>Does the geometry of our secret words change, if spoken incorrectly?
Leaving aside how significant may be our words, the answer is 'sometimes".
The nature of traditional words is quite complex as the words may be given power by a tradition e.g. mantras. Thus if the words from such a tradition are used by an outsider then the beings of the tradition may disown the words in that situation.
This seems to have occurred with the TM movement where a break-away group I knew had difficulty in achieving the expected results with those they initiated.
Thus words that are sponsored by a tradition may take most of their power from that tradition.
On the other hand there may be situations where if you cannot 'spell' the words correctly then you are unable to cast a spell.
>are we talking about the sound of a word, or its meaning
In a non-sacred language the word takes most of its power from sound, the intent of the sounder and whether there is any inner patronage for the word use.
In a sacred language however the geometry of words arises from the words. Sanscrit is regarded as such a sacred language.
"They had something akin to a language, that could quite literally execute itself, at least in the presence of a very specific type of field. The language, a term I am still using very loosely, is a system of symbols (which does admittedly very much resemble a written language) along with geometric forms and patterns that fit together to form diagrams that are themselves functional. Once they are drawn, so to speak, on a suitable surface made of a suitable material and in the presence of a certain type of field, they immediately begin performing the desired tasks."
I think the above quotation was intended to indicate a lower level - a bit like a self-assembling computer program that starts to operate without further direction.
In browsing through some old posts, I found this older thread and wondered why we didn't see these distinctions:
How the word looks, that is how it's spelled
What does the word mean
How the word sounds to the ear
For example, I like the lilt in a word like "grangrene" but the sound is where its beauty ends. The Devanagari script I find lovely to look at, but I can read one of the Vedas and a list of script ligatures with equal delight. In English, at least, we have words like cleave, which means both 1) to separate and 2) to cling together without even different spellings to make the distinction clear.
Finding the geometry of words merely from the spelling seems dangerous. Spellings change over the history of the word. Are we to assume that it's geometry changes as well? Most of us are familiar with the vagaries of spelling in French but Tibetan is much worse. And the written languages of Chinese and Japanese? Where is the geometry there? If anything, I suspect the geometry lies in the sound, divorced from orthography and meaning. Down to the subtleties of string theory, all matter is a matter of vibration. Meaning may have some influence on the geometry of words, but I suspect that it is of secondary importance.
what if meaning changes the sound? wouldnt meaning then be of higher significance to the geometry of a word than the tone of a word spoken without underlying emotion?