Our voices and their deeper meaning: unearthing the earlier, primal qualities of language.

Voice has great mystery. The voice of the individual is suggestive of something, not only of his thought, feeling, and but of his grade of evolution, of his past, present, and future. If ten people say the same thing, we will find each of them suggesting a different sense, a sense which goes further than the words themselves. While the word reaches as far as the ears, feeling reaches further into the heart. It is the voice that carries a sense, a feeling, and it expresses so much that the more one studies it the more one finds that voice has a very great significance. When a person says, “I spoke, but nobody heard me,” he does not usually know that it was because of his voice that he was not heard. It was not what he said, but what his voice conveyed. Not everyone will notice it, but everyone will feel it automatically. Kind, wise, foolish, weak, or powerful personalities will all show their character in their voice. It would not be an exaggeration to say that sometimes a person’s voice expresses quite a different meaning from what he says in words.

When we trace the secret of language in history we find that many languages known to us today have come from just a very few ancient languages. But if we go further than history takes us we shall find that all languages have come from one language, a language that the human race knew in its cradle, a language that man learnt from intuition. The names he gave to everything were derived from what each thing suggested; he called things according to what he intuitively felt on seeing and feeling them. That is why the nearer we get to the ancient languages, the more we find the secret of psychological suggestion; for every word of the ancient languages has a psychological value, and is suggestive of its sense in such a profound way that it is as if the word had come as a reaction to what the actual thing had suggested to a person. Our minds, corrupted by the new languages, which have themselves been corrupted by mixture, cannot conceive or fully appreciate that feeling which one finds in an ancient language, and which is suggestive not only of the meaning of the word, but of the nature and character and mystery of what it is identified with.

Hazrat Inayat Khan, Psychology