Singing the world

What does language do?  Refer?  Communicate concepts?  Affect action?  Yes, but, according to Merleau-Ponty, with all of these doings of language it never loses its basic link to gesture and sound.  Language never loses its affective dimension, never loses its musicality.  James M. Edie sums up the point:

“Merleau-Ponty’s first point is that words, even when the finally achieve the ability to carry referential and, eventually, conceptual levels of meaning, never completely lose that primitive, strictly phonemic, level of ‘affective’ meaning which is not translatable into their conceptual definitions.  There is, he argues, an affective tonality, a mode of conveying meaning beneath the level of thought, beneath the level of the words themselves . . . which is contained in the words just insofar as they are patterned sounds , as just the sounds which this particular historical language uniquely uses, and which are must more like a melody – a ‘singing of the world’ – than fully translatable, conceptual thought.”