There is an oral tradition that holds great richness and has delighted generations of listeners, who were pleased to sit at the feet of the storyteller in dusty market places, throughout the world. Telling stories is an antique art form that has thrilled and engrossed mankind, since the first child looked into his mother's eyes and asked the universal interrogate - Why?
A story may be both a comfort and an entertainmentis - or plainly just a distraction from the cares of the world - but why do we all have this basic need to hear things put to us that we clearly understand may or may not be true? Why is this need to hear accounts of incredible events and descriptions of astounding things such a basal drive to a inevitable part of the human psyche. Speech obviously has pre-existed all writing systems by scores, if not hundreds, of millennia, and therefore it is easy to realize oral systems as being the absolute basis of all linguistic communication. But is this entirely correct? Is there not something even more basal that needs to be recognised about the way language has developed, before we can meaningfully explore any model of the oral process taken in isolation?
Ultimately no message, or exchange of ideas can ever be understood by the intended recipient of a communication, unless delivered to the brain in the form of a string of recognisable words, (or alternatively as textual symbols such as numbers). Moreover the elements of meaning carried by those same words and the rules for their composition (grammar), must have previously been made well-known to the subject, straight through his prior contact or training. This limitation is always gift within any communication process, either the primary means of transmission is a loud shout or a soundless digitised electronic pulse.
These all-important, well-known words or symbols are therefore the basal carriers of encoded facts or meaning, as far as the human brain is concerned. Words, unlike some of the symbols, are very exact to a singular spoken language. As such they are presented to the brain for understanding, either as a pattern of recognisable sounds, or alternatively may be offered in the form of text, which is usually presented visually (one preponderant exception being the tactile Braille law for the blind).
In essence, the human brain seems to recognise each well-known word, or symbol, once it has been learnt and its meaning understood, as a kind of elemental entity in its own right. It is stored within the memory as a uniquely individual idea, or concept, to be held there, awaiting recall, having by now acquired a inevitable existence and resting place of its own. This quintessential word entity, lodged within the human mind, is a much more basal conception than that of the individual spoken or written words, which serve as its external representatives, or proxies in the surface world.
These spoken or written expressions of a singular word are not identical to the associated word entity held in the brain, but are rather direct analogues for it. They have existence only within the singular oral or textual universe that has been excellent for them. These outward forms control within isolate analogous systems that exactly parallel the action that is going on inside the brain. Any way it is leading to realise that these audibly or visually displayed words have no actual location or manifestation within the brain itself, but are always "read in" and "read out" by a translational premise that is the basal basis of mankind's inherited linguistic capacity.
If this proposition seems account for and contrived, consider that its validity is often demonstrated to us, whenever something goes wrong with the process of verbalisation. A stroke could in fact cause this, but every person has had the contact of finding ourselves frantically searching for a word or name that we instinctively know exists. We say that it is on the "tip of our tongue", meaning that we have recognised the word non-verbally and fully understand the conception that it represents and how it fits into the sentence that we wish to construct, but frustratingly we just cannot bring it forward into verbal form to fit into our speech.
What is Language?