Random Thought About Word

Nidhu Bhusan Das :


‘What is a word? ‘you may ask. It is an important question. One may, without much thought, readily answer, ‘A word is a group of letters.’ Is the answer correct? No. But why? Let us see. Here we have a group of letters– tac. Is it a word? No. Why? Because, it does not convey any sense. How can it convey sense? The sense comes if we arrange the letters according to rule which evolved out of practical necessity. The rule is to organize the letters distributing and combining the vowels and consonants in such a way that the combination yields meaning.
We know only consonants cannot come into meaningful combination. They need vowels to combine meaningfully. Two letters A and I are words by themselves. They are vowels. We have Twenty-four other letters, three of them vowels, which cannot by themselves be words. They are words only by combination. In such a combination the vowels often function as adhesive. We can change the combination of ‘tac’ into ‘act’ and ‘cat’ and get two words. Here in the first case, ‘a’ acts as initializer and the following consonants merge into a double sound.
Why do we need vowels to form words? To answer this question I must go to the basic of sound. When we talk, we verbalize our thought and, thus, produce verbal language which is essentially oral and aural. Now, what is a vowel sound? When we produce a vowel sound, our oral passage remains unobstructed. As a result the air can flow from the lungs to the lips and beyond without being stopped. There is no audible friction. We can produce a vowel sound with our mouth open.We, therefore, can shorten and lengthen the vowel sound. We have short and long vowel sounds. On the other hand, for producing a consonant sound, we have to completely stop the air current, or have to force it through a narrow constriction which causes audible friction.
Two or more consonants put together cannot form a word because they become constricted, and produce a double sound. However, if vowel is brought in we can remove the constriction and produce a harmony. Thus, when we speak we use both vowel and consonant sounds in combination. Vowels help expansion of the sound similar to the natural process of contraction and expansion in us in the process of respiration. Vowels bring life to the combination of letters or sounds as a verb brings life to a group of words to make a sentence. What a verb does in a sentence is done by a vowel in a word or a sound image. As a sentence dies if we pluck out the verb from it so a word ceases to be a word when the vowel element is taken away from the combination of letters. When we go by the fact, we tend to believe that words may have an onomatopoeic origin i.e., imitation of sound.