3.
Edward Sapir1
3.1
Like Saussure's Cours, Sapir's Language, first published in 1921,
seeks to stake out the overall field of language study. The ‘main purpose is
to show what’ Sapir ‘conceives 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’ (SL v).2 He stresses that the ‘content of language is
intimately related to culture’, the
latter defined as ‘the socially inherited assemblage of practices and beliefs
that determines the texture of our lives’ (SL 219, 207). ‘The history of
culture and the history of language move along parallel lines’ (SL 219).3
Indeed, ‘the superficial connections’ between ‘speech’ and ‘other
historical processes are so close that it needs to be shaken free of them if we
are to see it in its own right’ (cf. 4.2; 6.6; 12.9; 13.1). ‘Language’ is
thus an ‘acquired ‘cultural’ function’ rather than ‘an inherent
biological function’ with an ‘instinctive basis’ (SL 3f) (cf. 3.15; 4.2;
8.26, 42, 44, 91; 9.1f, 6ff, 18, 22f, 107; 13.62).4 ‘Eliminate
society’, and ‘the individual’ ‘will never learn to talk, that is, to
communicate ideas according to the traditional system of a particular
society’. ‘Language’ has an even greater ‘universality’ than
‘religion’ or ‘art’: ‘we know of no people that is not possessed of a
fully developed language’ (SL 22). Indeed, ‘language’ may have
‘antedated even the lowliest developments of material culture’, which were
‘not strictly possible until language’ ‘had taken shape’ (SL 23) (cf.
4.10; 8.28; 9.7).
3.2
Such theses project a vast scope for the study of language, in pointed contrast
to the narrower pursuits of the time (cf. 13.3). Sapir hopes to provide ‘a
stimulus for the more fundamental study of a neglected field’ (SL vi). His
book could ‘be useful’ ‘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’ (SL v; cf. 2.88). ‘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’. We should avoid ‘making too much of terminology’, taking too
much ‘account of technical externals’, or parading ‘the technical terms’
and ‘technical symbols of the linguistic academy’ (SL 140, 138, vi). We
should also resist such tendencies as the inclination to ‘worship our
schemes’ as ‘fetishes’; ‘the strong craving for a simple formula’
‘with two poles’ that ‘has been the undoing of linguists’; and ‘the
evolutionary prejudice’ carried over from 19th-century ‘social sciences’
that has been ‘the most powerful deterrent of all to clear thinking’ (SL
122f) (cf. 3.49; 2.6; 13.14).
3.3
Sapir's characteristic stance is a striking mix of sobriety and exuberance. His
portrayals of language, for example, range from staid abstractions of a
Saussurian cast over to extravagant panegyrics. At the sober end, Sapir
describes ‘language’ as a ‘conventional’, ‘arbitrary system of
symbolisms’ (SL 4, 11). Or, less abstractly, it is ‘a purely human and
non-instinctive method of communicating ideas, emotions, and desires by means of
a system of voluntarily produced symbols’ (SL 8). At the exuberant end,
‘language’ is declared ‘the most significant and colossal work that the
human spirit has evolved’; ‘the most self-contained’ and ‘massively
resistant of all social phenomena’; the ‘finished form or expression for all
communicable experience’; and ‘the most massive and inclusive art we know, a
mountainous and anonymous work of unconscious generations’ (SL 220, 206, 231)
(cf. 6.2; 13.22). Moreover, ‘language’ ‘is the most fluid of mediums’
and ‘a summary of thousands upon thousands of individual intuitions’; ‘the
possibilities of individual experience are infinite’ (SL 221, 231) (cf. 3.13,
70; 4.31; 5.25, 28; 8.42). Hence, ‘languages are more to us than systems of
thought transference. They are invisible garments that drape themselves about
our spirit and give a predetermined form to all its symbolic expressions’ (SL
221).
3.4
In Sapir's view, quite unlike Saussure's, ‘language exists only in so far as
it is actually used -- spoken and heard, written and read’ (SL 154f) (cf.
13.36). But this claim is addressed mainly to the ‘pedagogue’ who
‘struggles against’ ‘“incorrect”‘ usage and insists on
‘maintaining caste’ and ‘conserving literary tradition’ (SL 156f) (cf.
2.5, 24, 29; 4.40, 87; 8.26).5 The ‘logical or
historical argument’ of such pedagogues is often ‘hollow’ or
‘psychologically shaky’, lacks ‘vitality’, or promotes ‘false’
‘correctness’ (SL 156ff). Instead, we must ‘look to’ ‘the uncontrolled
speech of the folk’ and examine ‘the general linguistic movement’ and
‘the actual drift of the English language’ (SL 156, 167). ‘The folk makes
no apology’ and feels ‘no twinge of conscience’ about usage, yet ‘has a
more acute flair for the genuine drift of the language than its students’ do
(SL 156, 161). So we should explore how a ‘system proceeds from the
unconscious dynamic habit of the language, falling from the lips of the folk’
(SL 230).
3.5
However, caution is needed because ‘the man in the street does not stop to
analyse his position in the general scheme of humanity’ and may confuse
‘racial, linguistic, and cultural’ ‘classifications’ or see ‘external
history’ as ‘inherent necessity’ (SL 208). Even linguists may be ‘so
accustomed to our own well-worn grooves of expression that they have come to be
felt as inevitable’ (SL 89) (cf. 3.50; 4.4, 72; 5.11; 8.14). Hence, ‘a
destructive analysis of the familiar is the only method of approach to an
understanding of fundamentally different modes of expression’.
3.6
In Sapir's exuberant outlook, ‘the fundamental groundwork of language’
‘meets us perfected and systematized in every language known to us’ (SL 22).
Yet he is equally impressed by the ‘incredible diversity’ of ‘speech’.
Indeed, ‘the total number of possible sounds is greatly in excess of those in
use’ (SL 44). From among ‘the indefinitely large number of articulated
sounds available’, each ‘language makes use of an explicit, rigidly
economical selection’ (SL 46). In ‘grammatical notions’ too, ‘the
theoretical possibilities’ ‘are indefinitely numerous’; ‘it depends
entirely on the genius of the particular language what function is inherently
involved in a given sequence of words’ (SL 63).
3.7
Exuberance and sobriety are again mixed in Sapir's characterization of language
as a system. An exuberant conception (just cited) is ‘the genius of language’: the ‘type’ or ‘basic plan’, ‘much
more fundamental, much more pervasive, than any single feature’ or any
‘fact’ of ‘grammar’ (SL 120) (cf. 3.32, 46, 51, 63, 68). This
‘genius’ is variously claimed to affect the ‘possibilities of combining
phonetic elements’; the interdependence of ‘syllables’; the amount of
‘conceptual material’ ‘taken in’ by the individual ‘word’ (3.32);
the ‘outward markings’ of ‘syntactic equivalents’ with ‘functionally
equivalent affixes’; the ‘functions’ of ‘sequences of words’; the
selection of ‘conventional interjections’; and even the ‘effects’ a
‘literary artist’ can draw from ‘the colour and texture’ of the
language's ‘matrix’ (SL 54, 35, 32, 115, 63, 5, 222). Only in regard to
‘race’ does Sapir dismiss the notion of ‘genius’ as a ‘mystic
slogan’ or a ‘sentimental creed’ (SL 208f, 212).
3.8
A sober conception, on the other hand, is the ‘economy’ of a language. This conception is applied to the
‘selection’ of ‘articulated sounds’; the ‘alternations between long
and short syllables’; the availability of ‘rhyme’; and the relative
importance of ‘word order’ versus ‘case suffixes’ (SL 46 229f, 64). The
‘economy’ also ‘irons out’ the ‘less frequently occurring
associations’ between ‘radical elements, grammatical elements, words’, or
‘sentences’ on one side, and ‘concepts or groups of concepts’ on the
other (SL 37f). This process limits the ‘randomness of association’ and
thereby makes ‘grammar’ possible (cf. 2.29). Even the single sentence is
said to have a ‘local economy’ of ‘its terms’ (SL 85).
3.9
If we ‘accept language as a fully formed functional system within man's
psychic or “spiritual” constitution’, then ‘we cannot define it as an
entity in psycho-physical terms alone’ (SL 10f). We should ‘discuss the
intention, the form, and the history of speech’ ‘as an institutional or
cultural entity’ and ‘take for granted’ ‘the organic and psychological
mechanisms back of it’. Sapir is thus ‘not concerned with those aspects of
physiology and physiological psychology that underlie speech’ (cf. 2.31). He
alludes only in passing to ‘the vast network of associated localizations in
the brain and lower nervous tracts’ (cf. 4.10, 14, 18f; 8.21, 23).
‘Language’ ‘cannot be definitely ‘localized’ in the brain’, ‘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’ (cf. 2.16, 31, 66; 7.31, 93, 743; 816).
3.10
Although Sapir vows he has ‘little to say about the ultimate psychological
basis of speech’, he believes that ‘linguistic forms’ ‘have the greatest
possible diagnostic value’ for ‘understanding’ ‘problems in the
psychology of thought and in the
strange, cumulative drift in the life of the human spirit’ (SL vf) (cf. 5.69;
6.2, 6; 7.10; 8.24; 12.17ff, 22, 62; 13.10).6 ‘Language and our
thought grooves are inextricably interrelated, are in a sense, one and the
same’ (SL 217f). ‘Linguistic morphology is nothing more or less than a
collective art of thought, an art denuded of the irrelevancies of
individual sentiment’ (SL 218). Moreover, ‘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’ (SL 21). ‘Even
those who’ ‘think without the slightest use of sound imagery are at last
analysis, dependent upon it’, ‘the auditory-motor associations’ being
‘unconsciously brought into play’ (SL 20). As proof, Sapir cites ‘the
frequent experience of fatigue in the speech organs’ after ‘unusually’
‘intensive thinking’ (SL 19).7 ‘Gesture languages’ too owe
their ‘intelligibility’ to ‘their automatic and silent translation into
the terms of a fuller flow of speech’ (SL 21).
