We have already seen, in an incidental way, that phonetic elements or such dynamic features as quantity and stress have varying psychological “values.”  The English ts of fiats is merely a t followed by a functionally independent s, the ts of the German word Zeit has an integral value equivalent, say, to the t of the English word tide.  Again, the t of time is indeed noticeably distinct from that of sting, but the difference, to the consciousness of an English-speaking person, is quite irrelevant.  It has no “value.”  If we compare the t-sounds of Haida, the Indian language spoken in the Queen Charlotte Islands, we find that precisely the same difference of articulation has a real value.  In such a word as sting “two,” the t is pronounced precisely as in English, but in sta “from” the t is clearly “aspirated,” like that of time.  In other words, an objective difference that is irrelevant in English is of functional value in Haida; from its own psychological standpoint the t of sting is as different from that of sta as, from our standpoint, is the t of time from the d of divine.  Further investigation would yield the interesting result that the Haida ear finds the difference between the English t of sting and the d of divine as irrelevant as the naive English ear finds that of the t-sounds of sting and time.  The objective comparison of sounds in two or more languages is, then, of no psychological or historical significance unless these sounds are first “weighted,” unless their phonetic “values” are determined.  These values, in turn, flow from the general behavior and functioning of the sounds in actual speech.

These considerations as to phonetic value lead to an important conception.  Back of the purely objective system of sounds that is peculiar to a language and which can be arrived at only by a painstaking phonetic analysis, there is a more restricted “inner” or “ideal” system which, while perhaps equally unconscious as a system to the naive speaker, can far more readily than the other be brought to his consciousness as a finished pattern, a psychological mechanism.  The inner sound-system, overlaid though it may be by the mechanical or the irrelevant, is a real and an immensely important principle in the life of a language.  It may persist as a pattern, involving number, relation, and functioning of phonetic elements, long after its phonetic content is changed.  Two historically related languages or dialects may not have a sound in common, but their ideal sound-systems may be identical patterns.  I would not for a moment wish to imply that this pattern may not change.  It may shrink or expand or change its functional complexion, but its rate of change is infinitely less rapid than that of the sounds as such.  Every language, then, is characterized as much by its ideal system of sounds and by the underlying phonetic pattern (system, one might term it, of symbolic atoms) as by a definite grammatical structure.  Both the phonetic and conceptual structures show the instinctive feeling of language for form.[25]