Ferdinand de Saussure

In five steps this text tries to convey a semiotic analysis of the phenomenon of  ‘live VR music concerts’.Through this paper it becomes clear that the meaning of live music and virtual live music is not always clear. Virtual does not want to be like the real. It does not intend to create the same music experience. It is a globalising trend that seeks to go beyond. In contrast, maybe the real becomes more like the virtual. Experimenting with virtual experiences results eventually in the dissolving of the boundaries between the real and the virtual. The meaning of live music is changing and is strongly interpreted in the context of culture. Pandemic culture insinuated the interpretation that VR is just arriving, but actually it was already here for a while. With the semiotic square we analysed the virtual and real through the ‘here and now’. It is the ‘here and now’ (authenticity?) that gets questioned in live virtual concerts. It is legit to present a live concert in other ways, because that is one of the aims of VR. The virtual concert does not necessarily want to substitute real-life concerts. Peircian interpretations led into new kinds of music experience and new music industries/business models. A virtual concert experience constructs experience of identities of experience of collectivity that are real. Even in a manipulated or determined world the emotions that music creates are real. ‘Liveness’ shows the (intersubjective) power of music.

This essay explores how management of creative organisations can communicate a flat organisational structure with emphasis on co- leadership and division of responsibility. Through a comparison of the language used in ordinary businesses with that of artistic organisations (especially theatres and symphonies), the essay suggests that by implementing the ‘artistic’ language into ordinary businesses, organisations can underpin a creative working culture and to a larger extend communicate the flat organisational structure that help organisations fulfil their potential in the creative economy.

“La letra embrolla” escribió Ricardo Gutiérrez. Un aire de sospecha pesa sobre ella. Para poder leer más los lectores involucionan, desconfían, desconocen los textos, se ven obligados a “poner la erudición a la altura del barro” arriesga Mercedes Álvarez en su poemario Imitación de los pájaros. Para empezar ¿se puede transmitir sentido por intermedio de palabras?, ¿se puede dominar lo que se inscribe en una página?, ¿es el sentido una frecuencia entre las palabras y las cosas? Por otra parte ¿es posible dar sentido al universo sin conectarse con una forma de lenguaje en un intento de aproximarlos entre sí a riesgo de provocar la caída en lo inefable?, ¿el sentido debe buscarse en la unidad o en la diferencia, en el origen simbólico o en su devenir irrefrenable? Y la forma ¿es una unidad mínima de contenido o una especie de ángel que se escapó del paraíso del sentido para vagar eternamente en busca de una comunidad perdida? Las preguntas se encadenan hasta fondear un mar de confusiones.

Bu çalışma dijital avatarların iletişimdeki rollerini iki farklı şekilde ele almaktadır. İlk bölümde avatarların kullanıcıları için ne tarz anlamlar taşıdığı tartışılmaktadır. Bu soruya yanıt vermek için Saussure ve Lacan’ın semiyotik teorileri baz alınarak yeni bir önerme getirilmiştir. Saussure’ün gösterge teorisi ile Lacan’ın özbenliğe giriş için göstergeler zinciri teorisi birleştirilerek yeni bir bakış açısı sunulmuştur. İkinci bölümde avatarların dijital iletişimde alıcılar için anlamları Berger’in belirsizlik azaltma teorisi üzerinden tartışılmıştır.

This article proposes that the common dichotomy between synchronic and diachronic approaches to biblical literature be set aside in favor of a paradigm centered on the concepts of cohesion and coherence as defined in contemporary linguistics. After demonstrating the difficulties associated with suitably defining and identifying indicators of diachronic textual formation, it argues that a focus on cohesion and coherence allows interpreters to avoid binary judgments as to the text’s unity and to recognize the primacy of coherence over surface-level cohesion. After presenting the linguistic principles that underlie this alternative approach, it concludes by examining several hypotheses of diachronic redaction in Isaiah and demonstrating that avoiding the synchronic-diachronic dichotomy brings textual unity and diversity into clearer focus.