3.11
Consequently, ‘the feeling entertained by so many that they can think, or even
reason, without language is an illusion’ (SL 15). ‘Thought may be no more
conceivable, in its genesis and daily practice, without speech than is
mathematical reasoning practicable’ without a ‘mathematical symbolism’. An
evolutionary connection is propounded: ‘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’ (cf. 4.34; 8.6). ‘The product
grows’ ‘with the instrument’, and ‘the growth of speech’ is
‘dependent on the development of thought’ (SL 15, 17). In view of ‘the
unconscious and unrationalized nature of linguistic structure’, ‘the most
rarefied thought may be but the conscious counterpart of an unconscious
linguistic symbolism’ (SL vi, 16). The idea that ‘people’ ‘are in the
main unconscious’ of the ‘forms’ they ‘handle’, ‘regardless of their
material advancement or backwardness of the people’ (SL 124) (cf. 3.61), is
favoured by other theorists as well (cf. 13.49). Sapir also surmises that the
‘analysis’ of forms is ‘unconscious, or rather unknown, to the normal
speaker’, implying that ‘students of language cannot be entirely normal in
their attitude toward their own speech’ (SL 161, n) (cf. 13.1, 49).
3.12
However, ‘language and thought are not strictly coterminous’, and ‘the
flow of language itself is not always indicative of thought’ (SL 14f). ‘At
best language can but be the outward facet of thought on the highest, most
generalized, level of symbolic expression’, rather than ‘the final label put
upon the finished thought’ (cf. 7.25). Conversely, ‘from the point of view
of language, thought may be defined as the highest latent or potential content
of speech’, its ‘fullest conceptual value’. Or, ‘language, as a
structure, is on its inner face the mould of thought’ (SL 22). Still, ‘the
feeling of a free, non-linguistic stream of thought’ may be ‘justified’ in
‘cases’ wherein ‘the symbolic expression of thought’ ‘runs along
outside the fringe of the conscious mind’. This view concurs with ‘modern
psychology’, whose ‘recent’ literature’ ‘has shown us how powerfully
symbolism is at work in the unconscious mind’ (SL 16, 126n). Perhaps ‘a more
general psychology than Freud's will eventually prove’ ‘the mechanisms of
“repression of impulse” and of its symptomatic symbolization’ ‘to be as
applicable to the groping for abstract form, the logical or esthetic ordering of
experience, as to the life of the fundamental instincts’ (SL 157n).8
3.13
A ‘speech sound’ attains ‘linguistic significance’ by being
‘associated with some element or group of elements of experience’;
‘this “element”‘ ‘is the content or meaning of the linguistic unit’
(SL 10). Hence, ‘the elements of language’ are ‘symbols that ticket off
experience’ (SL 12). For that purpose, ‘the world of our experiences must be
enormously simplified and generalized’ into ‘a symbolic inventory’. ‘The
concreteness of experience is infinite, the resources of the richest language
are strictly limited’ (SL 84). Besides, ‘the single experience lodges in an
individual consciousness and is, strictly speaking, incommunicable’ (SL 12).
So ‘we must arbitrarily throw whole masses of experience together as similar
enough to warrant being looked upon -- mistakenly but conveniently -- as
identical’, ‘in spite of great and obvious differences’ (SL 13). ‘It is
almost as though at some period in the past the unconscious mind of the race had
made a hasty inventory of experience’ and ‘saddled the inheritors of its
language’ with a ‘premature classification that allowed of no revision’
(SL 100). ‘Linguistic categories make up a system of surviving dogma -- dogma
of the unconscious’.
3.14
Sapir thus concludes that ‘the latent content of all languages’ is ‘the
intuitive science of experience’ (SL 218) (cf. 3.23; 12.12f; 13.24). ‘The
essence of language consists in assigning conventional, voluntarily articulated
sounds’ ‘to diverse elements of experience’ (SL 11). The
‘“concept”‘ serves as ‘a convenient capsule of thought that embraces
thousands of experiences’ (SL 13). ‘The single impression’ enters one's
‘generalized memory’, which is in turn ‘merged with the notions of all
other individuals’. ‘The particular experience’ gets ‘widened so as to
embrace all possible impressions or images that sentient beings may form or have
formed’.
3.15
Despite his reverence for Freudian ideas and his emphasis on experience, Sapir
shows scant concern for ‘volition and emotion’, albeit ‘they are, strictly
speaking, never absent from normal speech’ (SL 39). ‘Ideation reigns supreme
in language’; ‘volition and emotion come in as distinctly secondary
factors’ (SL 38) (cf. 9.15). ‘Their expression is not of a truly linguistic
nature’. To support this outlook, Sapir judges the ‘expression’ of
‘impulse and feeling’ to be ‘but modified forms of the instinctive
utterance that man shares with the lower animals’ rather than ‘part of the
essential cultural conception of language’ (cf. 3.1). Though ‘most words’
‘have an associated feeling-tone’ derived from ‘pleasure or pain’, this
tone is not ‘an inherent value in the word itself’, but ‘a sentimental
growth on the word's true body, on its conceptual kernel’ (SL 39f). ‘Speech
demands conceptual selection’ and the ‘inhibition of the randomness of
instinctive behaviour’ (SL 46n) (cf. 3.9). Besides, ‘the feeling-tone’
‘varies from individual to individual’ and ‘from time to time’ (SL 40).
So ‘desire, purpose, emotion are the personal colour of the objective
world’, and constitute ‘non-linguistic facts’ (SL 39, 46n).
3.16
Even in its more rarefied domains, Sapir finds language far from ideal. He notes
a ‘powerful tendency for a formal elaboration that does not correspond to
clear-cut conceptual differences’ (SL 98) (cf. 2.49).9 Instead, we
run up against ‘form for form's sake’, and a ‘curious lack of accord
between function and form’ (SL 98, 100, 89) (cf. 3.22, 24, 33; 4.47, 49; 7.63;
8.58; 9.19; 12.25, 27; 13.54). ‘Irrational form’ ‘is as natural to the
life of language as is the retention of modes of conduct that have long outlived
the meaning they once had’ (SL 98). ‘Phonetic processes’ favour
‘non-significant differences in form’; and ‘grammatical concepts’ tend
to ‘degenerate into purely formal counters’ (SL 100; cf. SL 61).
3.17
Again like Saussure (cf. 2.68ff), Sapir declares 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’ ‘a linguistic element at
all’ (SL 42; cf. 2.68; 4.29; 6.7). ‘The mere sounds of speech are not the
essential fact of language’ (SL 22). ‘Language is not identical with its
auditory symbolism’, though it is a ‘primarily auditory system of symbols’
(SL 16f). ‘Communication’ ‘is successful only when the hearer's auditory
perceptions are translated into the appropriate and intended flow of imagery or
thought’ (SL 18).
3.18
Nevertheless, ‘the cycle of speech’ as ‘a purely external instrument
begins and ends in sounds’ (SL 18) (cf. 2.17, 67; 13.27). ‘Speech is so
inevitably bound up with sounds and their articulation that we can hardly
avoid’ ‘the subject of phonetics’ (SL 42) (cf. 2.70f; 3.14, 21; 4.29;
5.42; 8.70; 13.26). ‘Neither the purely formal aspects of a language nor the
course of its history can be fully understood without reference’ to its
‘sounds’. At one point, Sapir asserts that ‘auditory’ and ‘motor
imagery’ are ‘the historic fountain-head of all speech and of all
thinking’ (SL 21) (cf. 3.10, 37; 8.6).
3.19
In regard to sound systems, ‘the feeling’ of ‘the average speaker’ is
not reliable, but ‘largely illusory’, namely that a ‘language’ ‘is
built up’ ‘of a comparatively small number of distinct sounds, each of which
is rather accurately provided for in the current alphabet by one letter’ (SL
42f) (cf. 2.22f; 4.38; 6.50; 7.46, 66; 8.11, 53, 75f; 13.26). ‘Phonetic
analysis convinces one that the number of clearly distinguishable sounds and
nuances of sounds that are habitually employed by speakers of a language is far
greater than they themselves realize’ (cf. 4.29).
3.20
We should rather assume that ‘every language’ ‘is characterized’ ‘by
its ideal system of sounds and by the underlying phonetic pattern’ (SL 56).10
‘The actual rumble of speech’ must therefore be traced to an ‘ideal flow
of phonetic elements’ (cf. 2.68; 4.30; 5.42f; 13.26). ‘Back of the purely
objective system of sounds’, each language has ‘a more restricted
“inner” or “ideal” system’ that can ‘be brought to consciousness as
a finished pattern, a psychological mechanism’ (SL 55).11 ‘The
inner sound-system, overlaid though it may be with the mechanical or the
irrelevant, is a real and immensely important principle in the life of a
language’. ‘Unless their phonetic “values” are determined’, ‘the
objective comparison of sounds’ has ‘no psychological or historical
significance'
3.21
For ‘the organic classification of speech sounds’, Sapir offers four
criteria: ‘the position of the glottal chords’; the passage of ‘breath’
through the ‘mouth’ or ‘nose’; ‘free’ or ‘impeded’ passage; and
‘the precise points of articulation’ (SL 52f). This scheme should be
‘sufficient to account for all, or practically all, the sounds of language’.12
For example, ‘each language selects a limited number of clearly defined
positions as characteristic of its consonantal system, ignoring transitional or
extreme positions’. Or, the language picks out its ‘voiced sounds’, which,
being ‘the most clearly audible elements of speech’, ‘are carriers of
practically all significant differences in stress, pitch, and syllabication’
(SL 49) (cf. 4.34). ‘The voiceless sounds’ serve to ‘break up the stream
of voice with fleeting moments of silence’.
