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Ferdinand de Saussure (1857 – 1913) was a Swiss linguist and a father of 20th-century linguistics. Without language, thought is a vague, uncharted nebula.

Ferdinand de Saussure

Ferdinand de Saussure philosopher of linguistics

COMMENT on the strategy of these Probaway maximizing posts.

The end goal of this series of posts is to create short statements of ideas derived from thinkers. The views are intended to be concise and stimulating of thoughts that can clash against other Probaway maxims in the collection. With an average of forty or so statements from each individual from this beginning list of about two hundred people, there will be approximately eight thousand statements to work with. Probaway’s maxim statements have been numbered and also numbered in the individual thinker’s list of quotes. The goal is to make possible referencing a clash with only four numbers. (I will renumber the authors at some point to make the system easier to use.)

The final goal is to find new ideas formed by clashing these ideas together. There are probably ideas that will appear obvious once stated, but no one has ever published them. The system might be used to generate online games for creating new ideas. If that could become a popular game, it would generate many useful ideas.

 

Probaway maximizing on Ferdinand de Saussure

[Short quotes do not convey Saussure well, so I have used a longer set mostly selected from the  European Graduate School site.]

1. Human language is a genetically evolved system for communication that uses aural and visual symbols to carry ideas.

2. We are all collections of paradoxes that language exploits to make human beings enjoyable to other human beings.

3. Without easy access to evolved grammar, grunts and hisses are vague and only have meaning relevant to present events.

4. With modern access to sophisticated brain imaging, the incoherent understanding of brain functions in past times is now becoming coherent.

5. Language evolves through time in response to its environmental pressures, similar to biological expressions adapting to their environments.

6. Speech permits individual speakers to think clearly about time and invisible events when alone and communicate those thoughts to their society.

7. The Greeks studied their language and designed a formal speech to aid in accurate communication through writing and sound.

8. Studies in philology existed in Alexandria but were intended to understand what previous authors indicated by their statements.

9. Languages can be compared to one another and be used to clarify one language’s words, grammar, and other aspects

10. To create a science of a subject, its proponents must define the study’s object and parameters so that cross-comparisons may be made and corroborated.

11. The early comparative philologist compared living Indo-European languages without other outside languages or historical growth.

12. The early comparative method created false notions, absurd reasoning, and weird words to justify their thinking. BEWARE!

13. The current reasoning, based on longitudinal observations, is that language is the evolved product of a group’s collective mind.

14. To observe a language’s growth through time requires broad and deep comparisons of written material to recover the spoken idioms.

15. Linguistics should: a) describe and trace all languages’ historical changes and reconstruct each of their source languages to their roots.

16. b) determine the specific forces modifying languages, and deduce the general laws generating and perpetuating those forces.

17. c) repeat and refine to delimit and define what linguistics means and implies and offers to the language users.

18. Linguistics is about communication and is separate from ethnography, or history, or anthropology; language is an independent social fact.

19. For the last hundred thousand years, those people who spoke more clearly would be preferred mates, which would force heritable adaptations of the larynx, tongue, and brain.

20. Speech is synergistic with all aspects of the human being because it improves every existing ability’s performance and survival fitness.

21. Human ancestors were making mouth sounds for warning signals, and when that ability expanded beyond a hundred words, there would be a forcing of greater verbal clarity.

22. Gestures like baring teeth were communicated and combined with snarling and bodily gesturing; they would combine to be synergistic and evolve together.

23. Language is a social product of our ability to form unique sounds with our mouths, combined with a collection of local social conventions.

24. Although we can communicate with facial and bodily gestures, the terms speech and language are normally confined to the spoken aspects.

25. Our speech has primarily evolved over the last eighty thousand years with the evolution of heritable verbal grammar that also affects facial and bodily actions.

26. The ability to communicate with language is now inherited, but the specific words and word order are local social conventions.

27. Our coevolved personal subsystems for creating communication have generated coevolving societies that have now joined as a world-wide evolving fellowship.

28. A language is not something that exists in a single speaker; it exists and functions because of a collective of similar speakers.

29. The use of language is a willful function of a speaker, but it’s the result of his evolutionary past and his passively assimilating his group’s behaviors.

30. Semiotics is the study of all forms of signs that signal something, and the signs may be arbitrary and have no relationship to the signified thing.

31. In a generalized science of language, we need to observe spoken sounds’ evolutions and foresee their effects.

32. A nation’s culture drives its language’s qualities, and using that language binds its people together.

33. Geographical splitting of languages tends to lead to time-generated differences, but it doesn’t affect an idiom’s inner organism.

34. Examining external linguistic phenomena created by geographical splitting is helpful for understanding internal linguistic developments.

35. One rule has emerged, that anything that changes the system in any way was already latent internally before being accepted.

36. Oral language has a number of oral traditions that are independent of writing, but written documents distract us from understanding the oral materials.

37. The spelling of words lags behind the pronunciation of common words, but intentionally created neologisms may be an exception to that rule.

38. The spelling of foreign words, like Beijing versus Peking, fluctuates interminably and changes with each new prominent grammarian.

39. Writing often obscures the pronouncing of words, like French oiseau (bird), where not one spoken sound is indicated by its own symbol.

40. Whenever a person claims a certain letter must be pronounced a certain way, they should tour the various regions where the language is spoken.

41. The way a word is pronounced references the moment in the evolution of that word, which may be tracked and forecast by the preceding pronunciations.

42. In highly literate societies, widely published words are spelled by the current conventions and influence and modify the language.

43. When deformations of a language occur, they are due to external influences, which linguists call teratological (monster) cases. 

44. One should hesitate to put what appears to fit naturally to replace what appears artificial in a native speaker’s spoken statement.

45. The linguistic sign links a concept with a sound and not a thing and a name.

46. The signifier of an idea seems arbitrarily chosen, but once in common use, it is fixed within the linguistic community and cannot be replaced.

47. In the long run, there is a slow shift in the relationship between the signifier and the signified.

48. Continuity in language means in the short run, things don’t change, but in the long run, they do change along a predictable trajectory.

COMMENTS on Saussure

No one has proved that speech, as it manifests itself when we speak, is entirely natural, i.e., that our vocal apparatus was designed for speaking just as our legs were designed for walking. That sentence from Saussure caught my eye because the anthropological community avoids the implication of design preceding an ability. I would agree that walking was a development of natural selection, which is always after the selective processes have forced a living being into its observed mode of existence. However, our language ability and our physical apparatus for modulating sound was not a natural selective process, but what I call an Evish selective one, where near-modern human women of one hundred thousand years ago were selecting mates and friends for their speaking abilities. This is a special form of artificial selection, and it is much quicker than natural selection. Artificial selection is so fast that we may observe its effects in our personally short lives. The rapidity of artificial selection is easily seen in the supermarket produce section’s improvements and in the great variety of unusual dogs at a dog park. Humans themselves were the first examples of artificial selection.

The linguistic sign unites, not a thing and a name, but a concept and a sound-image. This is a wonderful example of a simple idea that seems obvious after it has been said, that could have been said several millennia ago, but apparently wasn’t. Both the name (the sound image) and the thing (the concept) are complicated things that are conflated into surface images that our minds can work with.