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This volume is one of several by this author on the relation between words and their meanings and on the meaning of meaning. Its point of departure and essential conclusion are that the fundamental nature of words and the tie that links them with their range of meanings is a problem not so much of linguistics but of psychology. Accordingly, the crucial phenomena for study are not discrete, objective symbols and their historical vicissitudes, but rather the creation of vocabulary seen as reflection of thought processes. That the latter turns out to be almost wholly what amounts to the psychology of the primary process within the unconscious would not be surprising coming from a psychoanalytic author; but coming as this study does from a nonanalytic one, it is pleasantly surprising and useful as well.
The method of demonstrating the linking of the language creating process with the thought process—the phoneto-semantic tie—consists of a series of discussions grouped around clusters of related simple words, or phoneto-semantic variants. To be more exact, these are long lists of simple words of spoken language followed by a large range of definitions of their meanings. Forty-six of them deal with English words and fifteen with Japanese, the latter demonstrating the relevance of the same psychological processes for all languages. The existence of so many different languages and dialects is accounted for by the concept of 'sound preferences' selected by different communities of people. For the purpose of this study, however, the nature of this internal development or 'inwardness' of language creation is not investigated.
Perhaps the most far-reaching conclusion from the word cluster discussions is the idea-associating activity, its nature and extent. The author differentiates his conception of association of ideas from that inherent in such well-known processes as learning and 'conditioning'. According to the scope of his conception, idea-associating activity is a f