The phonic medium of language
Speech and writing are the two media or substances used by natural languages as vehicles for communication. Many languages in the world today are both written and spoken. But statistics resulting from careful investigations show that there have been over 5,000 languages in the world, about two thirds of which have not had written form. The languages used by some national minorities in china, the languages used in some tribes in Africa, and those used by some Australian aborigines are all examples that come to mind readily.
Of the two media of language, speech is more basic than writing. The natural or primary medium of human language is sound for some obviously reasons. In linguistic evolution, speech is prior to writing. The writing system of any language is always “invented” by its users to record speech when the need arises. In everyday communication, speech plays a greater role than writing in terms of the amount of information conveyed. And also, speech is always the way in which every native speaker acquires his mother tongue, and writing is learned and taught later at school. Thus for linguists, the study of sounds is of greater importance than that of writing; their data for investigation and analysis are mostly drawn from authentic, everyday speech.
Naturally, linguists are not interested in all sounds; they are concerned with only those sounds that are produced by the human speech organs in so far as they have a role to play in linguistic communication. These sounds are limited in number. This limited range of sounds which are meaningful in human communication and are of interest to linguistic studies are the phonic medium of language; and the individual sounds within this range are the speech sounds.
Modern linguistics regards the spoken form of language as primary, but not the written form, because the spoken form is prior to the written form and most writing systems are derived from the spoken form of language.
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