What OAS is and is not

What OAS is and is not

At the base of endolinguistics sits a small inventory: seven OAS classes — P, T, K, S, L, M, N — into which consonants are grouped. It’s tempting to read them as a secret dictionary, where each class “means” something. That reading is wrong, and getting it right matters.

An OAS class is not a meaning. It’s an orientation — a felt direction in the space of sensation, loosely anchored (not defined) by where in the mouth the sound is made. T leans toward boundary and delimitation; L toward flow and continuity; M toward mass and belonging. These are tendencies, not translations.

So a class is not a bucket of consonants you can pour into a word to read off its sense. And a code — two or three classes together — orients a field of possible meaning; it does not denote a fixed one. The moment you write “code = ", you've made a category error.

This also tells you what OAS can’t do alone. If the classes are orientations in sensation, then a purely phonological corpus — a big table of sounds — is structurally the wrong instrument to prove the theory with. It can measure form beautifully and still miss the thing the theory is actually about. That’s not a loophole; it’s a limit worth stating out loud.

OAS is a way of hearing sound as oriented before it is meaningful. Ask it for a dictionary and it will mislead you. Ask it for a direction, and it has something to say.