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Is the panamericana part of the Pan-American Highway?

Your blog, by the way, is beautiful — and by that I mean your writing. Even though I know just enough Spanish to be able to follow only about 50% of what you’re saying, I can feel the lovely flow of your words regardless.

This is very fascinating. I totally agree with your impression that the prefix pan- doesn’t actually mean all-encompassing, but something like all-connecting. Movement from a point of origin to all other possible points, simultaneously.

Where I live we have a fine example of this. Chile is a very long and narrow country, and therefore it has just a single highway covering almost the entire 4000 km length of it. This street is referred to as the “panamericana”. You just get on it, and suddenly, every single city of the country becomes a possible destination (quite literally!)

Santiago, the capital (primary origin or center), divides this street neatly in half, into the “panamericana norte” and the “panamericana sur”. You only have to choose your direction, and half of the country lies readily available before you. When you start traveling on this street, you expand with a lot of possibilities before you, slowly narrowing down the options until you reach your final destination.

The number of possible sounds the human mouth can make is very large; but it is finite, yes. And in theory words could be arbitrarily long — and in some languages they can get very long indeed; but in these cases each “word” is really made up of a bunch of units of meaning mashed together (”mashed” being a technical term… ok, so it’s “affixed”), and each of these units is usually only a syllable or two in length.

So yes — there are only so many words possible in human languages.

Couple that with the fact that some sounds and sound sequences are a lot more common than others. “Pan” is one of those words that’s short, and made up of simple, common sounds, and so I bet most of the languages in the world have a word that sounds a lot like “pan”. The claim of phonosemantics is that all those “pan”s in all those languages have the same core of meaning. That hasn’t been investigated… but it sure would be something, wouldn’t it?

Knowing nothing about linguistics, I would think from this description, the human brain/tongue/mouth can only “think” of so many words/sounds. There has to be an end point, regardless of the differences in languages.

Or am I totally off base?