SEMIOTICS & GRIMMS FAIRY TALES
Denotation, Connotation and Myth
Whilst Saussure may be hailed as a founder of semiotics, semiotics has become increasingly less Saussurean. Teresa de Lauretis describes the movement away from structuralist semiotics which began in the 1970s: De Lauretis' account of subjectivity as a product of "being subject/ed to semiosis" (i.e., making meanings and being made by them) helps to theoretically resolve and overcome the tension between the human action (agency) and structure. She makes use of Umberto Eco's reading of C.S. Peirce in order to establish her notion of semiotics of experience. She brings corporeality back to the discourse on the constitution of subjectivity which has been conceived mainly in the linguistic terms.
If you are searching for books on semiotics you could do worse than by starting off in the linguistics section. Linguistics is only one branch of this general science. The laws which semiology will discover will be laws applicable in linguistics, and linguistics will thus be assigned to a clearly defined place in the field of human knowledge.Thus wrote the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913), a founder not only of linguistics but also of what is now more usually referred to as semiotics (in his Course in General Linguistics, 1916).
It is difficult to disentangle European semiotics from structuralism in its origins; major structuralists include not only Saussure but also Claude Lévi-Strauss (b. 1908) in anthropology (who saw his subject as a branch of semiotics) and Jacques Lacan (1901-1981) in psychoanalysis. Structuralism is an analytical method which has been employed by many semioticians and which is based on Saussure's linguistic model. Structuralists seek to describe the overall organization of sign systems as 'languages' - as with Lévi-Strauss and myth, kinship rules and totemism, Lacan and the unconscious and Barthes and Greimas and the 'grammar' of narrative. They engage in a search for 'deep structures' underlying the 'surface features' of phenomena. However, contemporary social semiotics has moved beyond the structuralist concern with the internal relations of parts within a self-contained system, seeking to explore the use of signs in specific social situations. Modern semiotic theory is also sometimes allied with a Marxist approach which stresses the role of ideology. Whilst technological determinists emphasize that semiotic ecologies are influenced by the fundamental design features of different media, it is important to recognize the importance of socio-cultural and historical factors in shaping how different media are used and their (ever-shifting) status within particular cultural contexts. For instance, many contemporary cultural theorists have remarked on the growth of the importance of visual media compared with linguistic media in contemporary society and the associated shifts in the communicative functions of such media. Thinking in 'ecological' terms about the interaction of different semiotic structures and languages led the Russian cultural semiotician Yuri Lotman to coin the term 'semiosphere' to refer to 'the whole semiotic space of the culture in question' (Lotman 1990, 124-125).
The concept is related to ecologists' references to 'the biosphere' and perhaps to cultural theorists' references to the public and private spheres, but most reminiscent of Teilhard de Chardin's notion (dating back to 1949) of the 'noosphere' - the domain in which mind is exercised. Whilst Lotman referred to such semiospheres as governing the functioning of languages within cultures, John Hartley comments that 'there is more than one level at which one might identify a semiosphere - at the level of a single national or linguistic culture, for instance, or of a larger unity such as "the West", right up to "the species"'; we might similarly characterize the semiosphere of a particular historical period (Hartley 1996, 106). This conception of a semiosphere may make semioticians seem territorially imperialistic to their critics, but it offers a more unified and dynamic vision of semiosis than the study of a specific medium as if each existed in a vacuum. Most adults in Western cultures would know that a car can connote virility or freedom.
An Argot or a cant is the jargon or language of a group, often employed to exclude or mislead people outside the group. It may also be called a cryptolect, argot, pseudo-language, anti-language or secret language. Each term differs slightly in meaning; their use is inconsistent.
In the last decade or so, semiotics has undergone a shift of its theoretical gears: a shift away from the classification of sign systems - their basic units, their levels of structural organization - and towards the exploration of the modes of production of signs and meanings, the ways in which systems and codes are used, transformed or transgressed in social practice.
While formerly the emphasis was on studying sign systems (language, literature, cinema, architecture, music, etc.), conceived of as mechanisms that generate messages, what is now being examined is the work performed through them.
