Apophthegm
gdcm (Paidika) writes about the greek word phthengomai,
I find this word at once ugly and fascinating. Phthengomai: it’s hardly a comely sound. And yet from what I can gather it’s nearly unique among Greek verbs of vocalization—and there are a number; the Greeks were chatty—for terms that can apply both to animal and to human sound. LSJ records that in context of a horse, it means to whinny; of an eagle, scream; of a raven, croak; of a fawn, cry. But it can also mean to speak clearly, as in Homer above. The suggestion, I’d like to think, is to connote sound before it becomes speech—compare φημί/phemi, “I say,” “I declare”; its frequentative form φάσκω/phasko, “I assert”; λέγω “say, speak, mean”; ἀγορεύω “I address, speak publicly.” φθέγγομαι is pure sound, an animal howl.
“The aphorism, the apothegm, in which I am the first among the Germans to be a master, are the forms of “eternity”; it is my ambition to say in ten sentences what everyone else says in a book—what everyone else does not say in a book.” - Nietzsche
The etymologyically restored spelling, favored in the UK, apparently is “apophthegm” according to OED.
As Sassure writes in Cours de Linguistique Generale, “Signs function, then, not through their intrinsic value but through their relative position [to each other].” He was invoking the phemi:ephen=present:imperfect relationship, and I find in his quote a vivid application to what you write:“φθέγγομαι is pure sound, an animal howl,” which you paint through comparisons to words (signs) that bear, in Sassure’s words, an associative relationship to it. One might question: without these other words standing in contrast, would we hear that howl?
"Everyone, left to his own devices, forms an idea about what goes on in language which is very far from the truth...without language, thought is a vague, uncharted nebula" - Ferdinand de Sassure.
Exploring the nebula and some more concrete things, these are thoughts from Zach.
