whole of meaningful connections, meaningfulness. If we define meaningfulness as the specific structure of the whole of understandability, this should not be coupled with the assertion that here again the world and world hood are still conceived only as objectivity; here we do not have the very being of the world but the world as objective, to be sure now not objective for observation and research but for concerned understanding; here again as well meaningfulness only refers to the way of being apprehended. We shall return later to this potential objection.
Meaningfulness is first of all a mode of presence {Anwesenheit} in virtue of which every entity of the world is discovered. Concern as constantly oriented, defined by insight and understanding, already lives in primary contexts of meaning disclosed by its concern in interpretive circumspection. Since Dasein is moreover essentially determined by the fact that it speaks, expresses itself, discourses, and as speaker discloses, discovers, and lets things be seen, it is thereby understandable that there are such things as words which have meanings. It is not as if there were first verbal sounds which in time were furnished with meanings. On the contrary, what is primary is being in the world, that is, concerned understanding and being in the context of meanings. Only then do sounds, pronunciation, and phonetic communication accrue to such meanings from Dasein itself. Sounds do not acquire meaning; rather, it is the other way around: meanings are expressed in sounds.
Typically, two extreme theories are specially distinguished among the various theories on the 'origin of language.' First, there is the opinion that language originated from simple emotive sounds and that those of fear, anxiety, and surprise are the primary forms of utterance for the origin of language. The other extreme theory is that the origin of language lies in the imitative sounds, in the phonetic copying of what is found in the world, in speaking. First of all, it is in itself absurd to make the origin of language understandable by starting from sounds. This applies also to the attempt to regard one of these phonetic groups as the original one. Inasmuch as all talking and speaking is a matter of expressing oneself about something, there is in the unity of all talking both emotive and imitative sound. In other words, both become comprehensible only in such a way that in them the specific Dasein, which is also determined by corporeality, makes itself understood through sounds. Here it is only a matter of seeing the connection between the levels of verbal sound and meaning; meanings are to be understood on the basis of meaningfulness, and this in turn means only on the basis of being-in-the-world.
If we have truly seen this, then we have gained an insight which is methodologically of great significance for the theory of meaning as such. It means that we are in a position to put an end to the usual