3.22
Besides the ‘system of sounds’, ‘a definite grammatical structure’ ‘characterizes’ ‘every language’
(SL 56). ‘“Grammatical” processes’ are ‘the formal methods employed by
a language’ (SL 57) (cf. 13.54). ‘Grammar’ indicates that ‘all languages
have an inherent economy of expression’, wherein ‘analogous concepts and
relations are most conveniently symbolized in analogous forms’ (SL 38) (cf.
3.8). ‘Were language ever completely “grammatical”, it would be a perfect
engine of conceptual expression. Unfortunately or luckily, no language is
tyrannically consistent. All grammars leak’ (cf. 13.59). Hence, we should
expect to find a ‘relative independence’, or a ‘lack of accord’,
‘between function and form’ (SL 58f, 89; cf. SL 64, 69ff; 3.16).
3.23
For Sapir, ‘our conventional classification of words into “parts of speech is only a vague wavering approximation of a
consistently worked-out inventory of experience’, ‘far from corresponding’
to a ‘simple’ ‘analysis of reality’ (SL 117) (cf. 2.30, 65; 3.13; 4.55;
5.72f; 9.27; 13.7, 24). ‘The “parts of speech”‘ ‘grade into each
other’ or are ‘actually convertible into each other’ (SL 118) (cf. 13.54).
Hence, they ‘reflect not so much our intuitive analysis of reality as our
ability to compose that reality into a variety of formal patterns’. ‘For
this reason no logical scheme of the parts of speech -- their number, nature,
and necessary confines -- is of the slightest interest to the linguist’ (SL
119) (13.7, 17).
3.24
Taken by itself, ‘every language’ does have ‘a definite feeling for
patterning on the level of grammatical formation’ (SL 61). ‘All languages
evince a curious instinct for the development of one or more grammatical
processes at the expense of others, tending always to lose sight of any explicit
functional value that the process may have had’ and ‘delighting, it would
seem, in the sheer play of its means of expression’ (SL 60) (cf. 3.16). The
‘feeling for form as such, freely expanding along predetermined lines, and
greatly inhibited in certain directions by the lack of controlling patterns,
should be more clearly understood than it seems to be’ (SL 61). Meanwhile, a
strong later trend in American linguistics was foreshadowed by Sapir's
recommendation that ‘linguistic form may and should be studied as types of
patterning, apart from the associated functions’ (SL 60) (cf. 4.49; 7.63;
13.54). This counsel is ominous if ‘a linguistic phenomenon cannot be looked
upon as illustrating a definite “process” unless it has an inherent
functional value’ (SL 62).
3.25
‘The various grammatical processes that linguistic research has established’
‘may be grouped into six main types: word order, composition, affixation’,
‘internal modification’, ‘reduplication, and accentual differences’ (SL
61).13 Of these, word order
is ‘the most economical method of conveying some sort of grammatical notion’
-- ‘juxtaposing two or more words in a definite sequence’ (SL 62). ‘It is
psychologically impossible to see or hear two words juxtaposed without straining
to give them some measure of coherent significance’. When ‘two simple’
words, or even mere ‘radicals’ (roots), ‘are put before the human mind in
immediate sequence it strives to bind them together with connecting values’.
3.26
‘Composition’ is ‘the uniting
into a single word of two or more radical elements’ (SL 64) (compare
Saussure's ‘agglutination’, 2.64). ‘Psychologically, this process is
closely allied to word order in so far as the relation between the elements is
implied, not explicitly stated’. But ‘it differs’ ‘in that the
compounded elements are felt as constituting but parts of a single
word-organism’. ‘However, then, in its ultimate origins the process of
composition may go back to typical sequences of words in the sentence, it is
now, for the most part, a specialized method of expressing relations’ (SL 65)
(cf. 13.54).
3.27
‘Affixation is incomparably the
most frequently employed’ ‘of all grammatical processes’ (SL 67) (cf.
2.62). A well-developed system of affixes may allow a language to be somewhat
‘indifferent’ about ‘word order’ by compensating with ‘differences’
that are ‘rhetorical or stylistic’ rather than ‘strictly grammatical’
(SL 63) (cf. 7.55). ‘Of the three types of affixing -- the use of prefixes,
suffixes, and infixes -- suffixing is much the commonest’ and may indeed ‘do
more of the formative work of language than all other methods combined’. In
some languages (e.g. Nootka of Vancouver Island), ‘suffixed elements’ ‘may
have as concrete a significance as the radical element itself’ (SL 66; cf. SL
71n). In others (e.g. Latin and Russian), ‘the suffixes alone relate the word
to the rest of the sentence’ by demarcating ‘the less concrete, more
strictly formal, notions of time,14 person, plurality, and
passivity’, while ‘the prefixes’ are ‘confined to the expression of such
ideas as delimit the concrete significance of the radical element’ (SL 68).
Still, ‘in probably the majority of languages that use both types of affixes,
each group has both delimiting and formal or relational functions’ (SL 69).
3.28
‘Internal modification’ entails
‘vocalic or consonantal change’, and is ‘a subsidiary but by no means
unimportant grammatical process’ (SL 61, 73). ‘In some languages, as in
English’, it ‘indicates fundamental changes of grammatical function’.
‘Consonantal change’ ‘is probably far less common than vocalic’, but
‘not exactly rare’, appearing prominently in ‘Celtic languages’ for
instance (SL 74f).
3.29
‘Reduplication’ is a
‘natural’ operation, namely ‘the repetition of all or part of the radical
element’ (SL 76). ‘This process is generally employed, with self-evident
symbolism, to indicate such concepts as distribution, plurality, repetition,
customary activity, increase of size, added intensity, continuance’. ‘The
most characteristic examples’ ‘repeat only part of radical element’,
mainly to signal ‘repetition or continuance’ of an action (SL 77f).
3.30
‘Variations in accent, whether of
stress or of pitch’, are ‘the subtlest of all grammatical processes’ (SL
78f). ‘Accent as a functional process’ is hard to ‘isolate’, being
‘often combined with ‘alternations in vocalic quantity or quality or
complicated by the presence of affixed elements’. Even so, ‘pitch accent’
in particular ‘is far less infrequently employed as a grammatical process than
our own habits of speech would prepare us to believe’ (SL 81).
3.31
Once more like Saussure, Sapir is cautious about the status of the word
(cf. 2.18; 4.54, 60; 5.53; 6.23; 8.54; 12.69, 71, 77; 13.29). He remarks that
the word is ‘roughly’ ‘the “element of speech”‘, or ‘the first
speech element that we have found which we can say actually “exists”‘ (SL
24, 27). ‘Linguistic experience’ ‘indicates overwhelmingly’ ‘that
there is not, as a rule, the slightest difficulty in bringing the word to
consciousness as a psychological reality’ (SL 33) (cf. 13.57). ‘The
psychological validity of the word’ is strikingly revealed when ‘the naive
Indian, quite unaccustomed to the concept of the written word’, still
‘dictates a text to a linguistic student word by word’ (SL 33f). Yet ‘the
psychological existence’ of the word is not based on its outward shape, e.g.,
on its ‘phonetic characteristics’, such as ‘accent’ or ‘cadence’;
these ‘at best strengthen a feeling of unity that is already present on other
grounds’ (SL 35). Above all, ‘the word’ ‘cannot be cut into without a
disturbance of meaning’.
3.32
Sapir predictably favours a mentalistic account, though not in terms of
one-to-one correspondences between word and meaning (cf. 5.48, 64; 6.27; 9.39;
13.54). It is ‘impossible’ to ‘define the word as the symbolic, linguistic
counterpart of a single concept’ (SL 32). ‘Words, significant parts of
words, or word groupings’ can all be ‘the outward sign of a specific idea’
(SL 25). Conversely, ‘the single word expresses either a simple concept or a
combination of concepts so interrelated as to form a psychological unity’ (SL
82). Hence, ‘the word may be anything from the expression of a single concept
-- concrete or abstract or purely relational -- to the expression of a complete
thought’ (SL 32). ‘The word is merely a form, a definitely moulded entity
that takes in as much or as little of the conceptual material of the whole
thought as the genius of the language allows’ (cf. 3.7; 12.63). Therefore,
‘the single word may or may not be the simplest significant element of speech
we have to deal with’ (SL 25).15 ‘The mind must rest on
something; if it cannot linger on the constituent elements, it hastens all the
more eagerly to the acceptance of the word as a whole’ (SL 132; cf. CG 177)
(cf. 13.32).
