Chapter XI: Last Step : Translation of Language from Time to Space

Extract

Words are fleeting in pronunciation, but permanent when written down.—BACON, Advancement of Learning.

Statues of brass or marble will perish; and statues made in imitation of them are-not the same statues nor the same workmanship, any more than a copy of a picture is the same picture. But print and reprint a thought a thousand times over, and with material of any kind, carve it in wood or engrave it on stone, the thought is eternally and identically the same thought in every case. It has a capacity of unimpaired existence, unaffected by change of matter, and is essentially distinct and of a nature different from everything else that we know of or can conceive.—THOMAS PAINE, The Age of Reason.

And now we come to the final step in the making of language. By the conventionalization of sound in oral speech, which is the actual language, man accomplished two things. First, he changed the vague suggestiveness of natural sounds into perfectly defined, articulated, limited sound symbols, that can be clearly differentiated from one another by the ear, as ‘rat,’ ‘cat.’ Second, by conventionalization he transformed the pure time symbols into space-time symbols, as in the sentence, ‘The bird sings,’ where ‘bird’ is a representation of space, ‘sings’ of time, though both are carried from the lips of the speaker to the ear of the listener upon the common substratum of sound, that is, time.