The Speech of Monkeys

It appears to me consistent to believe that speech appears in the animal organism simultaneously with the vocal organs, and that the desire of expression must have preceded this. [Sidenote: PRESENT CONDITION OF SPEECH] The condition of the vocal organs depends upon the type of speech which they are used to utter, and the speech depends upon the quality of thought it is intended to express. That type of speech used by the Caucasian race within the space of a few centuries has developed from a vocabulary limited to a few thousand words into the polished languages of modern Europe, comprising new types and tens of thousands of new words, until to-day our own language contains more than two hundred and twenty thousand words, very few of which, however, if any, are entirely new. The phonetic elements on which is built up this huge vocabulary do not very greatly exceed in number those found in the lowest types of human speech in the world. The total number of these sounds does not much exceed two score in the highest forms of human speech; and about half this number can be shown as the vocal products of some species of the lower animals. Some philologists claim that the blending of consonant and vowel sounds is the mark which distinguishes human speech from the sounds uttered by the lower animals.