Abstract: The Saussurian adagio according to which linguistics is "le patron général de la sémiologie" is well known. To a certain extent, the verbal and non-verbal may be subjected to a common, semiolinguistic scheme of investigation. For instance, a fundamental phenomenon in the history of cult(ure)s – the transition of collective expression patterns from sacer ludus to ludus aestheticus – may be described in a semiological metalanguage. Thus, we intend to illustrate, by resorting to a choreographic corpus, the relevance of certain semiological concepts, traditionally applied to verbal objects:
·        “desemantization”/ “resemantization”: a relevant opposition, in our opinion, for the transformation of the choreographic language along with other structures of society;
·        “mutability” and “immutability” of the sign: a paradoxical condition for the subsistence of not only verbal, but also choreographic language;
·        the Saussurean principle of “alteration through continuity”;

    Key-words: dance, desemantization, gesture, (im)mutability, language, resemantization, ritual, sign, Saussure, theatre.the Saussurean concept of “shifting” the semiotic relation; in our opinion, shifting the original relation (ritualistic, magic-religious) between the choreographic significant and signifier is a symptom of the gradual “aestheticization” or “theatricalization” of choreographic “language”.

Le istituzioni spesso restituiscono un’immagine irragionevole della lingua. Questa immagine si costruisce attraverso usi che si stabilizzano e si reiterano nelle pratiche linguistiche quotidiane. Ma possono gli usi linguistici essere ragionevoli?

Ces douze pages décrivent, puis explorent, en onze petits chapitres des points essentiels de la « question » de l'arbitraire du signe. A partir du chapitre 6, on montre comment les noms ont joué un rôle abusif dans cette affaire, et pourquoi. Le dernier chapitre donne une perspective peut-être nouvelle sur la question. (Version 3)

《電影符號學：從古典到數位時代（新版）》是電影理論工作者齊隆壬長期研究的成果，詳細耙梳並剖析符號學的發展源流與變革，以及著名學者的理論，如索緒爾、李維史陀、羅蘭巴特、皮爾斯等。接著帶出電影理論的關鍵人物──克利斯蒂安．梅茲，闡釋他如何把符號學，以及相關領域如語言學、結構主義、精神分析運用至電影分析，奠定電影符號學在電影理論界的重要地位。也因電影符號學涵蓋的範圍甚廣，而讓電影分析有了更多可能性。除了回顧西方符號學與電影符號學的理論與沿革，作者也把討論拉回台灣與中國大陸，介紹電影符號學在兩岸的發展脈絡與特點。

　　在理論層面之外，作者也引用許多影片分析的範例，清楚說明電影符號學是如何應用於電影研究之中。而近來電影科技日新月異，已進入數位電影時代，因此第九章即在討論電影由膠卷轉為數位影像的變革，除了提及古典電影如《波坦金戰艦》、《月球之旅》等必會出現的經典例子，更舉《阿凡達》、《全面啟動》、《雨果的冒險》為例，把電影符號學理論連結至最新的影片發展上。

　　電影符號學雖看似古典，在現今的數位環境中非但沒有過時，反而受到電影理論學者大量援用，依然能夠提供理論架構和基本論點。而本書由符號學的發展開始，一直到電影符號學與數位電影的連結，提供了全面且獨到深入的見解，堪稱是近期電影理論的重量級著作，研究電影者不可不看！

In the second chapter of her book 'My Mother Was a Computer – Digital Subjects and Literary Texts' (University of Chicago Press, 2005), Katherine Hayles takes up the question of the “post-human” via the question of language. She extracts three “worldviews”: “speech”, “writing”, and “code” (understood as “the language of intelligent machines”, which is to say, in our day and age, computers), and she analyses their reciprocal relations, relying on her readings of the 'Course in General Linguistics' of Saussure, 'Grammatology' by Derrida, and numerous contemporary theoreticians of codes and of digital literature. We present and discuss the theses of the Author, and attempt to develop them by asking on the basis of what types of behavior and what definitions of language and of signification can one account for the difference between a human who “responds” and a non-human (animal or machine, pre- or post- human) that “reacts”.

El estudio de los signos, o semiótica, constituye una útil herramienta de análisis de los fenómenos sociales. Esta disciplina ayuda a entender la manera en que los repertorios culturales específicos de cada sociedad determinan sus visiones de la realidad. En consonancia con la importancia de estas cuestiones, diferentes programas académicos han incorporen en sus currículos contenidos pertenecientes a este campo. Éstos, sin embargo, son con frecuencia difíciles de abordar. El presente artículo tiene como finalidad ayudar a vencer este obstáculo, presentando una forma de graficar conceptos básicos de la teoría de los signos, a partir de la literatura.

