post-it note, Saussure

Isn’t “tree” a funny word?

Yeah. So is lake. The more you say it the weirder it sounds! Lake. Lake. Lake. Lake.

Such conversations as these are my earliest recollections of my own personal theoretical analysis of words. Little did I know that my thoughts were not original at all, but the realization that all words are abstract was just an observation probably being made by my schoolmates too.

Now that I am older, language seems amazing to me because of all of the words that humans are able to know, understand and use to express themselves. Many of my friends are bilingual. They know most of the words that I know and the same set of expressions in another language. That amazes me. But when I read, and then re-read Saussure’s Course in Ganeral Linguistics, it made me realize how much more is associated with words. The spoken language requires an understanding of emotions and concepts in order to combine sounds and ideas together in a way that makes sense. The word tree is an understanding of one object by one person. When many people understand the meaning of “tree” along with the meaning of many other concepts, linguistics becomes possible and conversation can occur that provides clarification and understanding instead of confusion and random sounds.

I never could understand when one of my friends gives me a look of disappointment when he could not describe the meaning of an English word as translated in Russian. It seems like he always has to use one or two Russian words to describe an English word. Now I can only realize that the signifiers of the English word are not accurately described with only one word, rather the English version of many ideas is developed in one very descriptive word.

The English language has over 750,000 words (Encyclopedia Americana). This is more than any other language. This only means that there are more ways to describe the world around us. There are many avenues available to us to describe anything. A tree is a tree, a lake a lake. And I know that my world is going to become more complicated as we continue to read about critical and cultural theories, in which the concepts given are simply words strung together without significance.

Encyclopedia Americana. Volume 10. Grolier, 1999.