So, I was thinking about Ferdinand’s assertion that in language there are only differences without positive terms. I decided I would apply this to a few of my own pet peeves regarding the phonic qualities of the English language.
Milk (but so many people say MELK)
Both (which is often pronounced BULTH)
Then we have regional accents and we still have the capacity to understand one another for the most part. That is because the difference between the words we use is greater than the variation between them.
I find this to be part of the difficulty in learning a new language, because as a language learner, one has to be exposed to speech enough to know where the boundaries of linguistic difference between words actually lie. And example of this is when I was in Peru and a Danish man in our class named Stig was trying to pronounce the word “guerra” (meaning war), and we all heard “quiera” (meaning he/she wants in the subjunctive). Needless to say it was a little confusing. When we realized what he was saying, the teacher asked him to make sure there was a difference between his “gu” and his “qu.” This supports the idea that sounds in a language are only really defined by the level of distinctness from other sounds.
So anyway, I see Saussure’s point. The part that I don’t quite understand is what I am supposed to do with that. It seems to me that the main use of Saussure’s theory is as a foundation upon which more applicable theories can be built. And that is, after all, what he set out to do (or rather what he knew must be done but did not want to do himself—way to do the dirty work):
“The utter inadequacy of current terminology, the need to reform it an, in order to do that, to demonstrate what sort of object language is, continually spoil my pleasure in philology, the I have no dearer wish than not to be made to think about the nature of language in general” (846).
For this reason, even though I find Saussure a bit of a bore to read, I thank him from the bottom of my heart for allowing us our “pleasure in philology” by creating a new terminology for us to work from.
I think you're right, and I think that that's probably why the wikipedia writer called him obsolete. I think you could easily argue not that he's obsolete, but that he's not so much a theorist in himself as a BASIS for a lot of other theory to jump off of. (Not to say what he says isn't theory-- but as you say, its almost more of creating terms so that we can talk about theory).
ReplyDeleteJacqui,
ReplyDeleteNice post. You and Caitlin are right. His theories are older, but we've built so many other ideas on his that he's actually foundational.