Phonetics and African Languages

Abstract

The resolution of a spoken language into its constituent sounds is an exercise that most of us have practised since first we began to prattle. Our early efforts in the hearing and making of speech sounds were probably as automatic as the act of breathing, and it is very doubtful whether we ever attain any great degree of voluntary control over the physical and mental processes involved in the hearing and making of speech sounds. Before the acquisition of speech is complete, the language problem is further complicated for us by the laborious tasks of learning to read and write, that is to say, learning to see a language with the eye, and to make a visual picture of it with the hand. The result is that language becomes, while we are still young, a medley of complex processes, in which ear, eye, hand, and tongue are co-ordinated by the brain in an intricacy that is probably the crowning achievement of the human mind. Language, visual or oral, heard or seen, made with hand or mouth, rests thereafter upon a congeries of reflex processes that remain at our disposal to serve all the purposes for which language is intended.