It is this work or activity which constitutes and/or transforms the codes, at the same time as it constitutes and transforms the individuals using the codes, performing the work; the individuals who are, therefore, the subjects of semiosis.
'Semiosis', a term borrowed from Charles Sanders Peirce, is expanded by Eco to designate the process by which a culture produces signs and/or attributes meaning to signs. In one of his many definitions of a sign, Peirce writes: I define a sign as anything which is so determined by something else, called its Object, and so determines an effect upon a person, which effect I call its interpretant, that the later is thereby mediately determined by the former.
The notion or definition of 'sign' then might be pertinent to the two main emphases of current, or poststructuralist, semiotic theory. One is a semiotics focused on the subjective aspects of signification where meaning is construed as a subject-effect (the subject being an effect of the signifier). The other the area of my focus is a semiotics concerned to stress the social aspect of signification, its practical, aesthetic, or ideological use in interpersonal communication; there, meaning is construed as semantic value produced through culturally shared codes. (de Lauretis 1984, 167)
Before launching on an exploration of this intriguing but demanding subject let us consider why I bother or why we should study semiotics? I agree with David Sless who remarked in 1986, 'semiotics is far too important an enterprise to be left to semioticians' .
Semiotics is important because it can explain that 'reality' is not necessarily something which has a purely objective existence, independent of human interpretation. It should teach us that our reality can be subjective especially when expressed through a system of 'signs' ie language both oral and written. Studying semiotics can assist us to become more aware of 'reality' as an abstracted construction by man for a dedicated purpose. It can help us to realize the difference between the real and the abstracted ordered reality. This information or meaning is not yet 'contained' in the world or in books, computers or audio-visual media.
Meaning is not 'transmitted' to us - we actively create it according to a complex interplay of codes or conventions of which we are normally unaware. Becoming aware of such codes is both inherently fascinating and intellectually empowering. We learn from semiotics that we live in a world of signs and we have no way of understanding anything except through signs and the codes into which they are organized. Through the study of semiotics we become aware that these signs and codes are normally transparent and disguise our task in 'reading' them. Living in a world of increasingly visual signs, we need to learn that even the most 'realistic' signs are not what they appear to be. By making more explicit the codes by which signs are interpreted we may perform the valuable semiotic function of 'denaturalizing' signs. In defining realities signs serve ideological functions. Deconstructing and contesting the realities of signs can reveal whose realities are privileged and whose are suppressed. The study of signs is the study of the construction and maintenance of reality. To decline such a study is to leave to others the control of the world of meanings which we inhabit.
Sir William Jones who knew 42 languages to various degrees and was an accomplished lawyer accidentally invented linguistics. Jones arrived in British India in 1783 to be a lawyer and quickly fell in love with the local culture, founding the Asiatic Society a year later. Sanskrit was the Indian equivalent to Latin (which he also spoke), so he had to learn it. In learning it, he discovered something interesting: Sanskrit was oddly similar to Classical Latin and Ancient Greek. Generally speaking, peoples of Europe had always noticed similarities between languages, but had assumed them to be a result of thousands of years of borrowing. To a degree, that was true, there was more to it than was thought and Jones prove it.
In 1786, he wrote the following passage that is considered to be what founded linguistics:
"The Sanskrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three, without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists; there is a similar reason, though not quite so forcible, for supposing that both the Gothic and the Celtic, though blended with a very different idiom, had the same origin with the Sanskrit; and the old Persian might be added to the same family."
Remarkably, he was correct in every one of those: today, Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Gothic, Celtic, and Persian - along with English, French, Russian, and related languages - are part of the Indo-European language family.
But the language change was still considered to be random, and there wasn’t a real scientific way to determine what was related to what.
Armenian was not a written language until about 300 A.D. so I think I need to be a bit indirect for a moment and take you to a recent example of how a new national identity can be formed superimposed on an oral tradition, let me take you to the Grimm’s Fairy Tales which has become one of the most famous books of all time.
