HUMAN SPEECH 55 



means that the child is subject to a very considerable period of random 

 and, of course, wholly involuntary experimenting in the production of 

 such articulations as would tend to produce sounds or combinations of 

 sounds approximating more or less closely those the child hears. In 

 the course of this experimenting many failures are produced, many 

 partial successes. The articulations producing the former, inasmuch 

 as they do not give results that match the sounds which it was intended 

 to imitate, have little or no associative power with these sounds, hence 

 do not readily form into habits; on the other hand, articulations that 

 produce successes or comparative successes will naturally tend to be- 

 come habitual. It is easy to see that the indirect manner in which 

 speech articulations are acquired necessitates an element of error, very 

 slight, it may be, but error nevertheless. The habitual articulations 

 that have established themselves in the speech of the child will yield 

 auditory results that approximate so closely to those used in speech by 

 its elders, that no need for correction will be felt. And yet it is in- 

 evitable that the sounds, at least some of the sounds, actually pro- 

 nounced by the child will differ to a minute extent from the correspond- 

 ing sounds pronounced by these elders. Inasmuch as every word is 

 composed of a definite number of sounds and as, furthermore, the lan- 

 guage makes use of only a limited number of sounds, it follows that 

 corresponding to every sound of the language a definite articulation 

 will have become habitual in the speech of the child; it follows imme- 

 diately that the slight phonetic modifications which the child has intro- 

 duced into the words it uses are consistent and regular. Thus if a 

 vowel a has assumed a slightly different acoustic shade in one word, it 

 will have assumed the same shade in all other cases involving the old 

 a-vowel used by its elders, at any rate in all other cases in which the 

 old a-vowel appears under parallel phonetic circumstances. 



Here at the very outset we have illustrated in the individual the reg- 

 ularity of what have come to be called phonetic laws. The term " pho- 

 netic law " is justified in so far as a common tendency is to be discovered 

 in a large number of individual sound changes. It is important, how- 

 ever, to understand that phonetic law is a purely historic concept, not 

 one comparable to the laws of natural science. The latter may be said to 

 operate regardless of particular times and places, while a phonetic law 

 is merely a generalized statement of a process that took place in a 

 restricted area within a definite period of time. The real difficulty in 

 the understanding of phonetic change in language lies not in the fact 

 of change itself, nor in the regularity with which such change proceeds 

 in all cases affected, but, above all, in the fact that phonetic changes are 

 not merely individual, but social phenomena ; in other words, that the 

 speech of all the members of a community in a given time and place 

 undergoes certain regular phonetic changes. Without here attempting 



