Speech sounds cannot be understood, delimited, classified and explained except in the light of the tasks which they perform in language.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
The task is to investigate speech sounds in relation to the meanings with which they are invested, i.e., sounds viewed as signifiers, and above all to throw light on the structure of the relation between sounds and meaning.
Most profoundly deaf people have speech that is very difficult to understand.
Words have not only a definition... but also the felt quality of their own kind of sound.
Linguistic sounds, considered as external, physical phenomena have two aspects, the motor and the acoustic.
Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent.
Language is legislation, speech is its code. We do not see the power which is in speech because we forget that all speech is a classification, and that all classifications are oppressive.
Humans are crude linguists from the moment of birth - and perhaps even in the womb - to the extent at least that we can hear spoken sounds and begin to recognize different combinations of language sounds.
Language can only deal meaningfully with a special, restricted segment of reality. The rest, and it is presumably the much larger part, is silence.
Speech happens to not be his language.
The spoken form is in fact a very restrained representation of what is possible in the musical language.