Language - An Introduction to the Study of Speech.pdf - jęz angielski podręczniki - monislaw

LANGUAGE

AN INTRODUCTION TO THE STUDY

OF SPEECH

Edward Sapir

The noted linguist and anthropologist Edward Sapir wrote this work to

show language in “relation to other fundamental interests—the problem

of thought, the nature of the historical process, race, culture, art.”

Language is not only a study of language and culture, but ultimately on

the world of relations and influence.

NEW YORK: HARCOURT, BRACE, 1921

Language a cultural, not a biologically inherited, function. Futility of

interjectional and sound-imitative theories of the origin of speech.

Definition of language. The psycho-physical basis of speech. Concepts

and language. Is thought possible without language? Abbreviations and

transfers of the speech process. The universality of language.

2. THE ELEMENTS OF SPEECH

Sounds not properly elements of speech. Words and significant parts of

words (radical elements, grammatical elements). Types of words. The

word a formal, not a functional unit. The word has a real psychological

existence. The sentence. The cognitive, volitional, and emotional

aspects of speech. Feeling-tones of words.

3. THE SOUNDS OF LANGUAGE

The vast number of possible sounds. The articulating organs and their

share in the production of speech sounds: lungs, glottal cords, nose,

mouth and its parts. Vowel articulations. How and where consonants are

articulated. The phonetic habits of a language. The “values” of sounds.

Phonetic patterns.

4. FORM IN LANGUAGE: GRAMMATICAL PROCESSES

Formal processes as distinct from grammatical functions. Intercrossing

of the two points of view. Six main types of grammatical process. Word

sequence as a method. Compounding of radical elements. Affixing:

prefixes and suffixes; infixes. Internal vocalic change; consonantal

change. Reduplication. Functional variations of stress; of pitch.

5. FORM IN LANGUAGE: GRAMMATICAL CONCEPTS

Analysis of a typical English sentence. Types of concepts illustrated by

it. Inconsistent expression of analogous concepts. How the same

sentence may be expressed in other languages with striking differences

in the selection and grouping of concepts. Essential and non-essential

concepts. The mixing of essential relational concepts with secondary

ones of more concrete order. Form for form’s sake. Classification of

linguistic concepts: basic or concrete, derivational, concrete relational,

pure relational. Tendency for these types of concepts to flow into each

other. Categories expressed in various grammatical systems. Order and

stress as relating principles in the sentence. Concord. Parts of speech:

no absolute classification possible; noun and verb.

6. TYPES OF LINGUISTIC STRUCTURE

The possibility of classifying languages. Difficulties. Classification into

form-languages and formless languages not valid. Classification

according to formal processes used not practicable. Classification

according to degree of synthesis. “Inflective” and “agglutinative.”

Fusion and symbolism as linguistic techniques. Agglutination.

“Inflective” a confused term. Threefold classification suggested: what

types of concepts are expressed? what is the prevailing technique? what

is the degree of synthesis? Four fundamental conceptual types.

Examples tabulated. Historical test of the validity of the suggested

1. INTRODUCTORY: LANGUAGE DEFINED

conceptual classification.

7. LANGUAGE AS A HISTORICAL PRODUCT: DRIFT

Variability of language. Individual and dialectic variations. Time

variation or “drift.” How dialects arise. Linguistic stocks. Direction or

“slope” of linguistic drift. Tendencies illustrated in an English sentence.

Hesitations of usage as symptomatic of the direction of drift. Leveling

tendencies in English. Weakening of case elements. Tendency to fixed

position in the sentence. Drift toward the invariable word.

8. LANGUAGE AS A HISTORICAL PRODUCT:

PHONETIC LAW

Parallels in drift in related languages. Phonetic law as illustrated in the

history of certain English and German vowels and consonants.

Regularity of phonetic law. Shifting of sounds without destruction of

phonetic pattern. Difficulty of explaining the nature of phonetic drifts.

Vowel mutation in English and German. Morphological influence on

phonetic change. Analogical levelings to offset irregularities produced

by phonetic laws. New morphological features due to phonetic change.

9. HOW LANGUAGES INFLUENCE EACH OTHER

Linguistic influences due to cultural contact. Borrowing of words.

Resistances to borrowing. Phonetic modification of borrowed words.

Phonetic interinfluencings of neighboring languages. Morphological

borrowings. Morphological resemblances as vestiges of genetic

relationship.

10. LANGUAGE, RACE AND CULTURE

Naïve tendency to consider linguistic, racial, and cultural groupings as

congruent. Race and language need not correspond. Cultural and

linguistic boundaries not identical. Coincidences between linguistic

cleavages and those of language and culture due to historical, not

intrinsic psychological, causes. Language does not in any deep sense

“reflect” culture.

11. LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE

Language as the material or medium of literature. Literature may move

on the generalized linguistic plane or may be inseparable from specific

linguistic conditions. Language as a collective art. Necessary esthetic

advantages or limitations in any language. Style as conditioned by

inherent features of the language. Prosody as conditioned by the

phonetic dynamics of a language.

PREFACE

THIS little book aims to give a certain perspective on the subject of language rather

than to assemble facts about it. It has little to say of the ultimate psychological basis

of speech and gives only enough of the actual descriptive or historical facts of

particular languages to illustrate principles. Its main purpose is to show what I

conceive language to be, what is its variability in place and time, and what are its

relations to other fundamental human interests—the problem of thought, the nature

of the historical process, race, culture, art.

The perspective thus gained will be useful, I hope, both to linguistic students and

to the outside public that is half inclined to dismiss linguistic notions as the private

pedantries of essentially idle minds. Knowledge of the wider relations of their

science is essential to professional students of language if they are to be saved from a

sterile and purely technical attitude. Among contemporary writers of influence on

liberal thought Croce is one of the very few who have gained an understanding of the

fundamental significance of language. He has pointed out its close relation to the

problem of art. I am deeply indebted to him for this insight. Quite aside from their

intrinsic interest, linguistic forms and historical processes have the greatest possible

diagnostic value for the understanding of some of the more difficult and elusive

problems in the psychology of thought and in the strange, cumulative drift in the life

of the human spirit that we call history or progress orevolution. This value depends

chiefly on the unconscious and unrationalized nature of linguistic structure.

I have avoided most of the technical terms and all of the technical symbols of the

linguistic academy. There is not a single diacritical mark in the book. Where

possible, the discussion is based on English material. It was necessary, however, for

the scheme of the book, which includes a consideration of the protean forms in

which human thought has found expression, to quote some exotic instances. For

these no apology seems necessary. Owing to limitations of space I have had to leave

out many ideas or principles that I should have liked to touch upon. Other points

have had to be barely hinted at in a sentence or flying phrase. Nevertheless, I trust

that enough has here been brought together to serve as a stimulus for the more

fundamental study of a neglected field.

I desire to express my cordial appreciation of the friendly advice and helpful

suggestions of a number of friends who have read the work in manuscript, notably

Profs. A. L. Kroeber and R. H. Lowie of the University of California, Prof. W. D.

Wallis of Reed College, and Prof. J. Zeitlin of the University of Illinois.

EDWARD SAPIR.

OTTAWA, ONT.,

April 8, 1921.

I. INTRODUCTORY: LANGUAGE DEFINED

S PEECH 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 newborn 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 nonsymbolic;

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

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