VARIETIES OF HUMAN SPEECH SAPIR. 583 



word is pronounced by a succession of various more or less compli- 

 cated adjustments of the speech organs. These adjustments or 

 articulations give rise to definite acoustic ofTccts, effects which, m 

 their totality-, constitute speech. Obviously, if the child's imitative 

 efforts were direct, it would have to copy as closely as possible the 

 speech articulations which are the direct source of what it hears. 

 But it is still more ob\dous that these speech articulations are largely 

 beyond the power of observation and hence imitation. It foUows 

 that the actual sounds, not the articulations producmg them, are 

 imitated. This means that the cliild is subject to a very considerable 

 period of random and, of course, wholly involuntary experimenting 

 in the ])roduction of such articulations as would tend to i)roduce 

 sounds or combmations of sounds approxmiatmg more or less closely 

 those the child hears. In the course of this experimenting many 

 failures are produced, many partial successes. The articulations 

 producmg 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 mto 

 habits; on the other hand, articulations that i)roduce successes or 

 comparative successes will naturally tend to become habitual. It is 

 easy to see that the indirect manner hi which speech articulations are 

 acquned necessitates an element of error, very shght, it may be, but 

 error nevertheless. The habitual articulations that have established 

 themselves m 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 j^et it is inevitable that the 

 sounds, at least some of the sounds, actually j)ronounced by the cliild 

 will difi'er to a minute extent from the corresponding sounds pro- 

 nounced by these elders. Inasmuch as every word is composed of a 

 definite number of sounds and as, furthermore, the language makes 

 use of only a Hmited number of sounds, it follows that correspondmg 

 to every sound of the language a definite articulation wiU have 

 become habitual m the speech of the child; it follows immediately 

 that the shght phonetic modifications which the child has introduced 

 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 hi all other cases uivolvhig the old 

 a-vowel used by its elders, at any rate m all other cases m wliich the 

 old a-vowel appears under parallel phonetic circumstances. 



Here at the very outset we have illustrated hi the mdividual the 

 regularity of what have come to be called phonetic laws. The term 

 ''phonetic law" is justified m so far as a common tendency is to be 

 discovered m a large number of mdividual sound changes. It is im- 

 portant, however, to understand that phonetic law is a purely historic 

 concept, not one comparable to the laws of natural science. The 



