Voluntary speech movements with the all but perfect freedom of voluntary

gesture.[10] Our rigidity in articulation is the price we have had to

pay for easy mastery of a highly necessary symbolism. One cannot be both

splendidly free in the random choice of movements and selective with

deadly certainty.[11]

[Footnote 10: Observe the "voluntary." When we shout or grunt or

otherwise allow our voices to take care of themselves, as we are likely

to do when alone in the country on a fine spring day, we are no longer

fixing vocal adjustments by voluntary control. Under these circumstances

we are almost certain to hit on speech sounds that we could never learn

to control in actual speech.]

[Footnote 11: If speech, in its acoustic and articulatory aspect, is

indeed a rigid system, how comes it, one may plausibly object, that no

two people speak alike? The answer is simple. All that part of speech

which falls out of the rigid articulatory framework is not speech in

idea, but is merely a superadded, more or less instinctively determined

vocal complication inseparable from speech in practice. All the

individual color of speech--personal emphasis, speed, personal cadence,

personal pitch--is a non-linguistic fact, just as the incidental

expression of desire and emotion are, for the most part, alien to

linguistic expression. Speech, like all elements of culture, demands

conceptual selection, inhibition of the randomness of instinctive

behavior. That its "idea" is never realized as such in practice, its

carriers being instinctively animated organisms, is of course true of

each and every aspect of culture.]

There are, then, an indefinitely large number of articulated sounds

available for the mechanics of speech; any given language makes use of

an explicit, rigidly economical selection of these rich resources; and

each of the many possible sounds of speech is conditioned by a number of

Independent muscular adjustments that work together simultaneously

towards its production. A full account of the activity of each of the

organs of speech--in so far as its activity has a bearing on

language--is impossible here, nor can we concern ourselves in a

systematic way with the classification of sounds on the basis of their

mechanics.[12] A few bold outlines are all that we can attempt. The

organs of speech are the lungs and bronchial tubes; the throat,

particularly that part of it which is known as the larynx or, in popular

parlance, the "Adam's apple"; the nose; the uvula, which is the soft,

pointed, and easily movable organ that depends from the rear of the

palate; the palate, which is divided into a posterior, movable "soft

palate" or velum and a "hard palate"; the tongue; the teeth; and the

lips. The palate, lower palate, tongue, teeth, and lips may be looked

upon as a combined resonance chamber, whose constantly varying shape,

chiefly due to the extreme mobility of the tongue, is the main factor in

giving the outgoing breath its precise quality[13] of sound.

[Footnote 12: Purely acoustic classifications, such as more easily

suggest themselves to a first attempt at analysis, are now in less favor

among students of phonetics than organic classifications. The latter

have the advantage of being more objective. Moreover, the acoustic

quality of a sound is dependent on the articulation, even though in

linguistic consciousness this quality is the primary, not the secondary,

fact.]

[Footnote 13: By "quality" is here meant the inherent nature and

resonance of the sound as such. The general "quality" of the

individual's voice is another matter altogether. This is chiefly

determined by the individual anatomical characteristics of the larynx

and is of no linguistic interest whatever.]

The lungs and bronchial tubes are organs of speech only in so far as

they supply and conduct the current of outgoing air without which

audible articulation is impossible. They are not responsible for any

specific sound or acoustic feature of sounds except, possibly, accent or

stress. It may be that differences of stress are due to slight

differences in the contracting force of the lung muscles, but even this

influence of the lungs is denied by some students, who explain the

fluctuations of stress that do so much to color speech by reference to

the more delicate activity of the glottal cords. These glottal cords are

two small, nearly horizontal, and highly sensitive membranes within the

larynx, which consists, for the most part, of two large and several

smaller cartilages and of a number of small muscles that control the

action of the cords.

The cords, which are attached to the cartilages, are to the human speech

organs what the two vibrating reeds are to a clarinet or the strings to

a violin. They are capable of at least three distinct types of movement,

each of which is of the greatest importance for speech. They may be

drawn towards or away from each other, they may vibrate like reeds or

strings, and they may become lax or tense in the direction of their

length. The last class of these movements allows the cords to vibrate at

different "lengths" or degrees of tenseness and is responsible for the