Even Aristotle used the identical word, gramma, to confer with the fundamental items of both speech and writing. Whereas speech is ephemeral, writing is concrete and, by comparability, permanent. This definition highlights the fact that writing is in precept the representation of language relatively than a direct illustration of thought and the truth that spoken language has quite a lot of levels of construction, including sentences, words, syllables, and phonemes (the smallest items of speech used to tell apart one word or morpheme from another), any one among which a writing system can “map onto” or represent. Thought is simply too intimately associated to language to be represented independently of it. The 17th-century German philosopher Gottfried Leibniz set out to invent the right writing system, which might replicate systems of thought straight and thereby be readable by all human beings no matter their mother tongues.