Combinations of sounds, especially of consonants, are indeed of variable difficulty for anatomical reasons. Some, like nd and ts and pf, have their components telescope or join naturally through being formed in the same part of the mouth. Others, like kw (qu), have the two elements articulated widely apart, but for that reason the elements can easily be formed simultaneously. Still others, like kt and ths, are intrinsically difficult, because the elements differ in place of production but are alike in method, and therefore come under the operation of the generic rule that similar sounds require more effort to join and yet discriminate than dissimilar ones; for much the same reason that it is on the whole easier to acquire the pronunciation of a wholly new type of sound than of one which differs subtly from one already known. Yet in these matters too, habit rather than anatomical functioning determines the reaction. German pf comes hard to adult Anglo-Saxons, English kw and ths to Germans. So far as degree of accumulation of consonants is concerned, English is one of the extremest of all languages. Monosyllables like tract, stripped (stripd), sixths (siksths), must seem irremediably hard to most speakers of other idioms.
Children’s speech in all languages shows that certain sounds are, as a rule, learned earlier than others, and are therefore presumably somewhat easier physiologically. Sounds like p and t which are formed with the mobile lips and front of the tongue normally precede back tongue sounds like k. B, d, g, which are voiced like vowels, tend to precede voiceless p, t, k. Stops or momentary sounds, such as b, d, g, p, t, k, generally come earlier than the fricative continuants f, v, th, s, z, which require a delicate adjustment of lip or tongue—close proximity without firm contact—whereas the stops involve only a making and breaking of jerky contact. But so slight are the differences of effort or skill in all these cases, that as a rule only a few months separate the learning of the easier from that of the more difficult sounds; and adults no longer feel the differences. The only sound or class of sounds seriously harder than others seems to be that denoted by the letter r. Not only do children usually acquire r late, but among all races there appears to be a certain percentage of individuals who never learn to form the sound right, but substitute one approaching g or w or j or l. The reason is that r stands alone among speech sounds. It is the only one produced by blowing the tongue into a few gross vibrations; which means that this organ must be held in a special condition of laxness and yet elevated so that the flow of breath may bear on it. However, even this inherent difficulty has been insufficient to prevent many languages from changing easier sounds into r.
60. Diffusion and Parallelism in Language and Culture
A phenomenon which language shows more conspicuously than culture, or which is more readily demonstrated in it, is parallel or convergent development, the repeated, independent growth of a trait (§ [89], [100]).
Thus sex gender is an old part of Indo-European structure. In English, by the way, it has wholly disappeared, so far as formal expression goes, from noun, adjective, and demonstrative and interrogative pronoun. It lingers only in the personal pronoun of the third person singular—he, she, it. A grammar of living English that was genuinely practical and unbound by tradition would never mention gender except in discussing these three little words. That our grammars specify man as a masculine and woman as a feminine noun is due merely to the fact that in Latin the corresponding words vir and femina possess endings which are recognized as generally masculine and feminine, and that an associated adjective ends respectively in masculine -us or feminine -a. These are distinctions of form of which English possesses no equivalents. The survival of distinction between he, she, and it, while this and the and which have become alike irrespective of the sex of the person or thing they denote, is therefore historically significant. It points back to the past and to surviving Indo-European languages.
Besides, Indo-European, Semitic and Hamitic express sex by grammatical forms, although like French and Spanish and Italian, they know only two genders, the neuter being unrepresented. These three are the only large language stocks in which sex gender finds expression. Ural-Altaic, Chinese, Japanese, Dravidian, Malayo-Polynesian, Bantu, and in general the language families of Asia, Africa, and America do without, although a number of languages make other gender classifications, as of animate and inanimate, personal and impersonal, superior and inferior, intelligent and unintelligent. Sex gender however reappears in Hottentot of South Africa, and in the Chinook and Coast Salish and Pomo languages of the Pacific coast of North America.
How is this distribution to be accounted for? Indo-European, Semitic, and Hamitic occupy contiguous territory, in fact surround the Mediterranean over a tract approximately co-extensive with the Caucasian area. Could they in the remote past have influenced one another? That is, could grammatical sex gender have been invented, so to speak, by one of them, and borrowed by the others, as we know that cultural inventions are constantly diffused? Few philologists would grant this as likely: there are too few authenticated cases of formal elements or concepts having been disseminated between unrelated languages. Is it then possible that our three stocks are at bottom related? Sex gender in that case would be part of their common inheritance. For Semitic and Hamitic a number of specialists have accepted a common origin on other grounds. But for Semitic and Indo-European, philologists, who are professionally exacting, are in the main quite dubious. Positive evidence seems yet to be lacking. Still, the territorial continuity of the three speech groups showing the trait is difficult to accept as mere coincidence. In a parallel case in the realm of culture history, a common source would be accepted as highly probable. Even Hottentot has been considered a remote Semitic-Hamitic offshoot, largely, it is true, because of the very fact that it expresses gender. Philologists, accordingly, may consider the case still open; but it is at least conceivable that the phenomenon goes back to a single origin in these four Old World stocks.
Yet no stretch will account for sex gender in the three American languages as due to contact influence or diffusion, nor relate these tongues to the Old World ones. Clearly here is a case of independent origin or parallel “invention.” Chinook and Coast Salish, indeed, are in contiguity, and one may therefore have taken up the trait in imitation of the other. But Pomo lies well to the south and its affiliations run still farther south. Here sex gender is obviously an independent, secondary, and rather recent growth in the grammar.
In short, it remains doubtful whether sex gender originated three or four or five or six times among these seven language stocks; but it evidently originated repeatedly.
Other traits crop out the world over in much the same manner. A dual, for instance, is found in Indo-European, Malayo-Polynesian, Eskimo, and a number of other American languages. The distinction between inclusive and exclusive we—you and I as opposed to he and I—is made in Malayo-Polynesian, Hottentot, Iroquois, Uto-Aztecan.