I was fascinated by Bertan's article on the study of the evolution of language and the signifier/signified debate. I especially liked his paragraph about how perhaps, if we had no word for pony, all horses would look the same to us because we had no designation for the smaller horses.
And that got me thinking about something I had read the other day about how in Arabic, and several other languages, there is more than one word for what we in English call "love." there's a word for general love, a word for love between lovers, a word for love that's distracting, a word for love that causes us pain because it's so powerful. We don't have anything close to that last word. we just have...love.
There's been a debate going on (maybe this is just at my house) about how we throw words around too freely now and how the phrase "LOVE" has lost its meaning. does a word become less powerful when we affix too many meanings to it? Can the signified overwhelm the signifier?
written after reading http://archive.eteraz.org/story/2006/12/4/8052/97546
and another article i can't seem to find now...
and another article i can't seem to find now...
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I have a hard time believing his suggestion about the horse. Is it saying that we wouldn't recognize that a pony was different than a horse if there was no word for pony? We had to recognize it in order to come up with the word, right? Maybe I'm misunderstanding that. As for love, I feel like it goes back to what Fish says about how readers create meaning. To me, love means something different to everyone. It is ineffable. One word describes something that can't accurately be described. Now i'm rambling
ReplyDeletebut it was good ramble. Lots of good questions. Maybe I read it wrong, and what he's really saying is that once we recognize that there are two different "types" of horses, the big ones and the little ones, then we create a new word, and that's how the language changes...
ReplyDeleteWe may as well all ramble together. I don't think it's a matter of which came first, the word or the meaning (kind of like the chicken or the egg). The signifier and signified have a sort of give-and-take relationship and cannot rely on themselves alone. So perhaps that would imply that without the word pony we could not separate it as special from a horse, because one part of the equation would be missing. I'm not sure if that makes sense or not...
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