The Tongue!

The tongue is indeed a miracle from the Creator and a great blessing. Have we ever pondered on the working of the tongue? How does it move and how do the sounds and words come out of our mouths? How is speech related to the movement of the tongue? 

This is just one of the numerous and mind boggling workings of the human body. When you think about how we have come into being and how we grow up from a baby to a full human you can not stop wondering and thinking about what the driving force is. 

The tongue is no less than a miracle and a great blessing because with it's help we are able to communicate with each other. It has given the human beings so many ways to express ourselves. We use numerous words and languages to talk and express our views. 

 Only when tongue, lips and teeth work together do sounds from the throat turn into understandable letters and words. The tongue is extremely agile and quick: It can produce more than 90 words per minute, using more than 20 different movements. The tongue is essential for pronouncing the consonants “t”, “d”, “l” or the rolling “r”. When pronouncing the letter “k” the tongue is slightly narrowed at the back. And when we say “s”, the tip of the tongue moves backwards. If the tip of the tongue remains between the teeth, we hear a typical lisp.

The fact that the tongue is essential for speaking can also be seen in the ability of parrots to imitate human language: Although they only have a very simple organ of speech with fewer muscle groups than humans, they have an extraordinarily thick tongue. This helps them to produce the sounds of human language. They can touch the tip of their tongue to certain points of articulation in their mouth to imitate human words in a deceptively similar way.

Ref: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmedhealth/PMH0033703/

Speech is bestowed only to human beings. No creature can communicate the way a human can.

The tongue and the speech are great source to either spread goodness or otherwise. It is indeed wise to think about a very good use of this great blessing that we carry around. We can make friends or foes by the good and bad use of the tongue. We can tell lies or always speak the truth. The choice is ours.