Professor Wright:
A child points, and is taught a word. Tree. Later, he learns to distinguish this tree from all the others. He learns its particular name. He plays under the tree. He dances around it. Stands beneath its branches, for shade or shelter. He kisses under it, sleeps under it, he weds under it. He marches past it on his way to war, and limps past it on his journey home. A king is said to have hidden in this tree. A spirit may dwell within its bark. Its distinctive leaves are carved onto the tombs and monuments of his landlords. Its wood might have built the galleons that saved his ancestors from invasion. And all this, the general and the specific, the national and the personal, all this, he knows, and feels, and summons somehow, however faintly, with the utterance of a single sound. 'Oak.' Saxon word. Proto-Germanic. Cognates in Old Norse. 'Eik.' Language is never nonsense. Language is meaning. History. Layer upon layer upon layer. And a word without meaning is -- what? Merely a sound.
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05/03/2025 alle ore 08:25
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