Last time we reduced Sapir’s Language (1921) to six claims. From here we walk through the book itself. Part 1 is chapters 1–3 — what language is, and what a sound is.
1. Walking, and talking
Sapir starts from the most familiar contrast. Walking is a biological function a child is equipped for from birth. Its muscles and nerves are built for it. Remove society and, if it survives at all, the child will still learn to walk.
Speech is not like that. A child comes to talk only because it is born “not merely in nature, but in the lap of a society that is certain … to lead him to its traditions.” Move a newborn into an alien society and it will walk much as before — but its speech “will be completely at variance with the speech of its native environment.”
Walking is an organic, an instinctive, function …; speech is a non-instinctive, acquired, “cultural” function. (ch. 1)
Hence the definition quoted last time: “Language is a purely human and non-instinctive method of communicating ideas, emotions, and desires by means of a system of voluntarily produced symbols.”
2. A cry does not become a word
One observation keeps making people think speech is an instinct: under a twinge of pain or a burst of joy, we involuntarily utter sounds a hearer reads as the emotion. But, Sapir says, there is “all the difference in the world” between that and the ordinary communication of ideas. The cry is instinctive but non-symbolic — it does not announce “I am in pain,” it is “a more or less automatic overflow of the emotional energy.” It is not addressed to anyone; it is merely overheard, “as the bark of a dog … is heard.”
What of the interjections in the dictionary (oh! ah! sh!)? They are conventional fixations of the natural sounds, and they differ from language to language. Imitative words (cuckoo, to mew) are not automatic reproductions of nature either but “creations of the human mind, flights of the human fancy.”
Here Sapir reaches for painting.
A Japanese picture of a hill both differs from and resembles a typical modern European painting of the same kind of hill. Both are suggested by and both “imitate” the same natural feature. … The two modes of representation are not identical because they proceed from differing historical traditions, are executed with differing pictorial techniques. (ch. 1)
Hokusai’s Fuji and Cézanne’s Sainte-Victoire are both prompted by a “mountain,” yet one works in a tradition of flat plane and contour, the other in a tradition of colour patch and stroke. Neither is a “direct outgrowth” of the mountain. Interjections are the same: Japanese and English interjections are “suggested by a common natural prototype, the instinctive cries,” and so resemble each other, but they differ because they are “built out of historically diverse materials or techniques, the respective linguistic traditions, phonetic systems, speech habits of the two peoples.” An interjection is, “at best,” “a decorative edging to the ample, complex fabric.” It is not the origin of language.
3. There are no “organs of speech”
To speak of “organs of speech” makes talking sound like a biologically predetermined activity. Sapir refuses it: “There are, properly speaking, no organs of speech; there are only organs that are incidentally useful in the production of speech sounds.” The lungs, larynx, palate, nose, tongue, teeth and lips are all used — but “no more … than are the fingers to be considered as essentially organs of piano-playing or the knees as organs of prayer.” Physiologically, “speech is an overlaid function.” Nor is it localised in the brain: its sounds sit in the auditory tract, its movements in the motor tract, exactly like any other sounds and movements.
4. Language is not sound
The word “house” is not the acoustic effect of its consonants and vowels, nor the articulation, nor the mark on the page. Only when these are purely symbolically associated with the image of a house do they become a word. And the association is not with a single house: a single experience “lodges in an individual consciousness and is, strictly speaking, incommunicable,” so “the world of our experiences must be enormously simplified and generalised.” A word is the symbol “of a concept, … a convenient capsule of thought that embraces thousands of distinct experiences and that is ready to take in thousands more.”
This symbol system can be transferred, point for point, from hearing to sight or movement (writing, gesture, Morse code — a “symbol of a symbol of a symbol”). The very ease of transfer shows that “the mere sounds of speech are not the essential fact of language, which lies rather in the classification, in the formal patterning, and in the relating of concepts.” Sapir’s phrase: “language, as a structure, is on its inner face the mold of thought.”
Word and thought lie on the same line. Language is “primarily a pre-rational function”; thought is “the highest latent or potential content of speech.” The two are inseparable — “the instrument makes possible the product, the product refines the instrument.” A word is a “key” to a concept and also a “fetter.”
5. The pattern behind the sounds
Speakers feel their language is made of “a comparatively small number of distinct sounds.” Under analysis, the sounds actually used are far more numerous (not one English speaker in a hundred knows the t of sting is a different sound from the t of teem).
Sapir’s key insight: “Back of the purely objective system of sounds … there is a more restricted ‘inner’ or ‘ideal’ system.” It is unconscious as a system, yet “can far more readily than the other be brought to consciousness as a finished pattern, a psychological mechanism.” “Two historically related languages or dialects may not have a sound in common, but their ideal sound-systems may be identical patterns.” And the pattern changes far more slowly than the sounds themselves.
An anecdote: when Sapir taught Native speakers to write their own languages, they could not hear distinctions that “did not correspond to points in the pattern of the language,” however plain to an outside ear — yet “subtle, barely audible” differences that did hit “points in the pattern” were written down easily and spontaneously. His interpreter seemed to be “transcribing an ideal flow of phonetic elements which he heard … as the intention of the actual rumble of speech.”
This is the direct forerunner of the phoneme (Prague School, American structuralism), and it rhymes with Saussure’s view that a sign works by difference.
Part 2 (chapters 4–8) takes up form and function, linguistic typology, and drift. For the overview, see “Reading Edward Sapir’s Language”.
