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Internally and Externally with Language

Posted by Nadine (She/Her) on

Ferdinand de Saussure defies language as a social construct, that becomes debatable in terms of how humans maneuver and use it. He brings forth the ability of single handedly isolating the use of language from our inner monologues. Language is “the principle of the arbitrary nature of sign”, indicating the numerous thresholds that hold onto the many different languages throughout the world. Saussure goes on to form his perspective on the usage of La Langue, a concept derived from the external world in which it is theoretically pulled from a particular language. 

With language, we are deemed to assimilate ourselves to a world where we watch, interpret and adopt. With Sassures demonstration of signifier and signified, he speaks on how humans interchangeably associate themselves with this development. With our thoughts, he associated that with the term ‘signifier’, ultimately meaning ‘words that sound like what they mean’. In this context, it exists, it’s available but not to the extent of originality. It’s visible, it’s open, it’s the symbol towards a universal system that has been interpreted and structured bound by rules. Yet when we look at signified, it’s the concepts in which it’s been suppressed to our individualities. It’s associated with this ‘freeness’ that we lack externally. Internally, it’s the infliction of what we originally perceive,  a graphic version of how we perceive language. The huge value of language within our minds, are altered to fit what we generally yearn to compose. With the concept of forming a relationship of thought and language, he highlights the correlation in terms of how compelling one is externally to internally. With language it’s a sound-image being translated into a fixed visual image. With that being said, the words we utter, it’s the components of that sound-image that portrays features within our ‘thought’, giving glimpses to what could be tricky to explain. 

Composing Saussure’s intake on language and the relationships he forms with thought and language, our minds subject itself to what it wants and needs to see. With language, we pitch together an image that can be altered in any way and regard it as a notion of expression or ideas. Language is very elevating in terms of how it’s used and with Saussure, it’s the abstraction of language that we take in and add our interpretations of it, whether in mind or not. It’s the collaboration of anything that relates to language into a visual form permitting grammar to speak for the language we adopt.



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