III

THE SOUNDS OF LANGUAGE


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