3.33
We might proceed not up from smaller units but down from larger units by
stipulating that ‘the word is one of the smallest, completely satisfying bits
of isolated “meaning” into which the sentence resolves itself’ (SL 34)
(cf. 13.26). ‘Radical (or grammatical) elements and sentences’ ‘are the
primary functional units of speech,
the former as an abstracted minimum, the latter as an esthetically satisfying
embodiment of a unified thought’ (SL 32). ‘The words’, in contrast, are
‘the actual formal units of
speech’ and ‘may on occasion identify themselves with either of the two
functional units; more often they mediate between the two extremes’. ‘The
importance’ of ‘methods of binding words into a larger unity’ ‘is apt to
vary with the complexity of the individual word’ (SL 109).
3.34
A parallel between word and sentence is drawn to describe ‘complex words’,
i.e., ‘firmly solidified groups of elements’ (SL 111). The ‘elements’
‘are related to each other in a specific way and follow each other in a
rigorously determined sequence’ (SL 110). ‘A word which consists of more
than a radical element is a crystallization of a sentence or some portion of a
sentence’ (SL 111) (cf. 2.55; 3.26; 4.61; 5.41; 8.56; 11.40, 79f; 12.71, 75,
77, 93; 13.54). ‘Speech is thus constantly tightening and loosening its
sequences’ (SL 112). ‘Complex words’ illustrate this process: ‘while
they are fully alive’ and ‘functional at every point, they can keep
themselves at a psychological distance from their neighbours; as they gradually
lose much of their life, they fall back into the embrace of the sentence as a
whole and the sequence of independent words regains the importance it had in
part transferred to the crystallized groups of elements’ (SL 111f).
3.35
‘Breaking down, then, the wall that separates word and sentence, we may
ask’: what ‘are the fundamental methods’ of ‘passing from the isolated
notions symbolized by each word’ or ‘element to the unified proposition that
corresponds to a thought?’ (SL 110). The answer is a ‘venturesome and yet
not altogether unreasonable speculation that sees in word order and stress the
primary methods for the expression of all syntactic relations and looks upon the
present relational value of specific words and elements as but a secondary
condition’ (SL 113). ‘At some point’, ‘order asserts itself in every
language as the most fundamental of relating principles’ (SL 116) (cf. 3.25;
7.3, 55; 11.64, 86).
3.36
Along these lines, pursuing the status of the word leads to the status of the
sentence. Sapir cheerfully says the ‘definition’ of the ‘sentence’ ‘is
not difficult’, since it is ‘the major functional unit of speech’ (SL 35;
cf. SL 66). Also, ‘it is the linguistic expression of a proposition
(SL
35) (cf. 3.44f; 8.55; 9.72, 924; 11.39-50). Just as a ‘sentence’
‘combines a subject of discourse with a statement in regard to this
subject’, a ‘proposition’ involves ‘a subject of discourse’ plus
‘something’ ‘said about it’ (SL 35, 119). ‘The sentence does not lose
its feeling of unity so long as each and every one’ of its ‘elements’
‘falls into place as contributory to the definition of either the subject of
discourse or the core of the predicate’ (SL 36). Still, ‘the vast majority
of languages’ ‘create some formal barrier between these two terms of the
proposition’ (SL 119). ‘The most common subject of discourse’ ‘is a
noun’ and may be either ‘subject’ or ‘object’ in the traditional
‘technical sense’ (SL 119, 87f, 82f, 94). The thing ‘predicated of a
subject is generally an activity’ whose ‘form’ is a ‘verb’ (SL 119).
‘No language wholly fails to distinguish noun and verb’, whereas no ‘other
parts of speech’ are ‘imperatively required for the life of language’.16
3.37
Like the word, ‘the sentence’ ‘has a psychological as well as a merely
logical or abstracted existence’ (SL 35) (cf. 13.7). Sapir ventures to assert
that ‘in all languages’, ‘the sentence is the outgrowth of historical and
unreasoning psychological forces rather than of a logical synthesis of elements
that have been clearly grasped in their individuality’ (SL 90). ‘The
sentence is the logical counterpart of the complete thought only if it be felt
as made up of the radical and grammatical elements that lurk in the recesses of
its words’ (SL 33).17 Such passages invoking the failure of
language to be ‘logical’ (also SL 89, 91, 97, 102, 119, 135, 156) call to
mind the longstanding dispute among linguists over the use of logic as a model
(cf. 13.17)
3.38
Sapir is more in tune with future trends of linguistics when he surmises that
‘underlying the finished sentence is a living sentence type, of fixed formal
characteristics’ (SL 37) (cf. 7.95). A type can be recognized when ‘we feel
instinctively, without the slightest attempt at conscious analysis, that two
sentences fit the same pattern, that they are really the same fundamental
sentence’ (SL 85) (cf. 4.68f; 5.40, 58; 7.51, 90f; 12.77). ‘These fixed
types or actual sentence-groundworks may be freely overlaid by such additional
matter as the speaker or writer cares to put on, but they are themselves as
rigidly “given” by tradition as are the radical and grammatical elements
abstracted from the finished word’ (SL 37). ‘New sentences are being
constantly created’ ‘in the same way’ as ‘new words may be consciously
created from these fundamental elements’ (cf. 7.44; 13.54). ‘The enlarged
sentence, however, allows as a rule of considerable freedom’ of
‘“unessential” parts’. ‘Such a sentence as “The mayor of New York is
going to deliver a speech of welcome in French” is readily felt as a unified
statement, incapable of reduction by the transfer of certain of its elements, in
their given form, to the preceding or following sentences’ (SL 36). But some
‘contributory ideas’, such as ‘“of New York”‘ or ‘“of
welcome”‘, ‘may be eliminated without hurting the idiomatic flow of the
sentence’ (cf. 7.51).
3.39
Still, this ‘freedom’ has its limits. ‘Change any of the features of a
sentence’ like ‘“The farmer kills the duckling”, and it becomes
modified, slightly or seriously, in some purely relational, non-material
regard’ (SL 85, 82). If the finite verb precedes both subject and object
(“kills the farmer the duckling?”), we get ‘an unusual but not
unintelligible mode’; but if articles are omitted (“farmer kills
duckling”), ‘the sentence becomes impossible -- it falls into no recognized
pattern and the two subjects of discourse seem to hang in the void’ (SL 87,
85). (As this judgment implies, ‘newspaper headlines’ ‘are language only
in a derived sense’, SL 36n). Moreover, ‘co-ordinate sentences’ are
disqualified on the opposite grounds of including too much: they ‘may only
doubtfully be considered as truly unified predications’ (SL 36).
3.40
Alongside phonetic and grammatical structures, ‘conceptual structure’ also ‘shows the instinctive feeling of
language for form’ (SL 56) (cf. 3.16). ‘The material of language reflects
the world of concepts’, and ‘the essential fact of language’ lies ‘in
the classification, in the formal patterning, and in the relating of concepts’
(SL 38, 22). Moreover, ‘the actual flow of speech may be interpreted as a
record of the setting’ of ‘concepts into mutual relations’ (SL 13). At
least, ‘the unconscious analysis into individual concepts’ ‘is never
entirely absent from speech, however it may be complicated and overlaid with
irrational factors’ (SL 90). Reciprocally, a ‘concept does not attain to
individual and independent life until it has found a distinctive linguistic
embodiment’ (SL 17). ‘As soon as the word is at hand’, we feel ‘that the
concept is ours for the handling’.
3.41
Sapir proposes to look into ‘the nature of the world of concepts’ as
‘reflected and systematized in linguistic structure’ (SL 82). He raises the
prospect of ‘reviewing the purely formal processes used by all known languages
to affect fundamental concepts -- those embodied in unanalysable words or in the
radical elements of words -- by the modifying or formative influence of
subsidiary concepts’. He tells ‘the general reader’ that ‘language
struggles toward two poles of linguistic expression -- material content and
relation -- and that these poles are connected by a long series of transitional
concepts’ (SL 109). ‘Particularly’ ‘in exotic languages’, we are not
able ‘to tell infallibly what is “material content” and what is
“relation”‘ (SL 102).
3.42
‘What then are the absolutely essential concepts in speech that must be
expressed if language is to be a satisfactory means of communication?’ (SL
93). ‘We must have, first of all, a large stock of basic or radical concepts,
the concrete wherewithal of speech’. ‘We must have objects, actions,
qualities to talk about’, plus ‘their corresponding symbols in independent
words or in radical elements’. Sapir's ‘tabular statement’ of
‘concepts’ is divided on one side into ‘concrete’,
which subsumes ‘radical’ and ‘derivational’; and on the other side into
‘relational’, which subsumes ‘reference’, ‘modality’,
‘personal relations’ (i.e. subject and object), ‘number’, and ‘time’
(SL 88f). However, he warns that ‘in the actual work of analysis difficult
problems frequently arise’ about ‘how to group a given set of concepts’
(SL 102) (cf. 13.59).
3.43
Besides, ‘it would be impossible for any language to express every concrete
idea by an independent word or radical element’ (SL 84). Instead, it must
‘throw countless concepts under the rubric of certain basic ones’, using
other ‘ideas as functional mediators’ (cf. 9.62-69). The latter ‘ideas’
‘may be called’ ‘derivational’ or ‘qualifying’ and may be
‘expressed’ by ‘independent words, affixes, or modifications of the
radical elements’ (cf. 3.27f). ‘Radical’
and ‘derivational’ are thus ‘two modes of expression’ as well as
‘two types of concepts and of linguistic elements’.
