Oral Words, etc.
through the organs of hearing. The component sounds of a word therefore are valuable only when they have become synthetic by the blend of elements which, being internal to language, are closely interdependent. Just as the philologists have unbalanced their work with too much attention to the written forms of language, and too little to the spoken; just as the grammarians have over-emphasized the importance of the comparative method in their researches, so have the phonetic specialists, for the most part, shown too great a predilection for the study of isolated sounds by the analytic method, and too little regard for the synthetic effect of sounds that form words.
Take, for example, the utterance of an isolated sound which is to enter a word: the phonetic organs assume their necessary position with relation to each other in order to produce the sound required. In the uttering of this sound, a certain individual liberty may be taken at will. The ear alone deter-
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