Part IV · Chapter 13

What We Don't Know Yet

The question left hanging

We've reached the end with a question the manual has been circling without answering. You already know what a code isn't. It isn't a meaning: it orients, it doesn't say. It isn't just history: terrain and rotate aren't related and still they invert each other. It isn't proof of kinship: much and mucho share code and meaning, and they don't share a history. So what is it?

Are codes in languages, the way words are? Or do we put them there?

The answer endolinguistics gives is subtler than a yes and more interesting than a no. I'll give it to you with an image from astronomy.

The coordinates and the stars

Astronomers divide the sky with imaginary lines, a lot like the latitude and longitude lines on a globe. With those lines they can say exactly where a star is and follow its movement night after night. But those lines don't exist in the sky. No spaceship will ever cross them. They're an instrument, a human invention.

And yet without them you couldn't follow a single star. And the stars, those really are there.

Something similar happens with codes. The code is an instrument: we extract it ourselves, with rules we decided on (the skeleton, the seven classes, the order). That's why it's written with symbols that belong to no language. But something that isn't the code really is there: something that traveled five thousand years inside padre, father, Vater, and Persian pedar; something that was kept while everything else changed. It isn't a word, because the words changed. It isn't a meaning, because the meanings moved. It isn't a sound, because even the sounds shifted. It's a continuity: a form that persists beneath the forms. The code doesn't create it. It detects it, the way a telescope detects a star without being the star.

And what is it, deep down, that persists? Here the manual reaches its limit, and says so without embarrassment: we don't know yet.

A direction: quality

What we do have is a direction. The search isn't moving blindly. It's oriented by a philosophical inquiry I've been developing for years, called qualic metaphysics. I'll tell you about it briefly, because it lies underneath everything you've read.

It starts with a distinction you already know, even if you've never named it: the difference between quantity and quality.

Think of red. A physicist can tell you the wavelength of red light: a number. That's quantity. But that number isn't what you see when you see red. What you see —red as it appears, as it feels— is something else, and no number exhausts it. That's quality. The same goes for the taste of a mango, the smell of rain on dry ground, what you feel when someone says your name with affection. You can measure a lot around those experiences. The experience itself isn't measured: it's lived.

Qualic metaphysics takes that order of qualities seriously. It has three words worth knowing:

Habence. A term from the Mexican philosopher Agustín Basave Fernández del Valle (in Spanish, habencia). It means, roughly, the original "there is": before we can say what something is, before we measure it or name it, there is. Habence is that background of everything that appears.
Qualo. The smallest unit of that lived appearing: an instant of quality, prior to concepts and words. A qualo isn't a thing you can grab or measure. What we can grab are its traces: what it leaves behind as it passes. A sound, for example, is a trace.
Logos. The word, the concept, reason. And qualic metaphysics says something curious about it: that it arrives late. First there's experience; then comes the word that tries to say it. The logos works on the traces, not on the experience itself. That's why there's always something words can't reach.

And what does this have to do with codes? A lot. In endolinguistics there are two domains that can't be separated. One is what can be counted and combined: consonants, classes, codes, inversions. The other is quality: the vowels that color, rhythm, endorhythm, the felt character of each class. We call the first the quantic domain (from quantity: what gets counted). We call the second the qualic domain (from quality). Codes are the most countable thing in language. But the suspicion of qualic metaphysics is that what travels inside them belongs to the other order: the order of qualities that are felt, not quantities that are added up.

Notice the symmetry, because it's a beautiful one. Philosophy does with our question exactly what the code does with words: it doesn't dictate the answer, it points where to look.

What a group shares without knowing it

There's one last idea from endolinguistics you need to know, because it's one of the most important and one of the easiest to misread.

If everyone who speaks a language shares its codes, its rhythm, its way of grouping sounds, and almost nobody knows they have them, then a group of speakers shares something it doesn't know it shares. Endolinguistics calls that the shared unconscious.

It's worth saying right away what this isn't. It isn't the "collective unconscious" of the psychologist Carl Jung, which would be universal, the same for all humanity. The shared unconscious is relative to a macrosystem. People who speak Indo-European languages share some structures; people who speak Semitic languages share others. And they nest like boxes inside boxes: English sits inside the Germanic languages, which sit inside Indo-European. Each box shares something with the ones outside it and has something of its own.

And there's one warning I can't leave out:

What remains open

A science that already knows everything isn't a science: it's a catechism. That's why I want to end with the questions that are still open. They aren't the manual's debts; they're the work left to do, and someone has to do it. Maybe you.

What are codes? Are they discovered, the way a star is discovered? Are they built, the way a map is built? Or both at once, without our being able to say where the found ends and the made begins?
How much does the code help you learn, and how much does the practice that comes with it? We know memory loves connections. We don't yet know how to measure what the code contributes on its own, separate from everything else.
Why do words that aren't related converge? Much and mucho, day and día: the same code and the same meaning by different roads. Part of it may be chance, and that has to be counted. Whatever is left after counting is one of the most interesting questions in the discipline.
How do you compare different macrosystems? We know they shouldn't be mixed. We don't yet really know what can be compared between them.
What happens in the brain? The Meulemans zone is a hypothesis. It will take a lot of research to find out whether there's anything to it.
What does the voice say that words don't? Psychophonology is only beginning to have instruments for studying micromusicality, endorhythm, the tremor in a voice.

These aren't small questions. They aren't impossible ones either. That's how almost everything we later came to know began: with someone who learned to look at something that didn't have a name yet.