“The characteristic role of language with respect to thought is not to create a material phonic means for expressing ideas but to serve as a link between thought and sound, under conditions that of necessity bring about the reciprocal delimitations of units…Language can also be compared with a sheet of paper: thought is the front and the sound is the back; one cannot cut the front without cutting the back at the same time; likewise in language, once can neither divide sound from thought nor thought from sound.”
What Saussure says about language reminded me of how physicists describe our universe. With language, the signifier/signified give meaning to thought and sound. In our universe, time and space make our universe “corporeal.” In other terms, if we weren’t able, as a race, to add significance to the primitive noises and drawings we created millions of years ago, we would haven’t evolved into the creatures we are now.
I found myself thinking of road signs when reading this article. The yield sign does not say “yield” like the stop sign does, yet we know, because of drivers ed, that we must slow our car down to make sure that we aren’t going to get t-boned by a 90 year-old driver that shouldn’t be on the road.
In the reading there is a diagram showing thought floating above sound with a gap in between the two. What I’ve taken from this diagram and the article – which is more than likely wrong – is that signifiers bridge the gap between thought and sound, giving us language. We could easily create an experiment wherein we tell young children that at traffic lights, red means go, and green means stop. When they reach driving age, they would of course cause many accidents, but because they are told what these colors mean, they interpolate the sign and do as they’re told – stop or go – proving that no matter how you spin it, language is subjective to different cultures, and even species.
Every creature has a language – we as humans are not capable of understanding most of their languages, but those that we do understand it is all based on signs, body language, etc. The primal sounds of an ape, aren’t just sounds, they’re that species’ way of communicating to each other.
Semiotics fascinates me and I find it oddly interesting that the smarter the human race gets, the more it seems we don’t understand a thing about how or why we do the things we do. A favorite writer/director of mine, who is no doubt a pioneer in the television industry best sums up this entry…
“A caveman painted on a cave/ It was a bison, was a fave/ The other cave-people would rave/ They didn’t ask, “why?/Why paint a bison if it’s dead/When did you choose the color red/What was the process in your head/He told their story/What came before he didn’t show/We’re not supposed to know/But now we pick pick/Pick pick pick it apart/Open it up to find the/Tick tick tick of a heart.”
In short, we can pick things apart until there’s nothing left, but that takes the mystery out of life.
-6
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1 comment:
It's clear that you thought about this concept; you relate it to other good ideas outside the classroom and explain these examples well. You pose an interesting question with what comes first: the sign or the word representing the physical thing? You also pose into the questioning of one's reality if you could theoretically teach a child alternate words for things, but reality is a concept we'll look into in a few weeks!
Smiley Face :)
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