ABSTRACT
There remains one great facet of language, whose nature and recorded history the authors have hardly looked at — namely, the physiology of speech. They went on to analyse the vocabularies of a number of languages, and found words or word-parts common to many words in the language and of constant meaning, and we called them ‘radical words’ or ‘roots’. The sounds that constitute speech are received by a series of rhythmical pressures of air on the ear-drum of a listener — very gentle but very rapid pressures, of a frequency within the range of human hearing. Air is of an elastic nature, and these pressures — or rather variations of pressure - are caused by a rhythmical disturbance of air at some point from which the sound originates. The column of air, pressed from the lungs, passes along the trachea (or wind-pipe) to the larynx, where the sides of the trachea are much flattened until they can meet.
