Part I · Chapter 1

Your Words Are Very Old

Three scenes

First scene. It's Monday, the first Spanish class of the semester. Your teacher hands out a list: padre, father; pie, foot; pez, fish. You have to know it by Friday. You repeat it, cover one column with your hand, repeat it again. By Tuesday you've forgotten half. Nobody told you why father is padre and not blorp. You got a handful of loose facts, dealt out like cards, and were left alone with them.

Second scene. You're texting someone, fast, one-handed: thx, pls, msg me tmrw. Nobody ever taught you to do that, but you know how. And look at what you're doing: you strip most of the vowels out of the words and keep most of the consonants. Never the other way around. Nobody writes a, ea to say "thanks, please." Without anyone explaining it, you know the message survives without its vowels and doesn't survive without its consonants.

Third scene. Line up four words that mean the same thing in four languages:

They sound different. They're spelled differently. But now do what you do when you text: take out the vowels.

Something shows up. The four words shrink to almost the same thing: three consonants, always in the same order. And the differences that are left have a family resemblance. P, f, and v are all made with the lips (German writes Vater but says FAH-ter: the spelling lies to you, the mouth doesn't). D, t, and English th are all made with the tip of the tongue at the teeth. And the r is an r in all four.

Three scenes, one problem. The list in the first scene looks like a pile of facts with no seams. The second scene says you already know, without knowing it, that consonants are what hold a word up. And the third suggests that if you look at the consonants carefully, the list stops being a pile: padre isn't a foreign word to memorize, it's father said with a different accent, an accent that has rules.

This manual is about that accent with rules, and about what lies underneath it.

A family of languages the size of half the world

How can father and padre be the same word, if Spanish comes from Latin and English doesn't?

The answer is that Latin and the ancestor of English were themselves siblings. Some five or six thousand years ago, somewhere between eastern Europe and western Asia, there lived a people whose language left no writing at all. Not one tablet, not one carved stone, not even its name. Scholars call it Proto-Indo-European, for lack of anything better. Proto means "first"; Indo-European means its descendants spread from India to Europe.

Those descendants are many. From the same trunk came Latin (and from it Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, French, Catalan, Romanian), the Germanic languages (English, German, Dutch, Swedish), Greek, the Slavic languages (Russian, Polish), the Celtic ones (Irish, Welsh), Persian, Hindi, and many more. Almost half of humanity speaks a language from this family today.

Look at what happened to a single word, the number three, in a few of these relatives:

Five languages that split apart thousands of years ago, in places that had no contact with each other, and they all kept the same thing: a tooth consonant followed by an r.

Nobody wrote down Proto-Indo-European. Everything those people said traveled from a mouth to an ear, over hundreds of generations, changing a little at every step. And yet something of what they said is still alive in your mouth every time you count to three.

What survived the journey?

Here is the question that holds up this whole manual. If a word traveled from mouth to mouth for five thousand years, changing shape in every generation, how can anyone seriously claim (not as poetry, but as knowledge) that three and tres are the same word?

To claim that, something had to survive the journey. Something tougher than fashions, more stubborn than centuries.

Historical linguistics found out what it was in the nineteenth century, and it's one of the great quiet achievements of science. It discovered that the sounds of a language don't change at random: they change by rules. Where Latin had p, the Germanic languages put f, and not in one word but in hundreds, all at once. Where Latin had t, English put th. If you know the rule, you can follow a word through the centuries even if it has changed clothes ten times.

In this manual you'll learn several of those rules. But I'm not going to hand them to you as a list to memorize. You're going to discover them yourself, by looking at words. That difference matters more than it seems.

Endo: inside

And endolinguistics? What does it add to all this?

The word makes sense in pieces. Endo, in Greek, means "inside." Endolinguistics studies what languages carry inside: not what they say, but how they're organized underneath what they say.

It helps to separate two layers right away:

1. The exolanguage is language as it appears: the words you hear and say, the grammar, the spelling, what's in the dictionary. It's the outer layer.
2. The endolanguage is the deep organization that holds up the outer one: patterns of consonants that repeat, that travel from language to language, and that orient the meaning of words without anyone noticing.

Endolinguistics calls those patterns codes. A code is, roughly, the consonant skeleton of a word seen in a special way. You'll learn to read them over the next three chapters.

And they have a very concrete use. A code is what father and padre share underneath the disguise. If you learn to see it, each new word in a language related to yours stops arriving alone. It arrives connected to something you already know. That changes how a language is learned, and chapter 8 explains why.

What this chapter doesn't say

Before we go on, two clarifications, because misreadings start early.

First: not all words in all languages are related. Father and padre are; that's documented. But some words look extremely alike and aren't relatives, and learning to tell them apart is half the work. (That they aren't relatives doesn't mean their resemblance means nothing; you'll see that in chapter 12.)

Second: a code isn't a word's "secret meaning." That idea is tempting and it's false. What a code is, then, you'll see in chapter 4. For now, keep this: the code doesn't tell you what a word means; it tells you where to look.

In the next chapter you'll learn the first operation of the whole method, the simplest one: separating bone from flesh.