The stories in this book were collected from around what would soon become Germany by the Brothers Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm. As such, they did not exist in written form. It was first published in German and quickly became the most famous and most-read work of new German literature, translated into over 160 different languages and dialects. It has also been called one of the founding works of Western culture. Jacob Grimm was a pioneer in linguistics, language families, but most relevant was his ear for sound changes and he is now famous in historical linguistics as the creator of Grimm’s law.
While Jacob did help with story-collecting, that job went mostly to Wilhelm. Jacob spent his time doing something else: he looked through lots of dictionaries in lots of languages.
He noticed a pattern. The words for “father” almost all start with a P or B (which are very similar sounds) - even English has “papa”! There are, however, four languages whose words start with an F. Interestingly, they all just happen to be spoken in northern and northwestern Europe.During and after the Napoleonic wars, a new kind of German nationalism bubbled up, united by a common language. This would lead to three things important here: the creation of Germany, the collecting of Grimm’s Fairy Tales, and a linguistic revolution. The Brothers Grimm did two things to contribute to this: the first, and most influential, was that they went around and collected German folk tales, myths, and legends. (To make something clear here: the Grimms didn’t write the stories, they just collected them.)
Starting to notice a pattern? Grimm did. He found that where other European - and some Indian - languages had a “p” sound, the very specific group of languages had an “f” sound. Same with “k” and “h”, respectively.
This led him to create Grimm’s law: certain sounds in other European languages would turn into other sounds in a certain language group:
Since this is a sound-change pattern that can be seen repeatedly in said language group, it’s fairly easy to see that they’re related. This group has a name now: it’s called the Germanic languages, and it includes German (of course), English, Dutch, Frisian, Low Saxon, Yiddish, Afrikaans, Scots, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Elfdalian, Faroese, and Icelandic.
We can also see that the sound changes all relate to words in other languages, so we can say with a good degree of certainty that the Germanic languages are related to most other European languages.
Due to other sound change patterns found in Sanskrit (eg. Latin pater, Sanskrit pitar), we found out that most of the major languages in India are related to most of the major languages in Europe, and we call the language family Indo-European. It includes the Germanic, Italic (languages related to Latin), Slavic (eg. Russian, Czech, Polish), Baltic (Lithuanian, Latvian), Celtic (eg. Irish, Welsh), Indic (eg. Hindi, Marathi), Iranian (eg. Pashto, Persian), Hellenic (Greek), Albanian, Hittite, and Armenian sub-families.
By reverse-engineering the sound changes, we are able to reconstruct Indo-European, despite having absolutely no written record of what it was like. This language is known as Proto-Indo-European, or PIE.
So the question is if there is a root or a proto-proto-Indo-European language? The simple answer seems to be yes there must be, yet it has been impossible for scholars to date to trace one for they seem to be looking for it in a written form and there is no written record of a root PIE language.
The general consensus is that yes there must have been, it must have existed but it has not yet been found.
My considered opinion on the subject is that to find this proto PIE language we must go beyond looking for it in its written form and look for it not in its alphabetic form but in its totally abstract rune like form, or better still in its syllabic form when the a priori system was first conceived and executed.
My research takes me to Sumer as the location and 2500 BCE as the time of the invention.
Having done just that I can say with certainty that I posit Hayaran/Armenian to be the root, or the proto-proto-Indo-European language.
Arabic and Hebrew are not related to any Indo-European language. We know this because they have no word-change patterns that relate to any IE languages. But they do have patterns that show that they relate to one another, as well as to Akkadian, Amharic, and Aramaic. Their patterns also show that they’re related to other African languages, such as Hausa and Somali, though not as closely. From this again we can deduce a family tree for this group of languages must have existed.
An Argot or a cant is the jargon or language of a group, often employed to exclude or mislead people outside the group. It may also be called a cryptolect, argot, pseudo-language, anti-language or secret language. Each term differs slightly in meaning; their use is inconsistent.
