The Vedic view of speech is unusually strong: correctly uttered sound is not a description of a power but the power itself, which is why pronunciation, meter, and pitch were preserved with obsessive precision for millennia. An error in recitation could invert the result — the texts record a case where a misplaced accent turned a blessing into its opposite. This is the origin of mantra as a technology, and of the Indian sciences of phonetics and grammar, which arose to protect the recitation and became the most sophisticated linguistics in the ancient world.