Yesterday I caught a glimpse of Annie Robinson testing the nation’s knowledge of English, and today came across this blog about the death of language (make sure to follow the links it makes). Is language being killed off by email, blogs and SMS? Should we declare war on language-terrorism, to reclaim it, to restore it to a primordial purity? Read the rest »
Ferdinand de Saussure is, and rightly so, considered the father of modern linguistics. One of the principal contributions of de Saussure to our understanding of language is his observation that linguistic signs are arbitrary, i.e., there is no necessary connection between the signified concept and the sign. The magnitude of de Saussure’s contribution is not so much in this observation, but rather in his elaboration of the implications of that arbitrariness. Read the rest »
[T]he music of the flute and of the lyre in most of their forms, are all in their general conception modes of imitation. … There is another art which imitates by means of language alone … The poet being an imitator, like a painter or any other artist, must of necessity imitate one of three objects: things as they were or are, things as they are said or thought to be, or things as they ought to be. [Aristotle, Poetics, Ch. i & xxv] Read the rest »
“We are moving toward a dictatorship of relativism.”
Joseph Ratzinger, 18 April 2005
I might not be a great fan the conservative (some prefer to call it reactionary) politics characterising the present Vatican administration, but Ratzinger’s phrase ‘dictatorship of relativism’ strikes chord with me. Relativism is one of the features of post-modernity, or at least one of the things that most people who have some notion of what post-modernity means associate with it, and it is one of its most liberating and troublesome aspects at the same time. Read the rest »