ABSTRACT
All sciences dealing with speech are legitimately concerned, therefore, with such things as beauty, ease of expression, and so forth, and even mystical abstractions such as the feeling of ‘grace’ may play their part. For many thousands of years men have been living together in communities. A community, by its very nature, implies the existence within itself of certain links which connect the individual members with one another. One of the most outstanding of these links is communication by means of sounds, known as ‘language’ or ‘speech’. The terms ‘language’ and ‘speech’ are so familiar that the ordinary man may think it unnecessary to give them any deeper consideration. He may assume that they are part of the make-up of every normal person, here for him to use, just as he does any other tool; and he attributes to them certain qualities such as goodness, badness, beauty, and so forth.
