Language embraces Speech—Speech, Words, Grammar, and Rhetoric.

A definition of the word speech as used in this particular work is given elsewhere, and by this definition the word is used only in that sense which limits it to the sphere of oral sounds. It is that form of language which addresses itself only to the ear. The sounds which constitute it may be supplemented by signs or gestures, but such signs are only adjuncts, and are not to be regarded as an integral part of speech in its true sense. Speech cannot be acquired by those forms of life which occupy the lowest horizons of the animal kingdom, and have no organs with which to produce sound. In the light of modern use and acceptation language, broadly interpreted, includes all modes and means of communication between mind and mind. It therefore includes speech as one form, while signs or gestures constitute another form. Writing in all its various modes is another form of language. It may be substituted for either speech or gestures, but it does not thereby become speech in a literal sense, but within itself it constitutes another form of language. There seems to be some vague and subtle method of communication found in certain spheres of life which is called telepathy. While it is a mere ghost of language, so to speak, it has an identity which cannot be denied. This may perhaps be called another form of language.

By some eminent men of letters it is claimed that speech was invented, and therefore cannot be universally the same; and this is proven by the fact that different tribes of men have different tongues. They do not appear to realise, that to the first cardinal sounds of speech so much has been added age by age, by slow accretions, that the radex of speech is but a mere drop in the great ocean of sounds. The mobility of speech is such as to make it more susceptible to change than matter is; and yet we find that, by the laws of change, man has been evolved from a less complex state of matter, and that in these latter years he can only be identified as the descendant of his prototype by the most scrutinising care, and by picking up the dropped stitches in the great fabric of Nature. To illustrate the slow and imperceptible, yet never ceasing, never failing process of evolution, we may imagine a man picking up a single grain of sand at a certain point and carrying it a distance of a thousand feet, where he deposits it at another certain point; returning, takes a second grain of sand from the same place as he secured the first, and carries it to the point at which he deposited the first, and thus continues through his life. At his death his son succeeds him in the task, and continues through his life, and at the death of this man his son succeeds; and thus in turn each one succeeds the other through a million generations. Supposing the wind and rain left these grains of sand unmolested during this long lapse of time, it is evident that at the place from which the sand was taken there would be a hole, and where it was deposited there would be a hill. It is by such slight changes that Nature does her work; and thus it is that speech, as well as matter, has been transformed from what it was to what it is. The physical basis of life retains its identity through all those varied forms, from protozoa to the highest type; and so the phonetic basis of speech adheres through all the changing modes of thought and expression. Speech is the highest type of language and the most accurate mode of expression, and belongs only to the higher forms of the animal kingdom. It has passed through all inferior horizons coinciding with the mental, moral, and social planes through which man has passed in the course of his evolution.

Words are the factors of speech and the highest development of that faculty. A word may be composed of one or more sounds so articulated as to preclude any interval of time between the utterance of any two of them, as "tune," in which the sounds appear to overlap and blend into each other. A single word may signify more than a single thing, and sometimes will suggest to the mind a category or group of connected thoughts, as "eat" or "telegraph," and such is the value of many of our words. This is especially true of words which combine two roots; but such a combination is usually found only in the higher types of human speech. But in these higher types words bear such relations to each other that we cannot well convey a complete idea with a single word; and hence it is that in the modes of expression used by man, each separate statement consists of two or more words bearing certain relations to each other, and these are often qualified by other words of less importance. This redundancy is due to the higher and more complex modes of thought used by man; and it is on such a state of facts that we have founded that branch of science called grammar, which would be of little use among those forms which occupy the planes of life inferior to man, and it is found of little use among the lower tribes of man, where it does not exist in any written form. Grammar does not make language, but serves as a kind of anchor by which the dialects of human speech are somewhat unified and made more stable; and to this is due in some measure the fact that savage tongues and dialects are more susceptible to change in their structure, while the phonetic basis upon which they rest remains the same.

In the more refined tongues of human speech, we go beyond that code of laws called grammar and amplify them into rhetoric. This branch of the science of speech could find no place among the lower types, as the words are few from which they may select; and so exact and arbitrary is the meaning of each one, and so uniform the relations, that no great variety of expression can be made with such a limited vocabulary. Their eloquence is in their brevity of speech. But while the types of speech used by the lower primates occupy a plane so low in the scale, they are as truly speech as the vocal organs that produce the sounds are truly vocal organs. Life is life, in what form soever it is found. It is not less real in the mollusc than in the man. The same is true of emotion, of thought, of expression, and of speech. Life, emotion, thought, expression, and speech began in embryo, and have developed co-ordinately with all the faculties possessed by man. They are as dependent upon each other as matter is on force, and as inseparable as light from energy. Speech is the physical manifestation of which thought is the ultimate force; it is a spoke in the chariot-wheels of consciousness; it is the body of which thought is the soul.