THE HISTORY AND VARIETIES OF HUMAN SPEECH. 



By Dr. Edward Sapir, 



The Canadian Geological Survey. 



Perhaps no single feature so markedly sets off man from the rest 

 of the animal world as the gift of speech, which he alone possesses. 

 No community of normal human beings, be their advance m culture 

 ever so slight, has yet been found, or is ever likely to be found, who 

 do not communicate among themselves by means of a com]^lex sys- 

 tem of sound symbols; in other words, who do not make use of a defi- 

 nitely organized spoken language. It is indeed one of the paradoxes 

 of linguistic science that some of the most complexly organized lan- 

 guages are spoken by so-called ])rimitive peoples, while, on the other 

 hand, not a few languages of relatively simple structure are found 

 among peoples of considerable advance in culture. Relatively to the 

 modern inhabitants of England, to cite but one instance out of an 

 indefinitely large number, the Eskunos must be considered as rather 

 limited in cultural development. Yet there is just as little doubt that 

 m com})lexity of form the Eskimo language goes far beyond English. 

 I \nsh merely to indicate that, however much we may indulge in 

 speaking of primitive man, of a primitive language in the true sense 

 of the word we find nowhere a trace. It is true that many of the 

 lower animals, for example, birds, communicate by means of various 

 cries, yet no one will seriously maintam that such cries are compa- 

 rable to the conventional words of present-day human spe(>ch; at best 

 they may be compared to some of our interjections, which, however, 

 falling outside the regular morphologic and syntactic frame of speech, 

 are least typical of the language of human beings. We can thus 

 safely make the absolute statement that language is typical of all 

 human communities of to-day and of such previous times as we have 

 historical knowledge of, and that language, aside from reflex cries, is 

 just as untypical of all nonhuman forms of anunal life, like all other 

 forms of human activity, language must have its history. 



Much has been thought and written about the history of language. 

 Under this term may be included two more or less distinct lines of 

 inquiry. One may either trace the changes undergone by a partic- 



1 Lecture delivered at the University of Pennsylvania Museum, Apr. 1, 1911. (Reprinted by perinission 

 from The Popular Science Monthly, July, 1911.) 



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