Success Quote by Roman Jakobson

Jakobson’s line is a quiet grenade tossed into common sense: what you experience as “a succession of sounds” is not what speech physically is. Taken “strictly articulatory,” speech isn’t a neat conveyor belt of discrete phonetic beads. It’s a bundled choreography of the vocal tract - tongue, lips, jaw, velum - overlapping in time. One gesture starts before the last one is finished. The ear may parse a tidy sequence; the body produces a mesh.

The intent is disciplinary as much as philosophical. Jakobson, working at the hinge point between early structural linguistics and mid-century phonology, is trying to drag analysis away from the seductive metaphor of speech-as-string. If you build your theory on the idea that sounds line up like tiles, you miss coarticulation, assimilation, and the way features bleed across segment boundaries. His broader project - to treat distinctive features as the real units of language - depends on puncturing the myth that phonemes are simply “heard” as stable chunks. They’re abstractions, useful fictions anchored in patterns of contrast, not miniature acoustic objects marching in formation.

The subtext has an almost political edge: don’t confuse the artifact of transcription with the phenomenon. Writing systems, phonetic alphabets, even “sound” itself as a folk category, encourage us to believe in serial order because paper and type are serial. Jakobson is warning that linearity is a representational convenience, not an articulatory truth. Language, in the mouth, is less like beads on a string and more like multiple threads being braided at once.