At the end of part 1 of the walkthrough we touched Sapir’s “sound pattern.” Here it is up close — chapter 3, and the road to phonology.
1. Objective sounds, and the sound in the mind
Speakers feel their language is built of “a comparatively small number of distinct sounds.” Under analysis, the sounds actually used are far more numerous. “Probably not one English speaker out of a hundred has the remotest idea that the t of a word like sting is not at all the same sound as the t of teem” — the first has its breath-release inhibited by the preceding s. In the same way the final s of heads is a voiced [z], and the ea of meat is shorter than the ea of mead.
Yet the speaker treats these as one sound. This is Sapir’s point:
Back of the purely objective system of sounds … there is a more restricted “inner” or “ideal” system … a finished pattern, a psychological mechanism. (ch. 3)
2. The pattern changes more slowly than the sounds
The ideal sound pattern “may persist as a pattern — involving number, relation, and functioning of phonetic elements — long after its phonetic content is changed.”
Two historically related languages or dialects may not have a sound in common, but their ideal sound-systems may be identical patterns. (ch. 3)
Its rate of change is “infinitely less rapid than that of the sounds as such.” So a language is characterised “as much by its ideal system of sounds … as by a definite grammatical structure.”
3. You can only write down the “points in the pattern”
Sapir taught Native speakers to write their own languages. The result was always the same.
- A sound difference that does not correspond to a point in the pattern of the language — however plain to an outside ear — cannot be heard and written down.
- A difference “barely audible,” if it hits a point in the pattern, is written down “easily and voluntarily,” with accuracy.
Sapir’s interpreter seemed to be “transcribing an ideal flow of phonetic elements which he heard … as the intention of the actual rumble of speech.”
4. This became the phoneme
What Sapir called the “ideal system of sounds” crystallised, in later linguistics, into a unit: the phoneme.
- Baudouin de Courtenay (1845–1929) conceived, in the late 19th century, a unit distinct from the physical sound: the “sound in the mind.”
- Sapir developed the chapter-3 insight into the papers “Sound Patterns in Language” (1925) and “The Psychological Reality of Phonemes” (1933).
- The Prague Linguistic Circle (1926–) — Trubetzkoy’s Principles of Phonology (1939) and Jakobson — split the study of speech sounds in two. Phonetics studies the sounds themselves; phonology studies “the system of sounds that distinguish meaning.” A phoneme has no positive content of its own; it is a point on a grid, fixed by its oppositions within the system (voiced / voiceless, place of articulation, nasality…).
The t of sting and the t of teem fall on the same point in English (they never distinguish meaning — they are allophones). In a language where aspiration does distinguish meaning (Hindi, Thai), they are different points. A “sound” is a physical fact; which sounds count as the same is decided by each language’s pattern.
5. The same intuition as Saussure
That a phoneme is fixed “not by its content but by its oppositions” is exactly Saussure’s idea that the value of a sign is fixed by difference. Saussure (1916) and Sapir (1921), independently, reached the same intuition: a unit of language is not a substance but a position in a system. The Prague School gave that intuition its most precise form, in the domain of sound.
In sum
| Objective sounds are more numerous than speakers think | the t of sting ≠ the t of teem; the s of heads is [z] |
| Behind them is an “ideal sound pattern” | unconscious, yet more accessible to consciousness than the raw sounds |
| The pattern changes far more slowly than the sounds | related languages can share a pattern with no sound in common |
| Speakers hear sound only through the points of the pattern | transcription = a copy of an “ideal flow” |
| This idea became the phoneme | phonetics (the sounds) split from phonology (the system of oppositions); a phoneme is a point on a grid |
The last piece of the Sapir feature is language and literature (chapter 11) — what translates and what does not, and prosody as an outcrop of a language’s dynamics. For the overview, see “Reading Edward Sapir’s Language”.
