Instinctive utterance that man shares with the lower animals, they

cannot be considered as forming part of the essential cultural

conception of language, however much they may be inseparable from its

actual life. And this instinctive expression of volition and emotion is,

for the most part, sufficient, often more than sufficient, for the

purposes of communication.

There are, it is true, certain writers on the psychology of language[9]

who deny its prevailingly cognitive character but attempt, on the

contrary, to demonstrate the origin of most linguistic elements within

the domain of feeling. I confess that I am utterly unable to follow

them. What there is of truth in their contentions may be summed up, it

seems to me, by saying that most words, like practically all elements of

consciousness, have an associated feeling-tone, a mild, yet none the

less real and at times insidiously powerful, derivative of pleasure or

pain. This feeling-tone, however, is not as a rule an inherent value in

the word itself; it is rather a sentimental growth on the word's true

body, on its conceptual kernel. Not only may the feeling-tone change

from one age to another (this, of course, is true of the conceptual

content as well), but it varies remarkably from individual to individual

according to the personal associations of each, varies, indeed, from

time to time in a single individual's consciousness as his experiences

mold him and his moods change. To be sure, there are socially accepted

feeling-tones, or ranges of feeling-tone, for many words over and above

the force of individual association, but they are exceedingly variable

and elusive things at best. They rarely have the rigidity of the

central, primary fact. We all grant, for instance, that _storm_,

_tempest_, and _hurricane_, quite aside from their slight differences of

actual meaning, have distinct feeling-tones, tones that are felt by all

sensitive speakers and readers of English in a roughly equivalent

fashion. _Storm_, we feel, is a more general and a decidedly less

"magnificent" word than the other two; _tempest_ is not only associated

with the sea but is likely, in the minds of many, to have obtained a

softened glamour from a specific association with Shakespeare's great

play; _hurricane_ has a greater forthrightness, a directer ruthlessness

than its synonyms. Yet the individual's feeling-tones for these words

are likely to vary enormously. To some _tempest_ and _hurricane_ may

seem "soft," literary words, the simpler _storm_ having a fresh, rugged

Value which the others do not possess (think of _storm and stress_). If

we have browsed much in our childhood days in books of the Spanish Main,

_hurricane_ is likely to have a pleasurably bracing tone; if we have had

the misfortune to be caught in one, we are not unlikely to feel the word

as cold, cheerless, sinister.

[Footnote 9: E.g., the brilliant Dutch writer, Jac van Ginneken.]

The feeling-tones of words are of no use, strictly speaking, to science;

the philosopher, if he desires to arrive at truth rather than merely to

persuade, finds them his most insidious enemies. But man is rarely

engaged in pure science, in solid thinking. Generally his mental

activities are bathed in a warm current of feeling and he seizes upon

the feeling-tones of words as gentle aids to the desired excitation.

They are naturally of great value to the literary artist. It is

interesting to note, however, that even to the artist they are a danger.

A word whose customary feeling-tone is too unquestioningly accepted

becomes a plushy bit of furniture, a _cliché_. Every now and then the

artist has to fight the feeling-tone, to get the word to mean what it

nakedly and conceptually should mean, depending for the effect of

feeling on the creative power of an individual juxtaposition of concepts

or images.

III

THE SOUNDS OF LANGUAGE

We have seen 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, as such, a linguistic element at all. For all

that, speech is so inevitably bound up with sounds and their

articulation that we can hardly avoid giving the subject of phonetics

some general consideration. Experience has shown that neither the purely

formal aspects of a language nor the course of its history can be fully

understood without reference to the sounds in which this form and this

history are embodied. A detailed survey of phonetics would be both too

technical for the general reader and too loosely related to our main

theme to warrant the needed space, but we can well afford to consider a

few outstanding facts and ideas connected with the sounds of language.

The feeling that the average speaker has of his language is that it is

built up, acoustically speaking, of a comparatively small number of

distinct sounds, each of which is rather accurately provided for in the

current alphabet by one letter or, in a few cases, by two or more

alternative letters. As for the languages of foreigners, he generally

feels that, aside from a few striking differences that cannot escape

even the uncritical ear, the sounds they use are the same as those he is

familiar with but that there is a mysterious "accent" to these foreign

languages, a certain unanalyzed phonetic character, apart from the

sounds as such, that gives them their air of strangeness. This naïve

feeling is largely illusory on both scores. Phonetic analysis convinces

one that the number of clearly distinguishable sounds and nuances of

sounds that are habitually employed by the speakers of a language is far

greater than they themselves recognize. 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 latter

_t_ having a fullness of "breath release" that is inhibited in the

former case by the preceding _s_; that the _ea_ of _meat_ is of

perceptibly shorter duration than the _ea_ of _mead_; or that the final

_s_ of a word like _heads_ is not the full, buzzing _z_ sound of the _s_