Language

A human language is a system of remarkable complexity, fo come to know a human'language would be an extraordinary intellectual achievement for a creature not specifically designed to accomplish this task. Chomsky (1975: 4)





PRELIMINARY REMARKS

Language (from Latin lingua "tongue") is truly a wondrous endowment. Without its development in the human species, culture as we know it would have been inconceivable. The knowledge preserved in books, and to which anyone can have access if one knows trie appropriate verbal codes, constitutes the intellectual scaffold sustaining social and technological growth. It is no exaggeration to say that if somehow all the books in the world were to be destroyed overnight, human beings would have to start all over re-coding knowledge linguistically. Writers, scientists, educators, law-makers, etc. would have to come together to literally "rewrite" knowledge. In oral cultures, too, language is (he primary means through which traditions, skills, and knowledge are codified and passed on to subsequent generations. People the world over are told in words how and what things are.

Language has always been felt to constitute the capacity that, more than any other, sets humankind apart from all other species. There is a deeply felt conviction within us that if we were ever able to solve the enigma of how language originated in our species, then we would possess a vital clue to the mystery of life itself. The Bible starts off, as a matter of fact, with "In the beginning was the Word," in acknowledgment of this deeply-entrenched belief. Throughout the centuries, the debate has revolved around whether the Word was a gift from a divine source or a unique accomplishment of the human mind. In ancient Greece, actually, language and mind were considered indistinguishable. Indeed, the Greek term for "speech"—logos—designated not only articulate discourse but also the rational faculty of mind. For the Greeks, it was logos that transformed the brute human animal into a reflective thinker.

Language is essentially a representational system made up of words (or, more accurately, morphemes). But what is a word! Take, for instance, green. First, a word must be a legitimate verbal signifier structurally. And, indeed, green qualifies as a signifier because it is made up of legitimate English phonemes, joined in an appropriate fashion (i.e. according to English syllable structure). The signifier den, on the other hand, would not be an acceptable signifier because it contains a phoneme, represented by the alphabet character n, that does not exist in English. Hence, it would violate paradigmatic structure. Nor would gpeen be a permissible signifier, even though each of its sounds is an acceptable phoneme, because it would violate syntagmatic syllable structure (the sequence gp does not occur in English to start a syllable). Now, green, being a legitimate signifier and having been assigned a particular function in the signifying order, will entail a meaning range that involves denotative, connotative, and annotative dimensions. As a qualisign (chapter 3, §3.3) it denotes, of course, a specific gradation on the light spectrum; its extensional connotations encompass concepts such as envy ("She's green with envy"), hope ("The grass is always greener on the other side"), youthfulness ("He's at the green age of eighteen"), etc. Annotatively, green elicits various reactions in its users, within a specific range of meanings: e.g. some people love the color, others find it bland. But language is not just a collection of words with their meanings. It also entails knowing how to join words into sentences and discourses.

Our trip through the cultural landscape has reached a very important site with this chapter—the one inhabited by Homo loquens, the speaking animal and the closest ancestor of Homo culturalis. Studying the properties of language formally is the task of the science of linguistics (chapter 2, §2.5). The focus of the cultural semiotician, on the other hand, is on the relation of the verbal code to the signifying order. As was the case in the study of bodily semiosis (chapter 4), the focus of semiotic research is on the main signifying properties of language and on how language mediates and regulates thought and social interaction.


Source: Analyzing cultures: an introduction and handbook / Marcel Danesi and Paul Perron. Bloomington : Indiana University Press, c1999.