But when we speak of language, we mean not enunciations indicative of feeling, but names for ideas or sentiments. They sigh, groan, cry, and laugh naturally, but imitatively they speak. Speech is the result of education of training, and of the imitative faculty of man. It has been experimentally demonstrated that a man who has never heard the articulations of the human voice can never speak. A child may be born with the most perfect organs of speech, and yet be born dumb, and continue dumb through life, in consequence of the imperfection of its auricular organs.
Dumbness is the necessary consequence, the inseparable adjunct of deafness from birth.
If there be a language of nature, it is a language of inarticulate sounds, which all abandon as soon as they learn to speak. This is a fact of vast consequence in this argument. Admitting that there is a natural enunciation of feeling, and a language of pains and joys, this language is abandoned when what is now called human language is taught. All philosophers have been baffled in their attempts to account for the origin of language, and all nations have concurred in declaring that speech was the gift of the gods. In proof of the syllogism, the deaf cannot speak.