Science Quote by Roman Jakobson

Jakobson’s line is a polite grenade lobbed at the habit of treating speech like a string of beads you can simply pick up and label. “Identification of individual sounds” sounds methodical, even commonsensical, but he’s calling it “artificial” because it mistakes the lab-friendly slice for the living phenomenon. Phonetic observation can measure the acoustics and articulation of [t] or [a]; it can’t, by itself, explain why those noises matter as units in a language, why they switch meaning here but blur into irrelevance there.

The intent is disciplinary: Jakobson is drawing a border between phonetics (the physical facts of sound) and phonology (the system of contrasts a speech community treats as meaningful). The subtext is sharper: a warning against naïve empiricism, the belief that if you stare hard enough at data, the structure will announce itself. In real speech, “sounds” don’t arrive as discrete specimens. They’re coarticulated, context-soaked, and perceived through expectations. Listeners don’t hear raw acoustics; they hear categories.

Context matters: Jakobson is a central figure in structural linguistics, writing in an era when language was being reimagined less as a catalog of parts and more as a network of relations. Calling phonetic segmentation “artificial” isn’t anti-science; it’s a push for the right level of analysis. He’s insisting that the true object isn’t the sound itself but the opposition: the difference between /p/ and /b/, the functional contrast that organizes a language. The line works because it punctures a comforting illusion: that reality comes pre-divided, waiting for the scientist to name it.