A very roughly-hewn thought

There's a big question these days among phoneticians and speech scientists about the variability in speech utterances vs. their discrete representation as individual sounds. The sound "d" is not pronounced in a single way, but it varies from person to person and from utterance to utterance. Does it therefore make sense to talk about discrete, individual sounds as real entities, or are they simply a figment of our imagination, useful for writing and organizing our knowledge of speech and language, but ultimately unfounded and misleading in fact?

It seems to me there might be an interesting parallel to draw between this problem and the problem of creation itself. When we speak, whatever it is we have in our minds, the outcome is a real, physical signal involving movements of our articulators and pressure waves through the air. On the other hand, God Himself spoke creation into being. Whatever was in His mind took real form in the newly-real world as soon as He spoke it, and of course we know that there is overwhelming variation in the world, so that even some finches have short beaks and others have long beaks. The result of our own speech is much less phenomenal, but no less real. And perhaps we could go even further: When we speak to someone, the real signal that we create conveys the knowledge of itself. That is, as listeners we sense the acoustic speech signal and interpret/understand it itself as an intermediate step to understanding the speaker's mind. By analogy, we could perhaps agree with Paul that the knowledge of God is seen in the creation itself.

Does this line of thinking help us out in any way? Does it help our understanding of creation, or speech production, or salvation? Not sure, but I thought it was intriguing enough to write down.