Text and Sign

Part One

Hartmut Haberland

(2)

Speech and writing

Language, pictures and music

Speech and writing

Leonard Bloomfield (1887-1949)

”Writing is not language, but merely a way of recording language by means of visible marks” (1933)

The Stoic philosophers (C3 BC) still thought that the sign in language is the ’voice’, i.e. for them language is spoken language.

Remember last weeks slide?

After the invention of the printing press, when printed books, magazines etc. became increasingly widespread, and especially in C19 when literacy bedame common in Europe and North America, the idea prevailed that written language is primary and spoken language is derived.

Bloomfield reacted against such a conception that was common in Europe and Northern America.

NB C19 = 19th Century C3 BC = 3rd Century BC

Arguments for ”Writing is not language”

Speaking is learnt before writing and reading.

There are many languages that have never been written.

What people speak are often dialects or local variants; language standardization which is often connected with writing comes later.

(In C20, the mass media – radio, then tv and now the internet – have become a secondary source of language standardization.)

There are between 6,000 and 7,000 spoken languages.

There are only just over 100 official languages of sovereign states (all written).

There is a Wikipedia in over 200 languages (all written).

For a list of all languages of the world, see www.ethnologue.org

Writing is especially important as a cultural technique: helping memory

Language and pictures

First a little digression: a page from the Voynich manuscript (see also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voynich_manuscript)It looks like language – line writing – but nobody has ever found out what it means. How do we know then that it not just a picture?

The following is a picture taken by Henri Cartier-Bresson in Athens in the early 1950s.

Is there anything in pictures that correponds to double articulation?

In other words: are there minimal meaningful units in a picture?

The answer is: no.

This is an important difference between language of pictures.

If we talk about ’the language of pictures’, this is a purely metaphorical use of ’language’.

Grandville

The following illustratiions are from Grandvilles ’Hundred proverbs’ (Cent proverbes, 1844).

Note how difficult it is see which proverb the picture is supposed to show if we don’t know!

A special problam is that pictures cannot express negations.

The linguistic sign can refer to what is the case, but also to what is not the case.

A picture can not refer to what is not the case.

Pictures cannot contain negation.

Hokusai’s Manga

The following picture from Hokusai’s Manga needs a lot of explanation before we can understand it.

Compare the comment on p. 13 of the compendium with the picture.

How much can we understand without the comments?

And how much with the comments?

Music and language

Smetana: Vltava

The Moldau (from Má vlast ’My Country’, 1874)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LlLPLO90fSk

The ’River’ theme

There are two important themes in the beginning of Smetana’s Moldau: the water theme and the river theme.

Do they consist of minor or minimal meaningful element?

The answer is no again, music has no double articulation.

Meaning in music

But if there is no double articulation in music, and if the minimal elements of a musical piece have no meaning at all, how does music convey meaning?

Värmlandssangen

Ack Värmeland du sköna (1822, from the play ”Värmlandsflickan”)

The melody of Ack Värmeland du sköna resembles the River theme from Smetana’s Moldau.

But here we have a text as well, viz.

Smetana’s Moldau and Fryxell’s text of the Värmland song have one common reference: National romanticism

When Stan Getz plays Dear old Stockholm at a concert in Stockholm, the audience

applauds: probably because it is proud to have recognized the melody (Ack

Värmeland du sköna)

Brecht/Eisler: Lied von der Moldau(Gisela Mey)

Das Lied von der Moldau

Brecht/Eisler

In Eisler’s melody we hear the water theme (accompaniment) and a variation of the river theme from Smetana’s Moldau simultaneously. The title refers to the very same river that flows through Prague. And the text refers to national resistance in Czechoslovakia during the German occupation (WW II) and the hope for better times.

Meanings in music are often reinforced through lyrics (i.e. words).

But as we can see in the last example (from a novel by Murakami), words and music can clash.