3.44
‘In origin’, however, ‘all of the actual content of speech’ is
‘limited to the concrete; relations were originally not expressed in outward
form but were merely implied and articulated with the help of order and
rhythm’ (SL 114) (cf. 3.35). ‘No known language’ ‘succeeds in saying
something without the use of symbols for concrete concepts’ (SL 94). And ‘no
proposition, however abstract in its intent, is humanly possible without tying
on’ ‘to the concrete world of sense’ (SL 93). Accordingly, ‘such
relational concepts must be expressed as moor the concrete concepts to each
other and construct a definite, fundamental form of proposition’ allowing
‘no doubt as to the nature of the relations’. ‘Most languages’ ‘throw
a bold bridge between’ ‘the concrete and the abstractly relational’ (SL
95).
3.45
Sapir thus ‘revises our first classification’ (summarized in 3.43) and
suggests another ‘scheme’ for the ‘classification of concepts as expressed
in language’, proceeding through ‘a gradual loss of the concrete’ (SL 100,
103). He enumerates: ‘I. Basic Concrete Concepts’; ‘II. Derivational
Concepts’, ‘less concrete’; ‘III. Concrete Relational Concepts,
still more abstract’; and ‘IV. Pure Relational Concepts, purely
abstract’ (SL 101). Concepts in class I ‘involve no relation’ except what
is ‘implied in defining one concept against another’; concepts in II
‘concern only the radical element, not the sentence’; concepts in III
‘transcend the particular word’; and concepts in IV give ‘the
proposition’ ‘definite syntactic form’. Class I is ‘normally expressed
by independent words or radical elements’, and the other classes by
‘affixing non-radical elements to radical elements’. Sapir conjectures that
‘concepts of class I’ and ‘IV’ ‘are ‘essential to all speech’,
whereas ‘II and III are both common, but not essential’ (SL 102).
3.46
Though he considers his classes ‘logically’ ‘distinct’, he concedes that
‘the illogical, metaphorical genius of language’ has ‘set up a continuous
gamut of concepts and forms that leads imperceptibly from the crudest of
materialities’ ‘to the most subtle of relations’ (SL 102) (cf. 3.37). The
gamut runs parallel to ‘a constant fading away of the feeling of sensible
reality’ (SL 103). In addition, ‘impulses to definite form operate’
‘regardless of the need’ for ‘giving consistent external shape to
particular groups of concepts’ (SL 61).
3.47
His scheme of concepts animates Sapir to propose an ambitious ‘conceptual
classification of languages’ reflecting ‘the translation of concepts into
linguistic symbols’ (SL 138). It would be ideal to have ‘a simple, incisive,
and absolutely inclusive method of classifying all known languages’ (SL 136).
But ‘classifications’, those ‘neat constructions of the speculative mind,
are slippery things’ and ‘have to be tested at every possible opportunity’
(SL 144). ‘Various classifications have been suggested’ before, and ‘none
proves satisfactory’ (SL 122) (4.62, 72). ‘It is dangerous to generalize
from a small number of selected languages’. Nor is the problem cured merely by
throwing in ‘a sprinkling of exotic types’ to ‘supplement the few
languages nearer home that we are more immediately interested in’.
3.48
Since ‘languages’ ‘are exceedingly complex historical structures’, we
should not ‘pigeonhole’ ‘each language’, but ‘evolve a flexible
method’ to ‘place it, from two or three independent standpoints, relatively
to another language’ (SL 140). ‘We are too ill-informed as yet of the
structural spirit of great numbers of languages to have the right to frame a
classification that is other than flexible and experimental’. ‘Like any
human institution, speech is too variable, too elusive to be quite safely
ticketed’ (SL 121).
3.49
However, we must not rush to the other extreme and take the ‘difficulty of
classification’ as a ‘proof’ of its ‘uselessness’ (SL 121). ‘It
would be too easy to relieve ourselves of the burden of constructive thinking’
by asserting that ‘each language has its unique history, therefore its unique
structure’. We should rather proceed with caution, striving to resist the
‘craving for a simple formula’ -- e.g., ‘a triune formula’ with ‘two
poles’ and ‘a “transitional type”‘ (SL 122f) (cf. 3.2).
3.50
Above all, linguists must beware of holding the ‘grooves of expression’ of
their native language to be ‘inevitable’ (SL 89) (cf. 3.5; 13.42). ‘The
classification of language’ remains ‘fruitless’ as long as one assumes
that ‘familiar languages’ like ‘Latin and Greek’ ‘represent the
“highest development”‘, and that ‘all other types were but steps on the
way to this beloved “inflective” type’ (SL 123) (cf. 3.53). Only ‘when
one has learned to feel what is fortuitous or illogical or unbalanced in the
structure of one's own language’ can one attain ‘a sympathetic grasp of the
expression of the various classes of concepts in alien types of speech’ (SL
89). ‘Not everything that is “outlandish” is intrinsically illogical and
farfetched. It is often precisely the familiar that a wider perspective reveals
as the curiously exceptional’. ‘If, therefore, we wish to understand
language in its true inwardness we must disabuse our minds of preferred
“values” and accustom ourselves to look upon English and Hottentot with the
same cool, yet interested detachment’ (SL 124). ‘Any classification that
starts with preconceived values or that works up to sentimental satisfactions is
self-condemned as unscientific’.18
3.51
Outward appearances may be deceiving. ‘The fact that two languages are
similarly classified does not necessarily mean that they present a great
similarity on the surface’ (SL 141). ‘We are here concerned with the most
fundamental and generalized features of the spirit, the technique, and the
elaboration of a given language’. Anyone who has felt ‘the spirit of a
foreign language’ may suspect there must be a ‘structural “genius”‘,
‘a basic plan, a certain cut to each language’ (SL 120) (cf. 3.7). The
‘fundamental form intuitions’ of ‘diverse languages’ may ‘some day’
be established well enough to reveal ‘the great underlying ground plans’ (SL
144). For the present, Sapir offers ‘only a few schematic indications’; ‘a
separate volume would be needed to breathe life into the scheme’ and disclose
a full ‘formal economy of strikingly divergent types’ (SL 146n).
3.52
Sapir's scheme again has four classes of languages, related in diverse ways to
his four classes of concepts summarized in 3.45. Two criteria are decisive: (1)
whether the language ‘keeps the syntactic relations pure’ or ‘expresses’
them in forms ‘mixed’ with ‘concrete significance’; and (2) whether the
language ‘possesses the power to modify the significance of radical elements
by means of affixes or internal changes’ (SL 137f). We thus get: A. ‘simple
pure-relational languages’ (‘pure’ ‘relations’, no
‘modifying’); B. ‘complex pure-relational languages’ (‘pure’
‘relations’, ‘modifying’); C. ‘simple mixed-relational
languages’ (‘mixed’ ‘relations’, no ‘modifying’); and D. ‘complex
mixed-relational languages’ (‘mixed relations’, ‘modifying’).
3.53
Since this classification is still ‘too sweeping and broad’, a further
‘subdivision’ is added (SL 138).19 ‘Agglutinative’
languages apply a ‘juxtaposing technique’; ‘fusional’ languages
apply a ‘fusing technique’; ‘symbolic’ languages use ‘internal
changes (reduplication; vocalic and consonantal change; changes in quantity,
stress and pitch)’; and ‘isolating’ languages use no ‘affixes or
modifications of the radical element’ (SL 130, 126, 139) (cf. 4.62f). Though
the ‘fusing technique’ is typical of ‘inflective’ languages, many are
‘quite alien in spirit to the inflective type of Latin and Greek’ (SL 130f).
Moreover, a threefold subdivision is proposed between ‘analytic’,
which ‘does not combine concepts into single words at all’ (e.g. Chinese)
‘or does so economically’ (e.g. English); ‘synthetic’, wherein
‘concepts cluster more thickly’ and ‘words are more richly chambered’
but within ‘a moderate compass’ (e.g. Latin); and ‘polysynthetic’,
wherein ‘the elaboration of the word is extreme’ (e.g. Algonkin) (SL 129,
143). Sapir thus proffers a table of types wherein his original four groupings
according to the two pairs ‘simple/complex’ and ‘pure/mixed-relational’
are broken down into classes, some rather elaborate:
‘agglutinative-fusional-analytic’ (e.g. Modern Tibetan),
‘symbolic-fusional-synthetic’ (e.g. Semitic),
‘fusional-agglutinative-polysynthetic’ (e.g. Chinook), and so on --
twenty-one varieties in all (SL 142f).
3.54
This scheme is further complicated by the fact that ‘languages are in a
constant process of change’, and their ‘technical features’ show ‘little
relative permanence’ (SL 144f; cf. SL 171). ‘The feeling’ that ‘our
language is practically a fixed system’ is ‘fallacious’ (SL 155). So
‘there is no reason why a language should remain permanently true to its
original form’ (SL 144f). In ‘the course of their development we frequently
encounter a gradual change of morphological type’ as well as ‘changes’ of
‘grammatical classes’ and word ‘significances’ (SL 144, 141). But
‘languages’ ‘tend to preserve longest what is most fundamental in their
structure’ (SL 144). ‘The degree of synthesis’ ‘seems to change most
readily’, ‘the technique’ ‘far less readily’, and ‘conceptual
type’ ‘persists the longest of all’ (SL 145). ‘Highly synthetic
languages (Latin; Sanskrit) have frequently broken down into analytic forms
(French; Bengali)’; ‘agglutinative languages (Finnish)’ have ‘taken on
inflective features’; and so on.
