In a message dated 98-03-29 15:48:03 EST, you write:

<< Teasing the meaning from the
 statement "The artwork of Achilles Rizzoli fascinates me" (something
 fluent speakers of English do automatically) and its analysis in terms of
 bilabials and other components of speech are vastly different enterprises.
 I just meant that meaning and the sounds and structures that convey
 meaning aren't the same thing. >>

The sounds of speech are structures, physical structures that we can describe
in terms of tone, hertz, volume, etc.   How humans make speech sounds in any
language, even in reverse, is with these structures: labials, fricatives,
gutternals, dentals, etc.  Jakobson, I believe, constructed a phonoloogical
chart for this purpose, but the Prague School of Linguistics is best known for
this approach.  At this point in history, even rudimentary anthropologists
practise classifying human speech sounds in a standardized manner.  In each
language, a combination of phonologically-coded sounds 'stands for' a meaning.
This is called a phoneme-morpheme correspondence.

If you want to record hman speech and play it backwards and listen for
meanings, go to it.  In fact, if you even want to take human speech, speel it
out in your mind, and then spell it in reverse in your mind to get an
additional point of view on the ossible meanings, intended or not, of
someone's utterance.  But, I don't think you can do much with it.  Most of
your interlocuter's will not acknowledge your interpretation of their
utterance and hence the validity of your interpretation as a listener will be
jeopardized because they might think that your are not trying to understand
what they meant to say.

Now, if you understand perfectly well what others say and you would like to
determine if they have any ulterior motives, and you think an analysis of
their speech in reverse will clarify that, be my guest.