Even Aristotle used the same phrase, gramma, to check with the fundamental items of each speech and writing. Whereas speech is ephemeral, writing is concrete and, by comparability, everlasting. This definition highlights the fact that writing is in principle the representation of language rather than a direct representation of thought and the truth that spoken language has plenty of levels of structure, together with sentences, phrases, syllables, and phonemes (the smallest units of speech used to tell apart one phrase or morpheme from one other), any one of which a writing system can “map onto” or signify. Thought is just too intimately related to language to be represented independently of it. The seventeenth-century German philosopher Gottfried Leibniz set out to invent the proper writing system, which might replicate techniques of thought immediately and thereby be readable by all human beings no matter their mom tongues.