3.55
The causes of such changes are obscure (cf. 2.41f, 76). Sapir invokes ‘some
deep controlling impulse that dominates’ the ‘drift’
of ‘languages’ and ‘linguistic features’ (SL 122, 141, 144; cf. SL 150f,
161f, 167f, 172, 180f, 186, 200ff, 206, 218). ‘A language changes not only
gradually, but consistently’, and ‘moves unconsciously from one type toward
another’ (SL 121). Without ‘gainsaying the individuality of all historical
process’, Sapir ‘affirms that back of the face of the history are powerful
drifts that move language, like other social products, to balanced patterns’,
‘to types’ (SL 122). Yet ‘why similar types should be formed, just what is
the nature of the forces that make them and dissolve them -- these questions are
more easily asked than answered’. At present, we are ‘very far from able to
define’ such ‘fundamental form intuitions’, and can only ‘note their
symptoms’ (SL 144). ‘Perhaps psychologists of the future will be able to
give us the ultimate reasons’ (SL 122) (cf. 3.12; 13.10).
3.56
Meanwhile, we ‘must be careful not to be misled by structural features which
are mere survivals of older stages, and which have no productive life and do not
enter into the unconscious patterning of the language’ (SL 140fn). We should
be alert to ‘the tendency for words that are psychologically disconnected from
their etymological or formal group to preserve traces of phonetic laws’ or of
‘morphological processes that have lost their vitality’ (SL 189). Also,
‘the foreigner, who approaches a new language with a prying
inquisitiveness’, is ‘most apt to see life in vestigial features which the
native’ ‘feels merely as dead form’ (SL 141n).
3.57
‘The conception of “drift” in language’ points to the problem of
relating ‘historical changes’ to ‘individual variations’ (SL 154).
‘What significant changes take place in language must exist, to begin with, as
individual variations’ (SL 155) (cf. 2.45; 3.64; 4.81). A ‘new feature’
‘may exist as a mere tendency in the speech of the few’ until it ‘becomes
part and parcel of the common, accepted speech’. Due to this drift,
‘language has a “slope”‘: ‘the changes of the next few centuries are
in a sense prefigured in certain obscure tendencies of the present’.
‘Significant changes’ ‘begin’ ‘as individual variations’ that are
‘themselves random phenomena’ until they acquire a ‘special direction’
through an ‘unconscious selection on the part of the speakers’. This
‘direction may be inferred’ ‘from the past history of the language’. For
the future, though, ‘our very uncertainty as to the impending details of
change makes the eventual consistency of their direction all the more
impressive’.
3.58
Language change is accordingly a
major concern, since it introduces a leading parameter of diversity into language. Again like Saussure, Sapir likes to draw
illustrations from ‘gradual phonetic change’, ranked as ‘probably the most
central problem in linguistic history’ (SL 173; cf. CG 147; 2.76; 4.75). This
domain supports the view that ‘the drift of language is not properly concerned
with changes in content’, but ‘with changes in formal expression’ (SL 218)
(cf. 12.66).
3.59
‘“Phonetic laws” make up a
large and fundamental share of the subject-matter of linguistics’ (SL 173)
(but cf. 2.13, 38; 3.18; 12.26f). Such ‘laws’ may ‘participate’ in a
‘far-reaching’ ‘drift’: ‘not so much a movement toward a particular
set of sounds as toward particular types of articulation’ (SL 181).
‘Phonetic changes’ are nonetheless ‘regular’; ‘exceptions are more
apparent than real’, ‘generally due to the disturbing influence of
morphological groupings or to special psychological reasons which inhibit the
normal progress of the phonetic drift’ (SL 180). ‘Phonetic laws’ may be
entirely ‘regular’ and ‘sweeping’, or may only ‘operate under certain
definable limiting conditions’ (SL 178). These ‘laws do not work with
spontaneous automatism’; ‘they are simply a formula for a consummated drift
that sets in at a psychologically exposed point and gradually worms its way
through the gamut’ of ‘analogous forms’.
3.60
We can also consider ‘the general morphological
drift of the language’, as ‘symptomized’ by ‘analogical adjustments’
(SL 189). ‘The general drift seizes upon those individual sound variations
that help to preserve the morphological balance or to lead to the new balance
that the language is striving for’ (SL 186).20 To describe this
interactive process, Sapir ‘suggests’ that ‘phonetic change is compacted
of three basic strands’: (1) a ‘prevailingly dynamic’ ‘general drift in
one direction’; ‘(2) a readjusting tendency to preserve or restore the
fundamental phonetic pattern of the language; and (3) a preservative tendency
which sets in when a too serious morphological unsettlement is threatened by the
main drift’. Here, Sapir differs from the typical ‘linguist’ (including
Saussure) who ‘knows that phonetic change is frequently followed by
morphological rearrangements’ yet who ‘assumes that morphology exercises
little or no influence on the course of phonetic history’ (SL 183; cf. 2.54).
‘A simple phonetic law’ may ‘colour or transform large reaches of the
morphology of a language’ (SL 191). ‘If all phonetic changes’ ‘were
allowed to stand’, ‘most languages’ might ‘present such irregularities
of morphological contour as to lose touch with their formal ground-plan’ (SL
187). However, presumably because ‘phonetic pattern’ and ‘morphological
type’ ‘hang together in a way we cannot at present quite understand’,
American linguistics did not always concur that the ‘tendency to isolate
phonetics and grammar as mutually irrelevant linguistic provinces is
unfortunate’ (SL 187, 184) (cf. 5.35; 7.46).
3.61
‘Analogy’ is a major force for
‘regularizing irregularities that come in the wake of phonetic processes’
(SL 189) (cf. 2.50-54). But it can also ‘introduce disturbances’; indeed,
‘analogical levelling’ accounts for many of the ‘remarkably’ ‘few
exceptions’ ‘in linguistic history’ (SL 189, 180; cf. SL 184; 2.51).
Still, the effects work ‘generally in favour of greater simplicity or
regularity in a long established system of forms’ (SL 189). ‘A morphological
feature that appears as the incidental consequence of a phonetic process may
spread by analogy no less readily than old features that owe their existence to
other than phonetic causes’.
3.62
As befits Sapir's mentalist orientation, he warns ‘linguistic students’ that
‘sound change’ is ‘a strictly psychological
phenomenon’ (SL 183).21 He believes ‘the central unconscious
regulator of the course and speed of sound changes’ lies in ‘the tendency to
“correct” a disturbance by an elaborate chain of supplementary changes’
(SL 182). ‘The most important tendency in the history of speech sounds’ is
this ‘shifting about without loss of pattern’, e.g., when ‘the unconscious
Anglo-Saxon mind’ deployed ‘certain individual variations, until then
automatically cancelled out’, as a means for ‘allowing the general phonetic
drift to take its course without unsettling the morphological contours of the
language’ (SL 182, 185f). Or, ‘phonetic changes’ may ‘be unconsciously
encouraged in order to keep intact the psychological spaces between words and
word forms’ (SL 186). Or, an ‘alternation’ produced by ‘an unconscious
mechanical adjustment’ might ‘rise in consciousness’ and become ‘neatly
distinct’ and ‘symbolic’ (SL 174f).
3.63
Changes due to languages being in contact are explained as an interaction
between the ‘unconscious assimilation’ to native ‘habits’ and the
‘unconscious suggestive influence of foreign speech habits’ (SL 197, 200).
Here too, ‘as long as the main phonetic concern is the preservation of its
sound pattern’, a language may ‘unconsciously assimilate foreign sounds that
have succeeded in worming their way into the gamut of individual variations,
provided’ they ‘are in the direction of the native drift’ (SL 200). This
account is plausible if we assume that each language indeed has ‘innate formal
tendencies’ (SL 197), or its own ‘genius’ (3.7).
3.64
Diversity also appears at any single point in time. One parameter obtains among
the individual users of a language.
‘Two individuals of the same generation and locality, speaking precisely the
same dialect and moving in the same social circles, are never absolutely at one
in their speech habits’ (SL 147). ‘A minute investigation of the speech of
each individual would reveal countless differences of detail -- in choice of
words, in sentence structure, in the relative frequency’ of ‘particular
forms or combinations of words’, and ‘in all those features, such as speed,
stress, and tone, that give life to spoken language’. But such ‘individual
variations are swamped in or absorbed by certain major agreements -- say of
pronunciation and vocabulary -- which stand out very strongly when the language
as a whole is contrasted’ with another (SL 147f). Sapir concludes that
‘something like an ideal linguistic entity dominates the speech habits of
members of each group, and that the sense of unlimited freedom which each
individual feels in the use of his language is held in leash by a tacitly
directing norm’. ‘The individual's variations’ ‘are silently
“corrected” or cancelled by the consensus of usage’. ‘All speakers’
are subsumed in ‘a very finely intergrading series clustered about a
well-defined centre or norm’.
3.65
A second, and more problematic, parameter of diversity obtains among the dialects
of a language. ‘The explanation of primary dialectic differences is still to
seek’ (SL 149). ‘Distinct localities’ or ‘social strata’ need not
‘naturally’ produce ‘dialects’ (SL 149f) (cf. CG 193, 210). If, as Sapir
just contended, ‘individual variations are being constantly levelled to the
dialectic norm, why should we have dialectic variations at all?’ The answer is
strikingly like Saussure's: ‘language is not merely spread out in space’,
but ‘moves down time in a current of its own making’ (cf. 2.43). While
‘each language’ ‘constantly moves away from any assignable norm,
developing new features and transforming itself’, ‘local groups’ ‘drift
independently’ (SL 150f). ‘No sooner are the old dialects ironed out’
‘when a new crop of dialects arises to undo the levelling’. Sometimes,
‘dialects develop into mutually unintelligible languages’, and ‘none but a
linguistic student’ ‘would infer’ ‘a remote and common starting point’
(SL 152f).22 This inclination to explain language variety as the
product of language change probably reflects Sapir's view that change is more
tractable for study, a view Saussure both espoused and denied (2.42f).
