Closing

To the Reader

If you've made it this far, you know how to do things you didn't know how to do at the start of this manual.

You know how to strip the flesh off a word and keep the bone, and you know the bone comes from the sound, not the spelling. You know your mouth has seven regions, and that a p and an f can be the same person in different disguises. You know how to read a code, and you know a code doesn't mean: it orients. You can tell a relative from a loan and from a stranger who happens to look alike. You know why Spanish writes hijo with an h, why Portuguese says chave where Spanish says llave, and what Jacob Grimm and fairy tales have to do with your Spanish class. You know the voice says things words don't. And you know much and mucho aren't related, even though everything about them shouts that they are; and that this doesn't erase their resemblance, which is still there as an open mystery.

You also know what this manual doesn't ask of you. It doesn't ask you to believe that words have secret meanings. It doesn't ask you to add up consonants to guess meanings. It doesn't ask you to explain a people by the sounds of its language. Those readings weren't left out out of prejudice: they were left out because they don't work, and because sometimes they do harm.

And you know there are open questions. What codes are. How much they really help. What happens in the brain when a thought becomes voice. Nobody has those answers yet.

I'll leave you with an image. At the start of the manual there was a Spanish list that was forgotten by the next day: padre, pie, pez. Three loose words, like cards dealt out. Now look at the same list again. They aren't three pieces of data anymore. They're three glimpses of a single rule, and behind the rule there's a family five thousand years old that stretches from India to Ireland. One of its branches passed through Rome and became Spanish; another passed through the forests of Germania and reached, tonight, your mouth. The list didn't change. You did.

One last suggestion, which doesn't require buying anything or signing up for anything. Tonight, pick any word of yours. Take its vowels away. Look at the bone. And ask yourself where it comes from: how far it must have traveled to reach, exactly today, exactly you.

Words have bones. Now you know where to look for them.

And if you want to keep going, I'll see you at www.endolinguistics.science and at www.independentbooks.site.

A. T. M.