Althusser builds on Marx's principle of revolution by explaining the functioning of the state and ideology. Contradictions in the society are when the class struggles are possible. When there is a contradiction between the owners of means of production and the relations of production, the owners of the previous means of production will do everything possible to keep the relations of production same in order to have the power to influence other classes in the society. This is why Althusser says that there is a need to constantly reproduce the relations of production. This contradiction can be seen in the events preceding the French Revolution where differences between the landowners and the industrialists surfaced which eventually led to a confrontation. Althusser distinguishes between the base and the superstructure of a capitalist mode of production. The base is the economic base which is also the infrastructure and the superstructure is a set of apparatuses used by the state to enforce their hegemony (In my opinion, he is describing Gramsci's hegemony in terms of how the state uses it). Althusser speaks of Ideology as a structure under which the various state apparatuses operate at the superstructure level. The state here has been equated to power in the sense that a certain class or a class alliance seizes the state power. The apparatuses could be further divided into two types: the repressive state apparatus and the ideological state apparatus. The repressive state apparatus are primarily violent mechanisms which operate in the public domain. Examples would include the army, the police etc. The ideological state apparatus contributes to influencing individuals by influencing ideas (at the very base) which ensure the reproduction of the ideology and is mostly in the private domain. For example, the education system, the family, the social media etc. In Althusser's opinion, education is the most influential of the ISAs. Saussure breaks down language to a series of signs which are determined by the sound image and the concept it is referring to. He uses the terms signifier and signified to refer to them respectively. The relation of the signifier to the signified is created by an associative bond in our brains. For instance, for the sound image " tree " the concept that it invokes (it could vary from the cherry blossom tree with pink leaves to a banyan tree with green leaves depending on the individual) shows the relation in between the signifier and the signified. Saussure then points highlights the arbitrariness which exists in the functioning of the sign. The meaning is not naturally fixed. This is because the signifier is different for each individual who performs the task of attaching meaning to objects. This indicates that the meaning of the object lies with the signifier (sound image) and the individual who attaches it to the signified (the concept). Two other concepts are brought into the picture; langue and parole. Langue refers to the underlying rules and the deeper organization of language. The langue helps an individual interpret the world. The underlying rules of a language tend be relatively fixed (by social forces) and it is usually out of the power of the individual to change this deeper structure of language. Parole on the other hand would be the acts performed and the statements made at an individual level. Parole is the manifestation of the pre-existing langue. The dominant agent of change according to Saussure would be the structure that is a result of the Adheip Rashada (12060321002) Critical Ideas of the 20 th Century Assignment

Analyzing sign complexity, from the above described formal analysis, is visible, that its complexity is majorly comprised by pictures which are “artifacts, created primarily as instruments of signification and communication”. The problem of picture-artifact dichotomy can be relatively omitted in this analysis as we speak about a fictional map.
All map components of the chosen map can be considered plan-related, as apart from literal guided in the form of flags and boards, all the object stand in relation to each other, hence I do not see it possible to concentrate on separate objects aside from their surroundings – the principle feature of the map is interrelations of the objects comprising the represented territory.

Neste estudo propomos uma leitura da edição do Curso de Linguística
Geral, cuja publicação, em 1916, é reconhecida como o marco de fundação da Linguística Moderna. Essa leitura que ora propomos será guiada por um objetivo particular: demonstrar como a noção de relação, para além da teoria do valor, considerada por alguns estudiosos carro-chefe da reflexão saussuriana, atua também como um elemento
indispensável para a elaboração dos diferentes conceitos propostos por
Ferdinand de Saussure, tais como língua, sincronia, diacronia, mutabilidade, imutabilidade, arbitrariedade e linearidade, dentre outros.

Quais são as heranças deixadas pelo Curso de linguística geral, um século depois de sua publicação ? Como se produziram as diversas recepções ao CLG ao longo desses cem anos ? O que resta de Saussure na linguística contemporânea ? Seu pensamento foi reivindicado ou rejeitado, assimilado ou ignorado pelas ciências da linguagem de nossos dias ? No diversificado conjunto dessas heranças e recepções, como o pensamento de Saussure está hoje presente especificamente nas linguísticas do texto e do discurso, abordagens assentadas no frequente anúncio de uma suposta superação da linguística saussuriana ?
Nesta obra, o leitor encontrará respostas para essas e outras perguntas. Os capítulos foram produzidos por pesquisadores de diferentes nacionalidades, reconhecidos por sua condição de eminentes especialistas nos campos da história das ideias linguísticas, da análise do discurso, da linguística textual e da semiótica. Em cada uma dessas contribuições, há uma serie de reflexões e análises originais sobre o papel desempenhado por Saussure no desenvolvimento das noções de texto e de discurso, tais como foram concebidas e modificadas no decurso desses cem anos do CLG.