3.66
From deliberations like these, Sapir concludes (here too like Saussure, CG 204)
that ultimately, ‘the terms dialect, language, branch, stock’ ‘are purely
relative terms’ (SL 153; cf. SL 204; cf. 2.43; 4.74, 83; 13.59). ‘A
“linguistic stock”‘ may be revealed by ‘our researches’ as ‘but a
“dialect” of a larger group’ (SL 153). ‘All languages that are known to
be genetically related’ are judged to be ‘divergent forms of a single
prototype’. Indeed, Sapir's claim that ‘language developed but once in the
history of the language race’ (SL 154) suggests that all languages developed
from just one. The degree of development may produce a ‘primitive’ or a
‘sophisticated language’, a ‘lowly’ or a ‘cultivated’ speaker (SL 8,
22). Yet though ‘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’, ‘popular statements as to the poverty of
expression to which primitive language are doomed are simply myths’ (SL 22).
‘Many “savage” languages’ evince ‘formal richness’ and
‘complexities’ that ‘eclipse anything known to the languages of modern
civilization’ (SL 124n, 22). ‘When it comes to linguistic form, Plato walks
with the Macedonian swineherd, Confucius with the head-hunting savage of
Assam’ (SL 219).
3.67
The features Sapir considers ‘all but universal’ (SL 65, 76) might be signs
of this common origin. Elsewhere, however, he suggests that ‘broadly similar
morphologies must have been reached by unrelated languages, independently and
frequently’ (SL 122, 204). Or, ‘parallels in unrelated languages’ may be
caused by ‘borrowing’, although ‘fundamental features of structure’ are
more probably ‘vestiges’ of relatedness (SL 198, 205). He decides that the
question of ‘the single or multiple origin of speech’ is not pressing, since
‘such a theory constructed on “general principles” is of no real
interest’ ‘to linguistic science’ (SL 154) -- just the contrary view to
that held by Saussure, Pike, Hjelmslev, Chomsky, and Hartmann (2.8, 10f; 5.44;
6.10f; 7.19; 12.7, 37; 13.48, 62). ‘What lies beyond the demonstrable must be
left to the philosopher or the romancer’ (cf. 13.16).
3.68
The final parameter of diversity treated by Sapir is a stylistic one. His book closes unconventionally with a disquisition
on ‘language and literature’ -- an interest shared by Pike, Firth, Halliday,
van Dijk, and Hartmann, but not by Saussure, Bloomfield, Hjelmslev, or Chomsky
(cf. 2.24; 4.40f; 5.56; 6.4; 8.83, 89; 9.104, 111; 11.47f, 57f; 12.99). This
move befits his fondness for calling ‘language’ itself an ‘art’, e.g.,
‘a collective art of expression’ (SL 220, 225, 231) (cf. 3.1, 3, 10).23
‘Concealed’ in each one are ‘aesthetic factors -- phonetic, rhythmic,
symbolic, morphological -- which it does not completely share with any other
language’ (SL 225; cf. SL 222). If the ‘effects’ due to ‘the formal
“genius”‘ of a ‘language’ or to ‘the colour and texture of its
matrix’ ‘cannot be carried over without loss or modification’, we might
imagine ‘a work of literary art can never be translated’ (SL 222). Yet ‘a
truly deep symbolism’ ‘does not depend on the verbal associations of a
particular language’, but ‘on an intuitive basis that underlies all
linguistic intuition’ (SL 224).
3.69
‘In so far as style is a technical matter of the building and placing of
words’, however, ‘the major characteristics of style’ are
‘inescapably’ ‘given by the language itself’ (SL 226). ‘These
necessary fundamentals of style’ ‘point the way to those stylistic
developments that most suit the natural bent of the language’ -- its
‘phonetic groundwork’, its ‘morphological peculiarities’, and so on.
‘An artist must utilize the native aesthetic resources of his speech’ (SL
225). For instance, ‘the poet's rhythms can only be a more sensitive and
stylized application of rhythmic tendencies that are characteristic of the daily
speech of his people’: ‘the daily economy’ or the ‘unconscious dynamic
habit of the language’ (SL 161, 228ff). The question is then what the artist,
‘deserving no special credit for felicities that are the language's own’ (SL
225), can contribute.
3.70
Sapir defines ‘literature’ as an ‘expression’ of ‘unusual
significance’, but ‘does not exactly know’ how to measure this (SL 221,
n). ‘Art is so personal an expression that we do not like to feel that it is
bound to predetermined form of any sort’. ‘The possibilities of individual
expression are infinite’ (cf. 3.3, 13; 13.43). ‘Yet some limitation there
must be to this freedom, some resistance of the medium’. ‘In great art’,
despite ‘the illusion of absolute freedom’, ‘the artist has intuitively
surrendered to the inescapable tyranny of the material’ and yet made the
‘fullest utilization’ of it. ‘The material “disappears” precisely
because there is nothing in the artist's conception to indicate that any other
material exists’ (SL 221f).24 ‘No sooner, however, does the
artist transgress the law of his medium than we realize with a start that there
is a medium to obey’.
3.71
‘Literature’ has ‘two distinct kinds or levels of art’: ‘a
generalized, non-linguistic art’, and ‘a specifically linguistic art’ (SL
222f). ‘The medium’ ‘intertwines’ ‘the latent content of language --
our intuitive record of experience’ -- with ‘the particular conformation of
a given language -- the specific “how” of our record of experience’.
‘Artists whose spirit moves largely’ ‘in the generalized linguistic
layer’ have ‘difficulty in getting themselves expressed in the rigidly set
terms of their accepted idiom’ (SL 224). Their ‘expression is frequently
strained’, with more ‘greatness of their spirit than felicity of art’
(e.g. Whitman and Browning), or with a ‘technically “literary” art’
‘too fragile for endurance’ (e.g. Swinburne) (SL 225) (cf. 8.52, 84, 839,
843). ‘The greatest -- or shall we say the most satisfying --
literary artists’ ‘subconsciously fit or trim the deeper intuition to the
provincial accents of their daily speech’ (SL 225) (e.g. Shakespeare).25
‘Their personal “intuition” appears as a completed synthesis of the
absolute art of intuition and the innate, specialized art of the linguistic
medium’.
3.72
Sapir ‘clarifies’ his ‘distinction’ by ‘comparing literature with
science’. ‘A scientific truth is impersonal, untinctured by the particular
linguistic medium in which it finds expression’ (cf. 4.22). ‘The proper
medium of scientific expression is therefore a generalized language that may be
defined as a symbolic algebra of which all known languages are translations’
(SL 223f; cf. 2.82). ‘One can adequately translate scientific’ texts
‘because the original scientific expression is itself a translation’. This
quality matches the impression of ‘art’ that seems to be ‘unconsciously
striving for a generalized art language, a literary algebra that is related to
the sum of all known languages as a perfect mathematical symbolism is related to
all the reports of mathematical relations that normal speech is capable of
conveying’.
3.73
If this comparison holds, Sapir might be expected to propose algebra as the general representation for language in linguistics,
as Saussure, Hjelmslev, and Chomsky do (2.82; 6.8, 29, 51, 60; 7.41, 718;
13.15). He does ‘understand why the mathematician and the symbolic logician
are driven to discard the word’ in favour of ‘symbols which have, each of
them, a rigidly unitary value’ (SL 33) (cf. 3.31). Also, he puts some examples
into ‘formulas’ for ‘those who are mathematically inclined’, and draws
‘mathematical’ analogies for relations between ‘thought’ and
‘speech’, or between ‘spoken’ and ‘written language’ (SL 132n,
25-32, 57, 15, 20; cf. 5.40, 51f, 62; 7.48).26 But he goes no
further, presumably because he situates language closer to ‘art’ and
‘experience’ than to ‘logical’ ‘symbols’ (SL 33), whence his
mistrust of ‘the technical symbols of the linguistic academy’ and of the
‘craving’ for ‘formulas’ (cf. 3.2, 50). Even the ‘sentence’ is
described as an ‘aesthetically satisfying’ ‘unit’, and the word as ‘a
miniature bit of art’ (SL 32, 35). ‘Abstract form’ is compared to ‘the
logical and aesthetic ordering of experience’; and a ‘form pattern which is
not filled out’ is deemed ‘unaesthetic’ (SL 157n, 158).
3.74
In our retrospect shaped by decades of academic sobriety in linguistics, Sapir's
exuberance is highly conspicuous. The range and diversity of his book has a
monumental vitalism wholly unlike the abstraction and specialization we often
take for granted. He was willing to turn in any direction that might reveal the
‘fundamental’ (SL vi, 25, 85, 93, 110, 116, 120, 144, 172, 226). He pursued
the precept that ‘adequate communication’ depends on its ‘context, that
background of mutual understanding that is essential to the complete
intelligibility of all speech’ (SL 92). No doubt his palette of topics was too
vast for any emerging science. His elaborate mentalism reached far beyond the
scope of early 20th century psychology, and was soon to be repressed by
‘physicalism’ and ‘mechanism’ (4.8; 13.11).
