A word’s meaning is not already present on the basis of the way the throat and tongue make speech possible. These are ϕυίσει (by nature), not so a word. Words are as one sees fit, κατὰ συνθήκεν (by convention), that is to say, each word first had to come to be as such and has its genesis. The sound of a word does not have a meaning for all time and does not actually have the fixed meaning that refers to a subject matter—a word as a whole is drawn, not from a primary, primordial experience of the subject matter, but from preconceptions and the nearest at hand views of things. The word’s genesis is not born by a human’s physiological being, but by his actual (eigentlich) existence. Insofar as a human being is in the world and wants something in that world and wants it with himself, he speaks. He speaks insofar as something like a world is uncovered for him as a matter of concern and he is uncovered to himself in this “for him.” But the word is thus not here like a tool (οὐχ ὡς ὄργανον), for example, the hand. Language is the being and becoming of the human being himself. In a name, what is named is so named in this naming that it is removed from every time-determination (ἄνευχρόνου). It is a matter simply of a specific, named “what.” That holds, too, for names that refer to something temporal. “Year” does not, indeed, mean this year or the next. No detachable part of a name means something for itself. If I place the parts together, I never come to the unitary meaning. That the specific syllables are together is first established by the unitary meaning. The audible articulation is only intelligible in that meaning. Aristotle: I say this because a word only exists as a word if something audible becomes a σύμβολον (symbol). (Σύμβολον in Greek originally signifies rings, broken in two, that spouses, friends give to one another when one of them departs so that, when they meet one another again, the one part is recognized by putting it together with the other part.) The one refers to the other. Σύμβολον makes something else evident, the meaningful word refers to its subject matter. Now, there are sounds that announce something without meaning something, ἀγράμματοι, for example, moaning. These sounds lack the imprint such that one could write or read them (which works only on the basis of meaning). (GA17EN:36-37)