“Speech is our most valuable instrument, because we can make it fit our common lives. We are not born to follow words. Words follow life. It has always been so from the very beginning. In fact, the human larynx and the shape of the passages above it have evolved in harmony with the lives our earliest ancestors lived, first in the trees, and then on the ground.”

—  John Rupert Firth

Source: The tongues of men. 1937, p. 25 (1968; 24)

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John Rupert Firth 14
English linguist 1890–1960

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