- And the meaning of the symbols are infinite, Lyra,” Farder Coram said. “No one can learn them all. But **where you are pointing the needles, you are focusing the whole complexity of all those meanings down to one: the meaning that is present at the time, or the meaning that you are wanting to ask a question about. - His Dark Materials
- “It’s like climbing down a ladder at night, you put your foot down and there’s another rung. Well, I put my mind down and there’s another meaning, and I kind of sense what it is. Then I put ‘em all together. There’s a trick in it like focusing your eyes.” - His Dark Materials
- categorical abstraction of vocal signals — i.e., whether acoustically variable sound events are recognized as members of the same abstract class (varṇa -class), and whether that class reliably maps to the same meaning across individuals.
- वर्ण = An abstracted sound-class recognized as ‘the same’ despite acoustic variation, with stable communicative value