[…] in ordinary use, “language” means utterance, and utterance only.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.2

[…] vocal utterance has become everywhere the leading means of expression, and has so multiplied its resources that tone, and still more gesture, has assumed the subordinate office of aiding the effectiveness of what is uttered.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.294

Men […] began, not with parts of speech which they afterwards learned to piece together into sentences, but with comprehensive utterances in which the parts of speech lay as yet undeveloped, sentences in the germ; a single word signifying a whole statement, as even yet sometimes with us: only then from poverty, as now from economy.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.301-302

Upon their [of vowel and consonant] alternation and antithesis depends the syllabic or “articulate” character of human speech: the stream of utterance is broken into articuli, ‘joints,’ by the intervention of the closer sounds between the opener and, connecting the latter at the same time that they separate them, giving distinctness and flexibility, and the power of endlessly variable combination.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.68