One of the less obvious contributions of Saussure is his role in establishing modern communications theory. The sender-message-receiver (SMR) model of communication was developed by Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver (1949). Within the humanities, it is Roman Jakobson's version of the SMR model which is most influential. Jakobson's model creates a methodology for considering such complexities as the sender's intentions, the context of transmission, metalinguistic codes, the transmission medium, and the relation to the referent. Despite the complexity of Jakobson's model, it is still bound by the assumption that perfect communication can be achieved through the full recovery of contexts. The most thorough and powerful critique of what's often called the " transmission model " of communication is found in Jacques Derrida's " Signature Event Context " (1988). Derrida's critique begins by demonstrating " why a context is never absolutely determinable " (3). In place of context, Derrida proposes the notion of " dissemination " in which a text is radically adrift of the conditions of its utterance or reception. At face value, Saussure's " speech circuit " model represents an early and underdeveloped model of communication. As if often the case, however, a closer reading of the Cours reveals something far more radical and profound. Closer attention to Saussure's speech circuit model reopens many questions in communication theory, and in associated fields such as literary theory, cultural studies, and semiotics.

The notebook 3959.10, part of the series Notes sur les légendes germaniques in the Ferdinand de Saussure archive, is devoted to the legend of Tristan and Isolde. In these notes, Saussure deals with the issue of the source of the medieval Tristan tales. He looks for the archetypical text, inspired by the story of Theseus, which would have served as a model for French and German medieval romances that passed down the Tristanian legend. In doing so, Sausurre comes across a transcultural archetypical character having the same features as Tristan and crossing different mythologies and legends. The paper aims at exploring the conjunction of a philological perspective and an anthropological perspective in Saussure's path. It shows how Saussure's reflection on the Tristanian legend was crucial to the development of a semiology of interdiscursivity and a general theory of the sign that anticipates the Cours de linguistique générale.

Esitare, incespicare sulle proprie parole, riprenderle e ricominciare. Dire una parola per un'altra, interrompersi e tacere, oppure correg-gersi, riavviare il discorso e bloccarsi all'intoppo successivo. Parlare è faticoso: è colmare lacune che affiorano nell'esercizio quotidiano del gesto verbale. Eppure si parla, anche fluentemente. E parlare è sentir-si parlare: magari «si può non farci attenzione, ma è certo che si ode il suono delle proprie parole». Così affermava Lacan, e con Lacan tutti gli autori che si sono misurati con quest'aspetto dell'attività di linguaggio. Diversi per tradizione e sensibilità, studiosi di enuncia-zione, psicoanalisti e scienziati cognitivi hanno identificato la presen-za di una «funzione muta del linguaggio» nella figura stessa del par-lante. Da taluni chiamata «auto-ricezione», da altri «auto-ascolto» o «intesa silenziosa», questa funzione è sincronicamente operante nel gesto verbale, è il rimedio provvisorio che il parlare procaccia alle proprie lacune: se vi è un margine di ripresa in ciò che fa buco nel discorso, lo si deve alla funzione muta del linguaggio.

This volume is dedicated to the theoretical legacy of Ferdinand de Saussure, which is still challenging not only for linguistics, but for many other disciplines. For Saussure, to conceive language as a system made it possible to found linguistics as an autonomous scientific discipline. However, if language could be seen and treated as a system, it had consequences not only for linguistics, but also for esthetics, anthropology, or cultural theory. With respect to Czech functional structualism, as developed by Jan Mukarovsky and others, it seems important that it was in Prague that Saussurean thinking on language came in touch with phenomenological philosophy. Since Husserl’s work was already authoritative at the beginning of the 30th, the confrontation of Saussure’s theory of language with phenomenological reflections on language was inevitable. The interaction between structuralism and phenomenology then continued, above all, in the philosophical work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. But if the interaction between structuralist theory and phenomenology is in focus of this volume, it is not so much for historical reasons; it is rather due to a mapping of the possible views of language that issue from the confrontation of structuralist and phenomenological tradition of thinking. With regard to language, a high attention is paid to the post-phenomenological and the post-structuarlist theories, too.

