I. The Nature of Expression.
1. Language.
Human civilisation rests entirely on the possibility of communication of thoughts. There would be no cooperation between human beings if man could not exchange ideas with his fellow men; there would be no arts, no science, if knowledge could not be handed down from one generation to the next.
Communication requires some sort of vehicle which carries the message through space and time. The most common vehicle consists of certain articulated sounds called Speech; but for many purposes spoken words would be useless on account of their transitory character: in such cases we use certain enduring marks of ink, pencil, chalk, engravings in stone or brass, or similar devices. Any system of lasting marks serving the purpose of communication we shall call Writing.
Speech and Writing are two different kinds of Language. They may not be entirely distinct from each other, the difference between them may be one of degree rather than of essence, but at present we are not concerned with this difference, nor indeed with any differences between various kinds of speech or writing; we are interested only in those characteristics which all the different methods of communication have in common and which are the essential characteristics of Language. There are innumerable methods of conveying thoughts, as a matter of fact almost anything in the world can be used as a vehicle of communication, and modern technical skill has developed some of the possibilities: electric currents, gramophone records, radio waves, and so on.
All these possible systems must have certain common properties (otherwise they could not serve a common purpose), and it is these properties which constitute the nature of language. We shall always use the word “language” in its largest sense, in which it denotes any system of things or procedures or events considered as a means of communication of thoughts.