In the last decade or so, semiotics has undergone a shift of its theoretical gears: a shift away from the classification of sign systems - their basic units, their levels of structural organization - and towards the exploration of the modes of production of signs and meanings, the ways in which systems and codes are used, transformed or transgressed in social practice.
While formerly the emphasis was on studying sign systems (language, literature, cinema, architecture, music, etc.), conceived of as mechanisms that generate messages, what is now being examined is the work performed through them.
It is this work or activity which constitutes and/or transforms the codes, at the same time as it constitutes and transforms the individuals using the codes, performing the work; the individuals who are, therefore, the subjects of semiosis.
'Semiosis', a term borrowed from Charles Sanders Peirce, is expanded by Eco to designate the process by which a culture produces signs and/or attributes meaning to signs. In one of his many definitions of a sign, Peirce writes: I define a sign as anything which is so determined by something else, called its Object, and so determines an effect upon a person, which effect I call its interpretant, that the later is thereby mediately determined by the former.
The notion or definition of 'sign' then might be pertinent to the two main emphases of current, or poststructuralist, semiotic theory. One is a semiotics focused on the subjective aspects of signification where meaning is construed as a subject-effect (the subject being an effect of the signifier). The other the area of my focus is a semiotics concerned to stress the social aspect of signification, its practical, aesthetic, or ideological use in interpersonal communication; there, meaning is construed as semantic value produced through culturally shared codes. (de Lauretis 1984, 167)
Before launching on an exploration of this intriguing but demanding subject let us consider why I bother or why we should study semiotics? I agree with David Sless who remarked in 1986, 'semiotics is far too important an enterprise to be left to semioticians' .
Semiotics is important because it can explain that 'reality' is not necessarily something which has a purely objective existence, independent of human interpretation. It should teach us that our reality can be subjective especially when expressed through a system of 'signs' ie language both oral and written. Studying semiotics can assist us to become more aware of 'reality' as an abstracted construction by man for a dedicated purpose. It can help us to realize the difference between the real and the abstracted ordered reality. This information or meaning is not yet 'contained' in the world or in books, computers or audio-visual media.
Meaning is not 'transmitted' to us - we actively create it according to a complex interplay of codes or conventions of which we are normally unaware. Becoming aware of such codes is both inherently fascinating and intellectually empowering. We learn from semiotics that we live in a world of signs and we have no way of understanding anything except through signs and the codes into which they are organized. Through the study of semiotics we become aware that these signs and codes are normally transparent and disguise our task in 'reading' them. Living in a world of increasingly visual signs, we need to learn that even the most 'realistic' signs are not what they appear to be. By making more explicit the codes by which signs are interpreted we may perform the valuable semiotic function of 'denaturalizing' signs. In defining realities signs serve ideological functions. Deconstructing and contesting the realities of signs can reveal whose realities are privileged and whose are suppressed. The study of signs is the study of the construction and maintenance of reality. To decline such a study is to leave to others the control of the world of meanings which we inhabit.
Sir William Jones who knew 42 languages to various degrees and was an accomplished lawyer accidentally invented linguistics. Jones arrived in British India in 1783 to be a lawyer and quickly fell in love with the local culture, founding the Asiatic Society a year later. Sanskrit was the Indian equivalent to Latin (which he also spoke), so he had to learn it. In learning it, he discovered something interesting: Sanskrit was oddly similar to Classical Latin and Ancient Greek. Generally speaking, peoples of Europe had always noticed similarities between languages, but had assumed them to be a result of thousands of years of borrowing. To a degree, that was true, there was more to it than was thought and Jones prove it.
In 1786, he wrote the following passage that is considered to be what founded linguistics:
"The Sanskrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three, without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists; there is a similar reason, though not quite so forcible, for supposing that both the Gothic and the Celtic, though blended with a very different idiom, had the same origin with the Sanskrit; and the old Persian might be added to the same family."
Remarkably, he was correct in every one of those: today, Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Gothic, Celtic, and Persian - along with English, French, Russian, and related languages - are part of the Indo-European language family.