Contents
I. System and Function
1) Johannes Fehr – “Language as a System. Revisiting Saussure”
2) Jan Sokol – “Language and Experience”
3) Ondrej Sladek – “Ferdinand de Saussure Interpreted by Jan Mukarovsky: Reception and Revison”
II. Language and Thought
4) Michal Ajvaz – “Maurice Merleau-Ponty: A Love Affair between Phenomenology and Structuralism”
5) Petr Urban – “Relationship of Thought and Language in Husserl’s Phenomenology”
6) Petr Kouba – “Beyond Phenomenology of Language”
7) Yong Ho Choi – “Saussure and Ricoeur at Odds with the Question of Meaning”
III. Conditions and Limits of Subjectivity
8) Alice Klikova – “Lived Worlds as the Systems of Signs – Uexkull’s Bio-Semiotics”
9) Emil Volek – “Habitats of Language/Language Inhabited: from the Umwelt to the Possible Worlds of Communication and Culture”
10) Josef Fulka – “The Lacanian Destiny of the Signifier”
11) Louis Armand – “Language and Interactivity”

According to Ferdinand de Saussure, "the linguistic entity is not accurately defined until it is delimited, i.e. separated from everything that surrounds it on the phonic chain" (Saussure 1916: 145 [103]). However, what are the units to be isolated? The question is important, pragmatically, for anyone trying to learn an entirely new language from the speakers of that language. And it is of crucial theoretical importance for anyone setting out to describe, analyse and study a language.
Just as the use of language to communicate is a universal human feature, the problem of delimiting the units of language can be considered a universal problem in reflection about language. It may therefore be of interest to see how the problem was perceived and dealt with in an entirely different cultural and intellectual environment than that of early and modern Western linguistics.
Bhartrhari's work the Vakyapadlya is definitely the oldest and it is moreover the only work for which the problem of the nature of words and sentences forms the main subject. In order to have a good basis for theoretical evaluations of early Indian discussions on this problem, it is therefore expedient to start with this older and more elaborate source. In the present paper, the aim will not be to arrive at a final evaluation of Bhartrhari's theory, but rather to arrive at a better understanding of his argument and position.

La contribution importante de l'un des spécialistes principaux du Saussurismo contemporain qui nous apporte des commentaires critiques à propos de l'influence du Cours de linguistique générale au XXe siècle, et en particulier les manuscrits de 1996. Comment devons-nous recevoir ces deux métatextes ?  François Rastier nous répond à cela et d'autres questions.

Sanskrit is a unique language. It is based on seed sounds or beeja dhvani. Each sound has its own gunas or qualities or characteristics. For example, the sound 'da' is 'a simple root sound, the primary root', as pointed out by Sri Aurobindo in his essay The Origins of Aryan Speech. From this simple root sound spring multiple lines of 'derivative, secondary or tertiary root-sounds'. He surmised that the root sound 'da' might have given to the ancient Aryan mind an impression of splitting, bursting open, cutting, tearing, crushing, destroying, cheating. And he also discovered that these primary root-sounds of Sanskrit are also shared with Greek, Latin and even Tamil, while retaining their original sense and meaning. This finding may have critical ramifications in our study of phonology.

La teoria saussuriana della scrittura, per come è pervenuta dalle trascrizioni di Bally e Sechehaye, è stata oggetto di demolizione quasi all’unanimità. E trampolino per superare la semiotica verso la grammatologia, la traccia immotivata di Jacques Derrida. Si tenterà di capire se la riattualizzazione del pensiero di Saussure attraverso la scoperta degli inediti, la rivalutazione del lavoro sugli anagrammi e il Corso stesso integrato e riveduto, non permettano di ripensare la problematica e di spiegare diversamente la relazione fra grafia e suono in Saussure

Worth noting, is that Wall-Romana relies heavily on biographical explanatory arguments for constructing his historiographical model and that this seems genuinely at odds with his over-zealous advocacy of post-structuralist methods such as hermeneutics, post-structuralist ontology such as corporeality, as well as, post-structuralist theories such as, queer theory and affect theory. From a traditional biographical argument, Wall-Romana presents Abel Gance as planting a seed in Epstein for the latter’s later flourishes of philosophical poetry in the cinematic milieux, however Wall-Romana also claims that Epstein’s queerness was rigourously individualized articulating Epstein’s oeuvre in profoundly unique ways. Gance is an author inscribing Epstein, yet Epstein is paradoxically erasing those inscriptions to produce his work from a state of tabula rasa. We can provide Wall-Romana will a modest amount of leeway given that the crux of his thesis regards Epstein’s gravitational flux at a crossroads in the discourse of cinematic epistemology. A real problem arises when Wall-Romana is unable to properly theorize whether the crossroads constitutes a bundle of things or the frayed ends of a single thing, in a phenomenological sense for the understanding of cinematic epistemology. I will elaborate on these ideas later in this paper.

