Tonality

“ In the higher Regions of the Desire World the confusion of tongues gives place to a universal mode of expression which absolutely prevents misunderstandings of our meaning. There each of our thoughts takes a definite form and color perceptible to all, and this thought-symbol emits a certain tone, which is not a word, but it conveys our meaning to the one we address no matter what language he spoke on earth. ”

“ The Tongue is here introduced, whether by inadvertence or in submission to common opinion, as if it were a sense, or the sole organ for speech; and yet, as the chief of the organs for taste and speech, it may be said to constitute one of the distinguishing features of humanity. As no creature, however, is without a tongue, it can scarcely be supposed to be wanting, and yet, as it would not seem to be so essential as some other parts, life might, perhaps, for a time, be maintained without it. ”

“ We have already said that they make free use of language as of an instrument; the word is consciously formed as a means to the end of communication. Hence all unessential “accessories” fall away, which express feelings and excite feelings; language becomes prosaic, and the “dry” written expression is therefore adequate; the individual element is submerged, and definite social styles, forms, and methods rule as patterns—and this all the more in proportion as what corresponds to these ideas presents itself clearly in reality. ”

“ When addressed in a foreign tongue, we hear a number of articulated sounds, to which we can attach no meaning; they convey nothing to the mind, make no impression upon the in-dwelling soul. When those sounds are interpreted to us, in a language that we can understand, they impart impressions of joy, hope, surprise, or sorrow, because the words convey to us a meaning. In like manner, if we fail to understand Nature, its beauties, its teachings are lost. ”

“ Not only is our mother-tongue, then, the instrument of our culture, but the way to master it is to study it, in lieu of any foreign tongue, living or dead. For English-speaking people the "special-culture study" is not Latin and Greek or either, but English. The mother tongue, if I may recur to the botanical figure, is the tap-root of the tree of mind, whereof no other tongue can be more than a rootlet. Neglect it, and you dwarf the intellect; cherish it, and the intellect shoots up into full stature. Our mother-tongue is the source of our mental growth. ”

“ Has not everything in like manner, even the most inanimate, a tongue, a language, peculiar to itself—a soul, a spirit, pervading its form, which moulds and fashions every substance according to its own nature? Now, this voice thou canst not interpret, being unskilled—knowing not the languages peculiar to every form and modification of matter; else would this beautiful type of the ever-rolling sea discourse marvellously to thine ear. ”

“ It is a part of the art of the orator, to awaken and to maintain by the right application, emphasis and accentuation of such words, the “mood” which prepares his hearers to accept his thoughts and to follow his counsels.
46. Artistic and poetic language is essentially allied to religious and all ceremonial speech. It, too, gets its original power and validity from the popular belief for which that is real and true which endures as image and simile in poetic language. Credulous imagination fills the world with living active spirits ”

“ Is it possible that, in the mesmeric trance, the mind in some cases rejects as artificial fabric all the educated conventionality of tongues, and resumes unconsciously the original and genuine dialect of the world? ”

“ It is an error to believe, as is commonly done, that we cannot read a foreign text, in the sense we attach to this word, without pronouncing it, at least mentally. In the mother-tongue, the meaning of written words is conveyed to the mind only by the sounds that they represent, the ideas being a priori associated with the sounds. But the words of a foreign language do not recall to the student, any more than to a deaf-mute in his own language, any sound associated with-the sense. ”

“ The eyes of men converse as much as their tongues, with the advantage, that the ocular dialect needs no dictionary, but is understood all the world over. When the eyes say one thing, and the tongue another, a practised man relies on the language of the first. If the man is off his centre, the eyes show it. You can read in the eyes of your companion, whether your argument hits him, though his tongue will not confess it. There is a look by which a man shows he is going to say a good thing, and a look when he has said it. ”

“ How much more easily the sounds of words, standing for the ideas we have in our minds, may be changed, than the grammatical structure and idiom of language, we may every day observe [390] in foreigners, who, though they may ever so carefully and perfectly have learned our language, rarely, if ever, attain to some of the niceties peculiar to our tongue, or ever lay entirely aside some of the characteristic peculiarities of their own. ”

“ An orator, by his tones as well as by his words, causes definite mental activities to take possession of his audience, thus influencing them with the action of their own minds. The language of tone is the language of the spheres, it is the language of the invisible world, it is the language of the angels. ”

“ For the tongue is a smouldering fire, and excess of speech a deadly poison. Material fire consumeth the body, whereas the fire of the tongue devoureth both heart and soul. The force of the former lasteth but for a time, whilst the effects of the latter endure a century. ”

“ While speaking our native tongue our muscles move, our sinews tend, our vessels lean, our blood throbs, and our nerves tingle with the essence of our language in its direction, and not in the direction of any other language. We not only speak and sing our language, but we gesticulate it, we walk it, dance it, write it, think it, smile it, and sorrow in it. Everything we do is done differently from the same thing done by a person speaking another language. ”

“ Or again; could such a spectator, by dissecting the tongues of animals, have divined that the Tongue, in man, was to be the means of communicating the finest movements of thought and feeling; of giving one man, weak and feeble, an unbounded ascendency over robust and angry multitudes ”

“ Every language is a persuasion, an induced habit, an instrument which receives the note indeed but gives the tone. Every language imposes a quality, teaches a temper, proposes a way, bestows a tradition: this is the tone—the voice—of the instrument. ”

