English · tongue
language
A taught system of standing-for. The word pipe does not resemble a pipe. That is the whole trick, and the whole danger.
Etymology
From Latin lingua, tongue. English kept the organ and the system. Saussure called the system langue, and any one speaking of it parole. Peirce would ask what kind of sign a word is: almost always a symbol, standing by convention.1
Semantic range
Speech, writing, caption, name. A child pointing. A lie. A poem. A diagnosis. The caption A pipe, which arrives after the looking and rearranges what was already there.
What the gloss loses
Language is not all of meaning. Smoke means fire without a dictionary. A dream image may not yet be a word. Collapsing every sign into language makes the world a text, and then every event a sentence.
Misuse
The universe is speaking. Sometimes a person is speaking. Sometimes a body left a trace. Sometimes you were taught. Ask which.
Is this a word, a likeness, or a trace?
Notes
- Charles S. Peirce, “What Is a Sign?,” in The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings, ed. the Peirce Edition Project, vol. 2, 4–10 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998).
