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.