3.75
All the same, Sapir's peculiar achievements continue to deserve recognition. He
insisted on the equal status and interest of unfamiliar languages, notably
Amerindian ones, so that the ‘theoretical possibilities’ would be
‘abundantly illustrated from the descriptive facts of linguistic morphology’
(SL 139). He explored the perilous problematics of form versus content, or
thought versus expression, and made them a basis for an original, large-scale
typology of languages. And he never tired of saluting the vast potential of
language for developments as yet unrealized. He thus bequeathed to us the
challenging conviction that any set of ‘examples’ will be ‘far from
exhausting the possibilities of linguistic structure’ (SL 141).
NOTES
ON SAPIR
1
Sapir's Language is cited as SL to distinguish it from Bloomfield's book
of the same name (BL). It was Sapir's ‘only full-length book for a general
audience’ (SL ii).
2
In practice, some of these ‘relations’ are not pursued very far. Sapir says
‘it is easy to show that language and culture are not intrinsically
associated’; and ‘race’ ‘is supremely indifferent to the history of
language and culture’ (SL 213, 208; cf. 2.76; 3.7; 4.80; CG 222f). As for
‘art’, however, Sapir includes a chapter on ‘literature’ (cf. 3.3,
68-72).
3
Sapir suggests that ‘the vocabulary of a language more or less faithfully
reflects the culture whose purposes it serves’; but this is only ‘a
superficial parallelism’ ‘of no real interest to the linguist except in so
far as the growth or borrowing of new words incidentally throws light on the
formal trends of the language’ (SL 219; cf. CG 225). Moreover, we should
‘never make the mistake of identifying a language with its dictionary’ (SL
219; but cf. 2.78). Nor is ‘the actual size of a vocabulary’ of ‘real
interest to the linguist, as all languages have the resources at their disposal
for the creation of new words’ (SL 124) (cf. 2.52; 6.23f).
4
This assertion leads to an opposition between ‘the normal type of
communication of ideas’ versus ‘involuntary expression of feeling’ through
‘instinctive cries’ (SL 5). Even ‘conventional interjections’ ‘are
only superficially of an instinctive nature’, rather more like ‘art’, and
hence cannot have been the ‘psychological foundations’ of ‘language’ (SL
5ff) (cf. 213; 8.6)
5
Sapir's illustration is the fading of ‘“whom”‘ from common speech. But
other cases still appear to him as ‘grammatical blunders’, ‘un-English
horrors’, or ‘insidious peculiarities’ (SL 156, 166).
6
Benedetto Croce (1902, 1922) is saluted for having promulgated this
‘insight’ (SL v; cf. 3.69). He is also lauded as ‘one of the very few’
‘contemporary writers of influence on liberal thought’ ‘who have gained an
understanding of the fundamental significance of language’ and ‘pointed out
its close relation to the problem of art’. Compare 3.68ff.
7
The parallel between ‘silent speech’ and ‘normal thinking’ (SL 18)
enjoyed some vogue at the time (e.g. Watson 1920; Thorsen 1925), mainly to
divert mentalistic conceptions over toward physicalists ones (cf. Beaugrande
1984a: 52ff). Compare 3.18, 311, 331; 4.9; 5.43; 8.22, 817;
1321.
8
One change in word-forms, for instance, is said to involve ‘unconscious
desire’ and ‘unconscious hesitation’ (SL 157, 163, 161).
9
Two causes are cited for this ‘tendency’: the ‘inertia’ of ‘a system
of forms from which all colour or life has vanished’; and ‘the tendency to
construct schemes of classification into which all the concepts of language must
be fitted’, using such absolute opposites as ‘good or bad’, ‘black or
white’ (SL 98f). Sapir would mistrust the binary oppositions of later
structuralism (cf. 2.70; 5.21, 49; 8.80).
10
Comparing this ‘system’ to a ‘system’ ‘of symbolic atoms’ (SL 56)
again suggests a submerged sympathy for physicalism (cf. Note 7). Elsewhere,
though, ‘the laws of physics and chemistry’ are declared an absurd
foundation for ‘explaining’ ‘languages’ (SL 208f). Compare 13.12.
11
Like Saussure (2.83), Sapir is inconsistent in using ‘mechanical concepts’
(SL 161), especially to explain ‘sound change’ (SL 187, 174), while
generally treating this aspect as irrelevant for linguistics (SL 11, 55, 62,
100, 121, 125).
12
The ‘inspiratory sounds’ of ‘“click”‘ languages like Hottentot are
exceptions (SL 53n).
13
‘Quantitative processes like vocalic lengthening or shortening and consonantal
doubling’ ‘may be looked upon as particular sub-types’ of ‘internal
modification’ (SL 61f).
14
‘Due to the bias that Latin grammar has given us’, speakers of English
‘generally think of time as a function that is appropriately expressed in a
purely formal manner’, even though English does not formally mark
‘present’ and ‘future’ (SL 69n; cf. SL 87).
15
An intriguing comparison is drawn: ‘the radical and grammatical elements of
the language, abstracted as they are from the realities of speech, respond to
the conceptual world of science, abstracted as it is from the realities of
experience’; ‘the word, the existent unit of living speech, responds to the
unit of actually apprehended experience, of history, of art’ (SL 32f). For
another view of science and art, see 3.72.
16
‘In Yana [of Northern California] the noun and the verb are well distinct’,
though they ‘hold in common’ some ‘features’ that ‘draw them nearer to
each other than we feel to be possible’ (SL 199n). But the language has,
‘strictly speaking, no other parts of speech’. ‘The adjective’, ‘the
numeral, the interrogative pronoun’, and ‘certain conjunctions and
adverbs’ are all ‘verbs’.
17
In one demonstration, though, Sapir decides that ‘the analysis’ into
‘radical’ and ‘derivational’ ‘elements’ ‘is practically irrelevant
to a feeling for the structure of the sentence’ (SL 84).
18
Sapir's distaste for ‘sentimentalism’, in which he himself indulges
sometimes, is due to its abuse as a channel for cultural and racial chauvinism
(cf. SL 124n, 208f). Undue emphasis on ‘feeling’ is also rebuked (SL 39)
(cf. 3.15).
19
Compare these categories with ‘the still popular classification of languages
into an “isolating” group, an “agglutinative” group, and an
“inflective” group’ (SL 123). Sapir suspects that his ‘contrast of
pure-relational and mixed-relational’ is ‘deeper, more far-reaching’ than
the older ‘contrast’, ostensibly because ‘conceptual type’ ‘persists
the longest of all’ (SL 145f) (cf. 3.54).
20
For example, ‘the English language’ shows hardly ‘one important
morphological change that was not determined by the native drift’, despite
‘the suggestive influence of French norms’ (SL 202). ‘English was fast
moving toward a more analytic structure long before the French influence set
in’ (SL 193n). Still, ‘the language of a people that is looked upon as a
centre of culture’ is ‘likely to exert an appreciable influence on other
languages spoken in its vicinity’ (SL 193) (cf. 4.40, 83; 8.7). ‘Just five
languages’ had an ‘overwhelming’ impact of this kind: ‘classical
Chinese, Sanskrit, Arabic, Greek, and Latin’ (SL 194). Sapir finds it
‘disappointing’ that the ‘cultural influence of English has so far been
all but negligible’. Today he would say otherwise (cf. 8.11, 13).
21
To ‘think of sound change’ as ‘quasi-physiological’ is a ‘fatal
error’ ‘many linguistic students have made’ (SL 183). Compare Note 12.
22
This process of inferring relations was, as Saussure notes, ‘a new and
fruitful field’ for linguistics in the 19th century, though it ‘did not
succeed in setting up a true science’ (CG 3) (2.5). Sapir again separates the
‘linguistic student’ from the normal speaker (cf. 3.11; 13.49).
23
Compare the ‘innate formal limitations’ and the ‘innate art of the
language’ (SL 222, 225). Sapir also uses the term ‘inner form’ (SL 109,
125, 197, 217), one made famous by Wilhelm von Humboldt in Uber die
Verschiedenheit des menschlichen Sprachbaus (1830-35) and covered in the
chapter on Hartmann (12.18). Sapir's typology of language also owes much to
Humboldt, though without acknowledgement.
24
I would prefer to suppose, along with many theoreticians of art, that the work's
main function is to foreground the otherness of its language (cf. Beaugrande
1986a, 1988a). The material disappears to the degree that the audience's schemas
can incorporate it (cf. Gombrich 1960).
25
The stipulation that ‘a truly great style’ cannot ‘seriously oppose itself
to basic form patterns of the language’ devalues the ‘semi-Latin’ of
Milton and the ‘Teutonic mannerism’ of Carlyle (SL 227). ‘It is strange
how long it took the European literatures to learn that style is not an
absolute, a something to be imposed on the language from Greek and Latin models,
but merely the language itself, running in its natural grooves’. Sapir's
tastes are not entirely disinterested, since ‘he published’ ‘some verse in
periodicals’ himself (SL ii).
26
‘The written word’ is judged ‘the most important of all visual speech
symbolisms’; ‘written language’ ‘is a point-to-point equivalence, to
borrow a mathematic phrase, to its spoken counterpart’ (SL 19f) (but cf.
13.33). ‘The written forms are secondary symbols of the spoken ones -- symbols
of symbols -- yet so close is the correspondence that they may’, ‘in certain
types of thinking, be entirely substituted for the spoken ones’. People
‘handle’ ‘visual symbols’ like ‘money’, i.e., as a ‘substitute for
the goods and services of the fundamental auditory-motor symbols’ (SL 21; cf.
CG 115). Compare Note 11.