9/24 De Saussure and Phonetics

 After sitting through our class, I now have a better grasp of structuralism within semiotics. I honestly was quite confused when I first read through the reading. The quote “Without language, thought is a vague, uncharted nebula” from Saussure I feel like encompasses my whole thoughts on the readings. I took a speech class last fall, and though we focused on the sounds of each word, we had some discussion about language and why we assign certain words to certain objects. In particular, we talked about the cultural differences among English speakers and how there are different terms for the same symbol. For example, the term “soda” is used heavily within the south and the western United States. However, in the northeast, the term” pop” is used to describe the same symbol. Why is there that difference? This question dives into what de Saussure and the other structuralist were talking about in reference to semiotics.

(picture of common phonetic symbols)

The most eye-opening part of that speech class was when my teacher decided to show us the universality of phonetics. One of my classmates asked my professor if phonetics can be used for other languages. In response, my professor took a french phrase and wrote it in phonetics. Thus, if I need to use phonetics to learn how to speak another language, I could. To me, this relates to what de Saussure was saying. Though all languages use different words to describe things (which we have assigned to them), but we use universal sounds to convey these objects. I could take any phrase in another language and learn how to say it through phonetics. I won’t understand the meaning behind the phrase itself, but I  can learn how to say the words that represent the symbols in the phrase. Thus, my phonetics class discussed some of these important issues.