Part III · Chapter 11

From Thought to Sound

The threshold

Think of something you want to say and haven't said yet. There it is, in your head. It makes no sound. It has no letters. Maybe it doesn't even have words yet: it's an intention, an image, an urge. And a second from now, if you decide to say it, it will leave your mouth as vibrating air, with consonants, vowels, rhythm, and a tone that gives away how you feel.

What happened in that second? Something that makes no sound became sound. Something inside became something outside, something another person can hear.

Psychophonology calls that passage a threshold. A threshold is the place where you cross from one space into another, like a doorway. It doesn't fully belong to either room. The phonic threshold is the passage between thought and sound, and it's the deepest question in this whole part of the manual: how does thought agree to become voice?

I'm not going to give you a closed answer, because there isn't one. But I can show you what the passage looks like from several sides.

Four levels

Endolinguistics distinguishes four levels at which language works on the inside. They aren't four different languages. They're four depths of the same one.

Speaking. The level of the body making sounds: the mouth, the air, the muscles, the patterns of movement you learned as a baby. When you say hello, what happens at this level is a sequence of movements.
Saying. The level of shared meaning: what a word means to a community, with its history and its culture. When you say hello, at this level you are greeting someone, with everything a greeting means where you live.
Thinking. The level of reasoning: logical relations, the structures that let you combine ideas, compare, deduce.
Intuiting. The deepest level, where something is understood before it can be explained: resonance, the sense of what the other person means beyond what they say. According to endolinguistics, this is also the level where language touches ethics: responsibility for what is said.

The codes you learned in Part I live mostly between the first and second levels: in the body that produces the sounds and in the meaning a community gives them. But endolinguistics holds that their influence reaches further down, all the way to the fourth. That, like almost everything in this part, is a proposal under study, not a proven fact.

How a language becomes yours

There's one way to watch the threshold at work, and that's to look at how a baby comes to speak.

We usually think a child starts talking around their first birthday, with their first words. But language starts much earlier, and it starts with music.

This isn't poetry: it has been measured. Studies with newborns show that, a few days after birth, babies prefer their mother's voice to a stranger's, and prefer a passage they heard repeatedly before birth to one they didn't. They also tell their own language apart from others, mostly by rhythm. And some studies have found that the melody of a newborn's cry already carries something of the pattern of the language it heard inside the womb.

What does that mean? That before understanding a single word, the baby has already received the rhythm of its language. Through its mother's body it heard the melody, the pauses, the rises and falls. The first thing you learn about a language isn't its meaning: it's its way of moving through time. The endorhythm forms first; the codes crystallize later, inside it.

Psychophonology describes this process with three words:

Exolanguage: language as it comes from outside. At first, for the baby, language is something that sounds all around: other people's voices.
Appropriation: the long, slow work of making that outside language your own. The baby takes it, imitates it, plays with it, bends it, and by making it its own, transforms it.
Endolanguage: the deep organization that results, which now belongs to that child and nobody else, even if it looks a lot like the language of the people around it.

Here's something worth noticing. The language that is most yours, the one you speak without thinking, started out as other people's language. Nobody invents their first language. You receive it, and in receiving it, you make it your own.

Playing with words

Some children grab a word and play with it: they say it backwards, rhyme it with other words, put it where it doesn't belong, invent a second meaning for it, turn it into a joke or a secret name. And there are others for whom each word stays nailed to its one use, unable to move.

Psychophonology proposes that this difference —being able to play with words or not— says something about how language was formed on the inside. When the first years come with good-enough care, the codes stay mobile: they can be inverted, recombined, moved around. When they don't, they can become rigid. This is a hypothesis, designed to be tested with studies that follow children for years; it is not a result. And it's nobody's diagnosis: the endolanguage keeps being remade all your life, and you can learn to play with words at any age.

But here's something you can observe for yourself. Tongue twisters, rhymes, freestyle rap, puns, the nicknames friends invent for each other, the secret languages kids make up: all of that is playing with codes. It's the same ability poets use. And it's the same one you're going to use to learn a new language.

Your second language: a second appropriation

All of this has a direct consequence for you.

Learning a new language means doing again what you did as a baby: taking a language that comes to you from outside and making it yours. At first Spanish, or French, or German, is exolanguage: something that sounds, something that belongs to other people. With time, with play and with practice, part of it becomes yours.

It will never be exactly like your first language. Your English endorhythm will keep sounding underneath: that's your accent, and it isn't a flaw, it's a signature. But the endolanguage isn't formed once and then sealed. It keeps being remade all your life, with every relationship, every language, every group of friends that lends you its way of talking.

That's why the advice in the previous chapter —listen a lot, imitate the melody, shadow— isn't a set of tricks. It's the way your body learns the rhythm of another language, the same way it learned the first one: by ear, before meaning.

What this chapter doesn't say

Three cautions, so that none of this gets read as more than it is.

A language has no unconscious of its own. A language isn't a person: it doesn't feel, doesn't suffer, doesn't remember. The ones who feel and remember are the people who speak it. When we say a language "keeps" something, we mean that it's kept by the bodies that speak it and pass it on from generation to generation.

Not every detail of sound means something. A lot of what's in a voice is tiredness, noise, the mechanics of the body. The job of psychophonology is precisely to separate what means something from what doesn't. A science that found meaning everywhere would be no different from one that found it nowhere.

Not everything inside can be read. There are things in the mind that no analysis of the voice will ever recover. Knowing where the knowable ends is also part of knowing.

In the last part of the manual we'll look straight at the biggest risk in everything you've learned: seeing what isn't there.