The degree to which all this affects the speech of the normal man has, however, been greatly exaggerated. Because there are, all told, including technical terms, a hundred thousand or more words in our dictionaries, and because Shakespeare in his writings used 24,000 different words, Milton in his poems 17,000, and the English Bible contains 7,200, it has been concluded that the average man, whose range of thought and power of expression are so much less, must use an enormously smaller vocabulary. It has been stated that many a peasant goes through life without using more than 300 or 400 words, that the vocabulary of Italian grand opera is about 600, and that he is a person above the average who employs more than 3,000 to 4,000 words. If such were the case it would be natural that the uncivilized man, whose life is simpler, and whose knowledge more confined, should be content with an exceedingly small vocabulary.
But it is certain that the figures just cited are erroneous. If any one who considers himself an average person will take the trouble to make a list of his speaking vocabulary, he will quickly discover that he knows, and on occasion uses, the names of at least one to two thousand different things. That is, his vocabulary contains so many concrete nouns. To these must be added the abstract nouns, the verbs, adjectives, pronouns, and the other parts of speech, the short and familiar words that are indispensable to communication in any language. It may thus be safely estimated that it is an exceptionally ignorant and stupid person in a civilized country that has not at his command a vocabulary of several thousand words.
Test counts based on dictionaries show, for people of bookish tastes, a knowledge of about 30,000 to 35,000 words. Most of these would perhaps never be spoken by the individuals tested, would not be at their actual command, but it seems that at least 10,000 would be so controlled. The carefully counted vocabulary of a five and a half year old American boy comprised 1,528 understandingly used words, besides participles and other inflected forms. Two boys between two and three years used 642 and 677 different words.
It is therefore likely that statements as to the paucity of the speech of unlettered peoples are equally exaggerated. He who professes to declare on the strength of his observation that a native language consists of only a few hundred terms, displays chiefly his ignorance. He has either not taken the trouble to exhaust the vocabulary or has not known how to do so. It is true that the traveler or settler can usually converse with natives to the satisfaction of his own needs with two or three hundred words. Even the missionary can do a great deal with this stock, if it is properly chosen. But it does not follow that because a civilized person has not learned more of a language, that there is no more. On this point the testimony of the student is the evidence to be considered.
Dictionaries compiled by missionaries or philologists of languages previously unwritten run to surprising figures. Thus, the number of words recorded in Klamath, the speech of a culturally rude American Indian tribe, is 7,000; in Navaho, 11,000; in Zulu, 17,000; in Dakota, 19,000; in Maya, 20,000; in Nahuatl, 27,000. It may safely be said that every existing language, no matter how backward its speakers are in their general civilization, possesses a vocabulary of at least 5,000 words.
59. Quality of Speech Sounds
Another mistaken assumption that is frequently made is that the speech of non-literary peoples is harsh, its pronunciation more difficult than ours. This belief is purely subjective. When one has heard and uttered a language all his life, its sounds come to one’s mouth with a minimum of effort; but unfamiliar vowels and consonants are formed awkwardly and inaccurately. No adult reared in an Anglo-Saxon community finds th difficult. Nor does a French or German child, whose speech habits are still plastic, find long difficulty in mastering the particular tongue control necessary to the production of the th sound. But the adult Frenchman or German, whose muscular habits have settled in other lines, tries and tries and falls back on s or t. A Spaniard, however, would agree with the Anglo-Saxon as to the ease and “naturalness” of th. Conversely, the “rough” ch flows spontaneously out of the mouth of a German or Scotchman, whereas English, French, and Italians have to struggle long to master it, and are tempted to substitute k. German ö and French u trouble us, our “short” u is equally resistant to Continental tongues.
Even a novel position can make a familiar sound strange and forbidding. Most Anglo-Saxons fail on the first try to say ngis; many give up and declare it beyond their capacity to learn. Yet it is only sing pronounced backward. English uses ng finally and medially in words, not initially. Any English speaker can quickly acquire its use in the new position if, to keep from being disconcerted, he follows some such sequence as sing, singing, stinging, ringing, inging, nging, ngis.
So with surd l—Welsh ll—which is ordinary l minus the accompaniment of vocal cord vibrations. A little practice makes possible the throwing on or off of these vibrations, the “voicing” of speech, for any sound, with as much ease as one would turn a faucet on or off. Surd l thereupon flows with the same readiness as sonant l. As a matter of fact we often pronounce it unconsciously at the end of words like little. When it comes at the beginning, however, as in the tribal name usually written Tlingit, Americans tend to substitute something more habitual, such as kl, which is familiar from clip, clean, clear, close, clam, and many other words. The simple surd l has even been repeatedly described quite inappropriately as a “click”; which is about as far from picturing it with correctness as calling it a thump or a sigh; all because it comes in an unaccustomed position.