Theory of the Topology of the Qualic Field

Anyone who speaks several languages has lived it: two words that do not come from the same origin meet, and something —in the person who hears them, in the language that keeps them— does something with that meeting. Historical linguistics treats it as chance or error; psycholinguistics measures how close sounds are; psychoanalysis found it in the slip of the tongue. No single discipline crosses the whole problem.

*Theory of the Topology of the Qualic Field* puts the question where it can be thought. It starts from an integrative corpus of nearly 4 million word forms from 3,405 languages, with their consonant skeletons and etymologies, and from a series of studies by macrosystem —Pama-Nyungan, Indo-European, Afroasiatic and others— measured against exact models of chance. Those studies did not only find coincidences: they set their limits. The space of codes is small and full; sound change is a cipher that loses information and manufactures resemblances; a situation, such as child-rearing, can choose the code before the word exists.

On those limits the book builds its object. The unit is no longer the word but the network of words. A field of meaning is what several networks, with different codes, do by sharing it out. What matters most is the coupling between the layer of form and the layer of meaning. The book then follows resonance —the moment the subject is inside— and what of it reaches the language.

Written within the endolinguistic tradition founded by Christiane S. Meulemans and José Ángel Elias Fernández y Cuevas, it is a book of questions asked from a declared position, one that separates on every page what can be measured from what can only be read.