Saussure on a bank holiday

I'm not saussure about that.

I thought they were called bangers in the UK.

I know little of this, but language's link to what it signifies is almost always completelr arbitrary (with rare exceptions, such as, arguably, onomatopoeia). With other signs there is sometimes a less arbitrary link, in that symbols are often based on the things they are signifying. I think by their nature there is nothing necessarily non-arbitrary about signifiers, and it's just that sometimes there is a less totally arbitrary connection.

I agree. It seems like language that isn't based on a pictogram is completely arbitrary, but I can't quite settle on that. There must be some kind of necessary connection between signifier and signified, though maybe I'm just predisposed to seeing a connection where there may not really be any.

Isn't the fact of all these different words for the same thing, over all the different languages, clear evidence of the arbitrariness of language? (I am very uneasy at talking from such a position of ignorance on this.)

RUN! RUN AWAY FROM THIS THREAD! RUN AS FAR AS YOU CAN! SAVE YOUSELVES, KILL THEM ALL!

This thread is

"nature is a language, can't you read?"

mmmm the weighty chains of signification.

I think it's kind of silly to talk about ALL signs. Couldn't most people could work out which links are arbitrary and which aren't, and to what extent? (For instance, the written word "whoosh" doesn't have any relation to the sound or action it refers to, except through the oral enunciation of it - and then it really does.) Haha to their own satisfaction if not to every single other person's, at least!

there are japanese characters that are supposed to reflect what they refer to, like the word mountain looks like a mountain, but even there i think you have to adhere to one agreed character, rather than just drawing your own. can art (drawing/photography/etc) be a signifier?

That depends which Japanese written language you are using - there are three. They aren't all at all pictographic - the one that is, to a fair extent, is basically Chinese anyway, more or less.

ok, so certain symbols can cross the language barrier, so that they could mean the same thing in japanese or chinese, but would be pronounced differently. what about back in the day, with cave paintings, could they be called signifiers because they link with a signified, or does that term only begin when pictures become a recognised language, like egyyptian heiroglyphics?

Cave paintings were an attempt to represent something - I'm not sure whether they (or most painting) could be called signifiers of something. (I'm not sure how the magic of similarity that some theorise works with that, really.)

What did Saussure say about all this? I think of him to do with a structural view of linguistics, rather than this issue in particular.

FRANKIE SAUSSURE SAY RELAX

i don't really know. If i can make a crude story out of a load of clip art things, (I mean that the story would be a bit rubbish, not some xxx funk and filth), allowing someone to read about the escapades of a stick man or something, the symbols that go into that, like a ball on a line with other lines for limbs, could be called signifiers, but would relate directly to a real life man. or does even the humble stickman count as being arbitrary because a social group are in agreement of its meaning?

It might be a different sort of thing, to interpret five sticks and a ball arranged in a particular way to be a human form, rather than taking the alphabetic characters L, O, V, and E to mean the abstract idea of "love." Both are metaphorical, but the word seems, I don't know, somehow deeper than the picture? (In this particular case anyway. I wonder if the same would be true if the word were "dog" and the picture were an abstract painting.)

i suppose a stickman can't really be thought of as a signifier because when i see it on a page it does not make me think of a man, but just the image of a thin geezer.

Language has been around far, far longer than writing so writing is kind of a red herring here. There isn't really much doubt that the sounds you use to signify stuff in languages is arbitrary.

The key point is that the bond can be arbitrary, not that there are plenty of examples where etymology lacks arbitrariness. At the time (the early 1900s) this was a pretty groovy thing to tell people, as many linguists were spending a lot of time doing stuff like trying to trace back languages to whatever was spoken in the Garden of Eden, operating on the basis that current languages were corrupted, but if you traced back you could discover the original perfect language in which words were not arbitrary but had a systematic correspondence with stuff in the world.

I think.

That depends which Japanese written language you are using - there are three. They aren't all at all pictographic - the one that is, to a fair extent, is basically Chinese anyway, more or less.

Well, Japanese has two syllabaries and a large set of Chinese characters (kan'ji) that are all used together to write Japanese. You can't write Japanese using just the kan'ji, and while you can write Japanese using just one of the two syllabaries, only foreigners and very small children do so and then only because they don't know enough kan'ji to write properly.

The syllabaries are arbitrary like English letters are, the kan'ji which that represent entire words (and other stuff) sometimes have a clear connection between the word and the image. But it's not at all transparent... many of the radicals that make up the kan'ji are pretty abstracted, they've been around for thousands of years.

If I'm not mistaken Egyptian hieroglyphics were also phonetic.

I wasn't watching home alone, neither was I drinking tea. I was taking a break from phonetics and signifiers and playing with the purely musical tones of Cubase. Sometimes my head hurts from all the thoughts in it.

And then HSA and his mum came home and we had a chat about how linguistics is word archeology. (They were happy because they found a 6000 year old carved mace head in among all the old sheep goat bones from an old dig in Israel.)

The saucy book I picked up really cheap turned out not to be saucy at all but some godawful Lacanian BS by some filmhack who could not BELIEVE that women could objectify men because that concept completely destroyed the concept of the Male Gaze. People who spend such time writing this crunk should be forced to spend several hours in the front row of a Busted concert and then come back to me on the nonexistence of the Female Gaze.

My slippers are very comfy. My African Sleep Shippers, I call them.

And now distract me with this no longer, I have TWO reports due to the Americans today and I must get down to work. Ugh.