately that these words are of two
sorts. The first word, _sing_, is an indivisible phonetic entity
conveying the notion of a certain specific activity. The other words all
involve the same fundamental notion but, owing to the addition of other
phonetic elements, this notion is given a particular twist that modifies
or more closely defines it. They represent, in a sense, compounded
concepts that have flowered from the fundamental one. We may, therefore,
analyze the words _sings_, _singing_, and _singer_ as binary expressions
involving a fundamental concept, a concept of subject matter (_sing_),
and a further concept of more abstract order--one of person, number,
time, condition, function, or of several of these combined.

If we symbolize such a term as _sing_ by the algebraic formula A, we
shall have to symbolize such terms as _sings_ and _singer_ by the
formula A + b.[1] The element A may be either a complete and independent
word (_sing_) or the fundamental substance, the so-called root or
stem[2] or "radical element" (_sing-_) of a word. The element b (_-s_,
_-ing_, _-er_) is the indicator of a subsidiary and, as a rule, a more
abstract concept; in the widest sense of the word "form," it puts upon
the fundamental concept a formal limitation. We may term it a
"grammatical element" or affix. As we shall see later on, the
grammatical element or the grammatical increment, as we had better put
it, need not be suffixed to the radical element. It may be a prefixed
element (like the _un-_ of _unsingable_), it may be inserted into the
very body of the stem (like the _n_ of the Latin _vinco_ "I conquer" as
contrasted with its absence in _vici_ "I have conquered"), it may be the
complete or partial repetition of the stem, or it may consist of some
modification of the inner form of the stem (change of vowel, as in
_sung_ and _song_; change of consonant as in _dead_ and _death_; change
of accent; actual abbreviation). Each and every one of these types of
grammatical element or modification has this peculiarity, that it may
not, in the vast majority of cases, be used independently but needs to
be somehow attached to or welded with a radical element in order to
convey an intelligible notion. We had better, therefore, modify our
formula, A + b, to A + (b), the round brackets symbolizing the
incapacity of an element to stand alone. The grammatical element,
moreover, is not only non-existent except as associated with a radical
one, it does not even, as a rule, obtain its measure of significance
unless it is associated with a particular class of radical elements.
Thus, the _-s_ of English _he hits_ symbolizes an utterly different
notion from the _-s_ of _books_, merely because _hit_ and _book_ are
differently classified as to function. We must hasten to observe,
however, that while the radical element may, on occasion, be identical
with the word, it does not follow that it may always, or even
customarily, be used as a word. Thus, the _hort-_ "garden" of such Latin
forms as _hortus_, _horti_, and _horto_ is as much of an abstraction,
though one yielding a more easily apprehended significance, than the
_-ing_ of _singing_. Neither exists as an independently intelligible and
satisfying element of speech. Both the radical element, as such, and the
grammatical element, therefore, are reached only by a process of
abstraction. It seemed proper to symbolize _sing-er_ as A + (b);
_hort-us_ must be symbolized as (A) + (b).