9/24 After Class Post: Noah

9/24 After Class: Barthes & Saussure 

This week's reading from Barthes & Saussure proposed quite macro topics and ideas that help give insight into linguistics and communication. First, Saussure identifies a linguistic theory that helps give background to the much larger topic at hand, "(1) that it can be exchanged for a fixed quantity of a different thing, e.g. bread; and (2) that it can be compared with a similar value of the same system" (p. 8). To me, the meaning of this quote is to say that within a language and the world around us, we can assign value and meaning by comparing and addressing the intertextuality much beneath the surface level. This can be applied to many patterns and disciplines in life. This is an overwhelmingly wide and broad topic to digest off of the first read, but when truly analyzing the way in which words are processed through the brain, we find connections in language and cultures globally. To connect this to a personal real-life example, I would connect these theorist's thoughts to the language I am currently learning, German. I am in the second semester of my foreign language studies. Within German, there are many more rules and tenses than the North American English language. Word order is not even close to the same, and often the direct translations do not sound grammatically correct in English. The other day I was thinking to myself, how do non-English German speakers process thoughts? This is a question for primary German-speaking individuals. As an English speaker I know I process thought and the voice in my head is doing the thinking in both words and pictures. The process of thought is something that can be directly referred to Saussure's thoughts, "language has neither ideas nor sounds that existed before the linguistic system" (p. 10). As stated, an idea or sound must be heard and linked to another system before it makes sense. Otherwise, sounds and words that have never existed will never make sense. Things need equal values. Lastly, I will conclude with a very powerful quote from Saussure: 

¨Everything that has been said up to this point boils down to this: in language there are only differences. Even more important: a difference generally implies positive terms between which the difference is set up; but in language there are only differences without positive terms. Whether we take the signified or the signifier, language has neither ideas nor sounds that existed before the linguistic system, but only conceptual and phonic differences that have issued from the system. The idea or phonic substance that a sign contains is of less importance than the other signs that surround it¨ (Saussure, 1916, p. 10).