“Thinking”—“The Sound of Silence” will inevitably, I think, remind the older ones among us of the song by Simon & Garfunkel from the 1960s. For the younger ones, it will undoubtedly be one of the now countless remixes, such as the one by ‘Disturbed’. With “The Sound of Silence”, Paul Simon has formulated a wonderful paradox and, detached from the meaning of the phrase in the song and from the actual content of the song, this phrase is for me an adequate description of thinking.

To make things easier for those who are unfamiliar with the international phonetic alphabet or who may not know it at all, here is the re-transformation into the source language. In the case of phonemic pictures whose source language is not English, a translation into English is also carried out.