*Everything uploaded to my Academia.edu in 2017 is considered a draft. I was required to do regular graduate course work for the first year of my doctoral studies and took the opportunity to play out some personal theories. It's all a prolegomenon for a bigger project down the road and these ideas will require a more rigourous distillation to be of real value to the scholarly community.

This essay combines philology and ecocriticism as approaches to PB Shelley's Prometheus Unbound.


Percy Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound (1819) acknowledges “a certain arbitrary discretion” in its subject, turning from the extent play of Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound (Prometheus desmotes), to a form of creative translation of Aeschylus’s fragmentary, lost play about liberational unbinding, Prometheus luomenos. Possible translations of luomenos include not only unbinding and ransom, but—across the verb’s active, passive, and middle senses—to loosen, free, release, dissolve, ransom, destroy, annul, unknit. What could it mean to read Prometheus Unbound as a materially imaginative revision of the richly layered linguistic act of that drama, “the Luomenos”? This field of meanings exceeds liberation, and its provocation helps us account for the fully distributed play of unbinding for this is drama, in which the unshackling of Prometheus by Hercules is a brief and perfunctory action. Arguing that Prometheus Unbound does not idealize but undercuts both the meaning and desirability of the reigning liberal concept of freedom, the essay uses close philology and theory to investigate multiple registers of Shelley’s poetics of creatively bound freedoms: ecological, political, psychological, and erotic. Recalling that Prometheus is a trickster figure in classical myth—an aspect notably missing from the nominal hero of Shelley’s drama—I argue the trickster role moves from character to language. Epimetheus his brother is a figure of afterthought and retrojection, retroactivity, thinking after the event. I end by considering the coimplicating bonds and cuts in Saussure’s two-wave diagram from Course in General Linguistics.

Resumo Este trabalho consiste em uma análise do " Prefácio à edição brasileira " do Curso de Linguística Geral (CLG), publicado em 1970, na ocasião da tradução do livro para português. Pode-se considerar que a introdução das reflexões saussurianas no Brasil ocorreu em dois principais momentos. O primeiro deles tem como ponto de partida a primeira publicação do CLG, em 1916, e se deu por meio da leitura da edição original em francês, e a partir de trabalhos de autores como Mattoso Câmara, que se pautaram, em certa medida, nas ideias de Saussure. O segundo momento se deu a partir da publicação da tradução do CLG para a língua materna do país. Com ela, veio a público também o " Prefácio à edição brasileira " do livro, escrito por Nicolau Salum, o qual contribuiu significativamente para esse segundo tempo da recepção do CLG no Brasil. Tendo isso em vista, visamos efetuar uma abordagem do " Prefácio à edição brasileira " , voltada, mais especificamente, para o contexto teórico em que tal texto foi escrito e publicado, buscando evidenciar a existência de uma visão dicotômica dos princípios saussurianos, pontualmente salientada por Salum (1970) em seu prefácio. Abstract This work presents an analysis of a Brazilian Linguistique Générale's Course preface — by N. Salum — which was published in 1970, along with the book translation into Portuguese. Saussure's thought was introduced in Brazil, at first , through the original French edition. The reading of the book leads to many interpretations, from which works, such as those by Mattoso Câmara, were written, reflecting on phonetics

Though the origin of language is unclear, experiments about languages are begun and are continuing for two thousand years back. Linguistics is an interesting area of studying for a long time. A subject-based study of language was begun in the 18th century. Since then the grammar, glossary, accent of languages were used to study and those studies are continuing to present as well. But the 19th century is considered as the century that which the scientific study of language was begun.

Parmi les pages les plus importantes, et peut-être les plus actuelles, du Cours de Linguistique Générale, sont celles où Saussure oppose Esprit d’intercourse et Esprit de clocher. Il montre le contraste toujours vivant, dans une même société mais pas toujours chez les mêmes hommes, entre le désir identitaire, centripète, celui qui affirme "je suis chez moi", et l’autre désir, centrifuge, qui dit "je voudrais vivre ailleurs".
Si le contraste de ces deux désirs, que décrit Saussure en quelques pages limpides, va bien au-delà du langage dans les conduites humaines, il est aussi tout-à-fait au-dedans. Car les deux désirs sont "innovants". L’Esprit de clocher veut singulariser toute expression nouvelle issue du lieu, la rendre typique, la faire paraître traditionnelle le plus vite possible. Chaque village, chaque tribu, chaque peuple qui fut d’abord voisin de l’autre peut vouloir « affirmer » sa différence, et en croyant souvent être fidèle à soi-même, il le sera en fait à travers des innovations constantes.