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Words have bones

Preface

Before You Begin

This manual grew out of a question I've been asked many times, almost always by young people, almost always with a little suspicion: so what is this endolinguistics thing actually good for? It's a good question. I'll take it as my own. And the short answer is this: it's good for looking at words from the inside, and once you learn to look at them that way, you stop learning languages the way you'd haul rocks, one at a time. You start re-cognizing them.

The long answer is the rest of the book.

Where what you're about to read comes from

I didn't invent endolinguistics. It was founded in the mid-twentieth century by Dr. Christiane S. Meulemans and Dr. José Ángel Elias Fernández y Cuevas. By the age of 31, Dr. Elias spoke more than twenty languages and had studied pure mathematics, music, and cryptology. Later, as physicians, the two of them took up an older intuition, that of the Belgian neurologist Joseph Meulemans, who suspected that the right hemisphere of the brain does things with language that the science of his time didn't know how to see. I was a direct student of both of them. What I've done since then is research, organize, and write down what I learned, and add a few pieces of my own.

You should know from the start which pieces are mine, so you don't credit them to the wrong people. The seven families of sounds you'll work with from chapter 3 on (the OAS classes) are my proposal, and so is the way of writing them with Greek symbols. So are psychophonology, which we'll talk about in Part III, and qualic metaphysics as I understand it, which shows up at the end. Whatever is solid in all this, I owe to my teachers. The mistakes you find are mine.

And there's a debt bigger than any other: the one I owe to historical linguistics, the science that has spent almost two hundred years reconstructing, link by link, the journey of words. Without its work there would be nothing to tell here. Endolinguistics doesn't compete with it. It takes what historical linguistics discovered and turns it into something you can discover on your own.

Who this manual is for

For you, if you're between fifteen and twenty and one of these three things is true:

  1. You're learning a language (Spanish, most likely; maybe French, German, Italian, or Portuguese) and you feel like you memorize lists that are gone by the next day.
  2. You like puzzles, secret codes, hidden patterns, and it never occurred to you that your own language was full of them.
  3. You're curious about how the mind works: why one word sounds hard to you and another soft, why a "no" can be a door slamming shut or a plea.

You don't need to know linguistics, or Latin, or anything you don't already know. You need to speak English, which you've done since you were a baby, and you need to want to look carefully.

What this manual is and what it isn't

It's a practical manual. It has explanations, examples, exercises, and challenges. It's meant to be read with a pencil in your hand and, every now and then, out loud.

It isn't a linguistics textbook. When I need a technical term I'll explain it, and when linguistics says something more precisely than there's room for here, I'll tell you.

It isn't a book of magic tricks either. From the very first chapter you'll find warnings. Some of them will seem like killjoys. They're there because the tool you're about to learn is powerful, and anything powerful can be misused. The same ability that will let you see that father and padre are the same word can lead you to believe that much and mucho are too. (They aren't. You'll see why in chapter 12, and it'll surprise you.)

How it's put together

The manual has four parts.

Throughout the text you'll find boxes:

The solutions to the exercises are at the end, in Appendix B. I ask just one thing: try each exercise before you look at the solution. Chapter 8 explains why that isn't a quirk of mine but the way memory works.

One last thing, about the tone

This manual doesn't want to convince you of anything. It wants you to look. If by the end you hear your own language with a little strangeness (the way you feel when you learn a secret about someone you've known all your life), it will have done its job. And if, on top of that, Spanish or French or German stops looking like a wall and starts looking like a distant relative with a different accent, even better.

Alejandro Toledo Martínez