Speech
Speech is the vocalized form of human communication. It is based upon the syntactic combination of lexicals and names that are drawn from very large (usually about 10,000 different words) vocabularies. Each spoken word is created out of the phonetic combination of a limited set of vowel and consonant speech sound units. These vocabularies, the syntax which structures them, and their set of speech sound units differ, creating the existence of many thousands of different types of mutually unintelligible human languages. Most human speakers (polyglots) are able to communicate in two or more of them. The vocal abilities that enable humans to produce speech also provide humans with the ability to sing.
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Famous quotes containing the word speech:
“I, schooled in misery, know many purifying rites, and I know where speech is proper and where silence.”
—Aeschylus (525–456 B.C.)
“Some subjects come up suddenly in our speech and cannot be silenced.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“Our speech has its weaknesses and its defects, like all the rest. Most of the occasions for the troubles of the world are grammatical.”
—Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592)