“ For either a word or an idiom, of which the reader is ignorant, brings him to a stop. Now if these belong to foreign tongues, we must either make inquiry about them from men who speak those tongues, or if we have leisure we must learn the tongues ourselves, or we must consult and compare several translators. If, however, there are words or idioms in our own tongue that we are unacquainted with, we gradually come to know them through being accustomed to read or to hear them. ”

“ The science of significations enables us to retain the spiritual unity of a tongue despite the confusion wrought by phonetic and morphologic changes. Age-old traditions of language which have acquired a subconscious status are not confused with the elements of speech that grow out of conscious imitation. ”

“ In this way we may explain the adventitious dental that has attached itself to the end of a word like sound, Latin sonus, French son, or the aspirate which is inserted in the wrong place by persons who are conscious of a difficulty in pronouncing it in the right place. So, again, in talking to a foreigner we instinctively raise the voice and repeat our remarks in a louder tone should he fail to comprehend them. The more readily our thoughts are understood, the less need there is of our dwelling upon the sounds which express them. ”

“ Rightly understood, it is the following of nature. Its value is that it emphasizes the constancy of this one of the constant factors in voice. Its result is a certain kind and degree of monotony; without that particular kind of monotony the voice is faulty. When the tone is forced out of its proper place, it is dissipated and more or less lost. A student once told the writer, when complimented on the good placement of his voice, that he learned this in his summer employment as a public crier at the door of a show tent. ”

“ The effect of the emotional tone does not even require fitness in the meaning of the spoken words, for nonsense or an unknown tongue may be made to convey, when spoken with expressive intonation, the feelings which are displayed upon the speaker’s face. ”

“ But the former relation is by far the most frequent; the personification of things, or of the causes of events, is the natural assimilation of the strange to the familiar, and this naturally happens when speech is there through the material which it offers, though this material is modified by the myth for its use. The stories, as well as the generic modes of expression, are taught, handed down, and felt in and with the language ”

“ There is but one defect in literature,—that the talk is all on one side, so that we are listeners, as at a sermon or a lecture, and not sharers in some antique symposium, our own brows crowned with flowers, and our own tongues loosened with wine. The exercise of the tongue is wanting, and to some it is an imperious need, so that they will talk to the most uncongenial [Pg 30] human beings, or even to parrots and dogs. ”

“ If you try to say anything superfluous, too emphatic, or false, the language will not suffer it. Whereas our literary tongue has no skeleton, you may pull it about in every direction, and the result is always something resembling literature. ”

“ Since mutual imitation is the expression of unanimity, this, the natural harmony of minds, may be regarded as the first cause of a current meaning of words, as of other signs. In every nursery, in the bosom of every happy family, we may see how new names for men and things are invented and understood, how they are taken up and repeated from delight in them or in their inventor—e.g., the child who imitates the sound. It is similar when, in larger communities of language, orators and authors introduce new and special words, or new meanings for old words ”

“ The language of customary usage as a universal opposed to the many dialects, distinguishes itself in advanced states of culture as the written language from the language of intercourse. Here the communication of an individual meaning in a social material is indeed still liable to all the defects which are inevitable in using signs of signs; but knowledge of the language as fixed in writing forces us also to a more conscious subordination to the norms and rules which are imparted by teaching, and the observance of which again facilitates understanding, hence social application. ”

“ That the use of language, like other customs, has also a subjective side is obvious with so psychical an act as that of speech; and yet the object is so far intellectual that deviations and errors ought not to excite ill-will. Still, in every linguist there is another kind of dissatisfaction, or at any rate dissent, which makes itself felt, often only as at something ludicrous, and in less marked cases simply as the judgment which denies something as false, and as the wish to correct. ”

“ Our own language would sound very different to us if we heard it without understanding, as we hear a foreign tongue. Rises and falls of voice, odd sibilants and other consonants, would fall on our ear in a way of which we can now form no notion. ”

“ The gist of the purity of a tongue lies not so much in the restriction of foreign words, or in the reservation with which new meanings are given to old words, but rather more in the retention of clearness and propriety in the use of words already in the service of the tongue. The process is less simple than it seems, since it includes not only a judicious reserve toward the new, but an active elimination of the weak and unfit among the old. ”

“ Not only is all spoken language the [10] resultant of the subjectively variable forces of time, stress, and pitch, but these three forces are themselves subject to and intimately affected by the thought and emotion which they express. Though educated persons probably receive the phenomena of language more frequently through the eye than through the ear, it is true that words are, in the first instance, sounds, of which the printed or written marks are but conventional symbols. ”

“ Why could he not have taken upon himself to say deliberately and truly, that the law of primitive language, and in the measure of its life of all language, is the symbolization of mental impression by sounds, just as man's spirit is symbolized in his body, and absolute spirit in the universe? ”

“ For every man, whatever be his mother-tongue, is equally capable to judge of the length or shortness of words, of the alternate opening and closing of the mouth in speaking, and of the relation which the sound bears to the sense. In these particulars, the judgement is susceptible of no prejudice from custom, at least of no invincible prejudice.{247}
That the English tongue, originally harsh, is at present much softened by dropping in the pronunciation many redundant consonants, is undoubtedly true. ”

“ But he will not, in his perplexity, think of ascribing even the most obscure and startling changes of sound to any other agency than that which brings about those contractions and conversions which are most obviously a relief to the organs of articulation: it is still the speakers of language, and they alone, who work over and elaborate the words they utter, suiting them to their convenience and their caprice. ”