Before compass traced the sea, before the telescope pursued the stars,
Before jurists clothed the law in measured terms,

There was a voice. Not merely sound, but speech.

The miracle that gathered thoughts, then taught the universe its names.

That voice was English, not merely born upon one island’s shore,
But a language gathering continents, welcoming strangers into kinship.
Every subject seeks answers, yet first requires a language to ask.
The chemist writes, the historian remembers, the lawyer argues.

English is not simply one more discipline; it is the house of disciplines.
Thought walks clothed in vocabulary, and every act a grammar.
Ideas cannot cross the threshold of the mind,
Until they find the architecture of speech.

Beside this father walks another guide, patient, exact, and enduring.
Her name is Mathematics, ancient mother of proportion.
Keeper of sequence, guardian of symmetry, the pulse of creation.
She teaches rivers their course and bridges their strength.

If English gives the world its voice, Mathematics gives it rhythm.
One fashions metaphor, the other fashions measure.
One awakens imagination, the other disciplines understanding.
Neither is complete without the other.

Even poetry counts its metre, cadence, and hidden pulse.
Mathematics, for all its perfect proofs, depends on language to explain.
Thus every subject born beneath the sun inherits two lasting gifts:
One of expression, one of precision.

History inherits narrative, science inherits explanation,

Philosophy inquiry, music both number and lyric.
Wisdom has no appetite for rivalry, for knowledge is one family.
Together these two timeless guides have raised civilisation.
Is not that inheritance sufficient for all?

For every subject, however far it journeys…

Returns at last to words that give it meaning.
And numbers that reveal its hidden truth.
There, quietly, the first parents of learning continue their glorious work.

By

Kono-Ugen Kono,

Author of ‘Another Untold Truth.’