But the language change was still considered to be random, and there wasn’t a real scientific way to determine what was related to what.
Armenian was not a written language until about 300 A.D. so I think I need to be a bit indirect for a moment and take you to a recent example of how a new national identity can be formed superimposed on an oral tradition, let me take you to the Grimm’s Fairy Tales which has become one of the most famous books of all time.
The stories in this book were collected from around what would soon become Germany by the Brothers Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm. As such, they did not exist in written form. It was first published in German and quickly became the most famous and most-read work of new German literature, translated into over 160 different languages and dialects. It has also been called one of the founding works of Western culture. Jacob Grimm was a pioneer in linguistics, language families, but most relevant was his ear for sound changes and he is now famous in historical linguistics as the creator of Grimm’s law.
While Jacob did help with story-collecting, that job went mostly to Wilhelm. Jacob spent his time doing something else: he looked through lots of dictionaries in lots of languages.
He noticed a pattern. The words for “father” almost all start with a P or B (which are very similar sounds) - even English has “papa”! There are, however, four languages whose words start with an F. Interestingly, they all just happen to be spoken in northern and northwestern Europe.During and after the Napoleonic wars, a new kind of German nationalism bubbled up, united by a common language. This would lead to three things important here: the creation of Germany, the collecting of Grimm’s Fairy Tales, and a linguistic revolution. The Brothers Grimm did two things to contribute to this: the first, and most influential, was that they went around and collected German folk tales, myths, and legends. (To make something clear here: the Grimms didn’t write the stories, they just collected them.)
Starting to notice a pattern? Grimm did. He found that where other European - and some Indian - languages had a “p” sound, the very specific group of languages had an “f” sound. Same with “k” and “h”, respectively.
This led him to create Grimm’s law: certain sounds in other European languages would turn into other sounds in a certain language group:
Since this is a sound-change pattern that can be seen repeatedly in said language group, it’s fairly easy to see that they’re related. This group has a name now: it’s called the Germanic languages, and it includes German (of course), English, Dutch, Frisian, Low Saxon, Yiddish, Afrikaans, Scots, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Elfdalian, Faroese, and Icelandic.
We can also see that the sound changes all relate to words in other languages, so we can say with a good degree of certainty that the Germanic languages are related to most other European languages.
Due to other sound change patterns found in Sanskrit (eg. Latin pater, Sanskrit pitar), we found out that most of the major languages in India are related to most of the major languages in Europe, and we call the language family Indo-European. It includes the Germanic, Italic (languages related to Latin), Slavic (eg. Russian, Czech, Polish), Baltic (Lithuanian, Latvian), Celtic (eg. Irish, Welsh), Indic (eg. Hindi, Marathi), Iranian (eg. Pashto, Persian), Hellenic (Greek), Albanian, Hittite, and Armenian sub-families.
By reverse-engineering the sound changes, we are able to reconstruct Indo-European, despite having absolutely no written record of what it was like. This language is known as Proto-Indo-European, or PIE.
So the question is if there is a root or a proto-proto-Indo-European language? The simple answer seems to be yes there must be, yet it has been impossible for scholars to date to trace one for they seem to be looking for it in a written form and there is no written record of a root PIE language.
The general consensus is that yes there must have been, it must have existed but it has not yet been found.
My considered opinion on the subject is that to find this proto PIE language we must go beyond looking for it in its written form and look for it not in its alphabetic form but in its totally abstract rune like form, or better still in its syllabic form when the a priori system was first conceived and executed.
My research takes me to Sumer as the location and 2500 BCE as the time of the invention.
Having done just that I can say with certainty that I posit Hayaran/Armenian to be the root, or the proto-proto-Indo-European language.
Arabic and Hebrew are not related to any Indo-European language. We know this because they have no word-change patterns that relate to any IE languages. But they do have patterns that show that they relate to one another, as well as to Akkadian, Amharic, and Aramaic. Their patterns also show that they’re related to other African languages, such as Hausa and Somali, though not as closely. From this again we can deduce a family tree for this group of languages must have existed.
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