THE DIVERSITY OF CULTURES 21
small surplus for the building of other traits. Aspects of
life that seem to us most important have been passed over
with small regard by peoples whose culture, oriented in
another direction, has been far from poor. Or the same
trait may be so greatly elaborated that we reckon it as
fantastic. |
It is in cultural life as it is in speech; selection is the
prime necessity. The numbers of sounds that can be pro-
duced by our vocal cords and our oral and nasal cavities
are practically unlimited. The three or four dozen of the
English language are a selection which coincides not even
âwith those of such closely related dialects as German and
French. The total that are used in different languages of
the world no one has ever dared to estimate. But each
language must make its selection and abide by it on pain
of not being intelligible at all. A langauge that used even
a few hundreds of the possibleâand actually recordedâ
phonetic elements could not be used for communication.
On the other hand a great deal of our misunderstanding of
languages unrelated to our own has arisen from our at-
tempts to refer alien phonetic systems back to ours as a
point of reference. We recognize only one k. If other
people have five à sounds placed in different positions in
the throat and mouth, distinctions of vocabulary and of
syntax that depend on these differences are impossible to
us until we master them. We have a d and an %. They
may have an intermediate sound which, if we fail to iden-
tify it, we write now d and now z, introducing distinctions
which do not exist. The elementary prerequisite of lin-
guistic analysis is a consciousness of these incredibly
numerous available sounds from which each language
makes its own selections. x
In culture too we must imagine a great arc on which are
ranged the possible interests provided either by the human
age-cycle or by the environment or by man's various
activities. A culture that capitalized even a considerable
âââââââââââââââ âââEââââââ_
