In class it was said that all language had no basis in reality or any connection to what it signified. I'm not sure why exactly that struck me as so wrong, but it did. I will concede that, yes, much of language is completely constructed by people for people and has no connection to what it signifies, such as store or car. However, a lot of language is based on the sounds that things make, such as with onomatopoeia. My example in class was the cat. I said a cat says "meow" anywhere in the world, and by saying meow, anyone in the world would understand my language and know I was at least referring to a cat. Thusly, the word "meow" has some connection to what it signifies.
Danish: miav
Dutch: miauw
English: meow
Finnish: miau
French: miaou
German: miau
Greek: miaou
Hebrew: miyau
Hungarian: miau
Italian: miau
Japanese: nyan nyan/nyaa nyaa
Russian: miyau
Spanish: miao
Swedish: mjan mjan
Turkish: miyav
Urdu: meow
http://www.boingboing.net/2006/05/16/animal-sounds-from-a.html
All but three of these languages phonetically spell out an onomatopoeia similar enough to "meow" for me to consider the correlation between the word and its source as more than made up. I'm sure many of these nations had contact with cats long before they had contact with a romance language. Meow is meow in almost any language, anywhere in the world.
I understand what De Sausurre was trying to say when he said that all language is arbitrary. However, to me it seems it's not. In imitating the cat, we define the cat, and therefor language is not solely a completely arbitrary construct.
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In Thursday’s class when the discussion was brought up about onomatopoeias, I was a little bit annoyed with the fact that the point was made that language had no connection to what it signified. I completely understand Scott’s frustration with this idea, because my whole life I have made a connection with the two: language and the object it is signifying. The issue of a cat making the sound “meow” maybe went a little too far, but I think what needs to be taken away from that is the word “meow” is spelled as closely to the sound a cat makes. Isn’t that what an onomatopoeia is anyway? As dictionary.com describes the word, they say it is “the formation of a word, as cuckoo or boom, [meow], by imitation of a sound made by or associated with its referent.”
The sound made by a cat is the same in any country on the planet, and as we all spell “meow” differently so that it makes sense in each language, the fact remains that the word and the symbol are still connected. I do not see how language is completely arbitrary. I can see and understand how most of (at least the English language) is arbitrary, and confusing, however when it comes to things such as onomatopoeias, it seems to me that Scott is right, and these sounds are not arbitrary. There are many problems and things that do not make much sense in the English language, but I think this is one thing that does make sense. To me there is a very clear correlation between a sound and the way it is spelled. I do not mean to be dragging on about this point, however I think that perhaps a little better clarification could be made in class this week…
http://artsweb.uwaterloo.ca/~hrvagt/Saussure/onomatopoeia.htm
Although some of Saussure’s opponents might argue that onomatopoeia, the term used to describe words whose pronunciations suggest their meaning like "meow" or "buzz," might negate his theory of arbitrariness because there is a direct sound link between word and meaning (signifier and signified), Saussure shoots this argument down briefly in his "Course in General Linguistics" (he devotes only a couple of paragraphs to the notion). Saussure writes that when you look at onomatopoeic words more closely, they are in fact simply arbitrary agreed-upon approximations of the sound they represent. For example, an English pig will say oink oink, but a French one, groin groin, a Norwegian one, nøff nøff, Croatian pigs say rok rok, Polish pigs say chrum chrum, Welsh pigs go soch soch, Chinese pigs say hulu hulu, and Hungarian pigs say röf röf, etc.
For Saussure, interjections work the same way (when one jams one’s finger in a door one says “Ouch!” but if this person was French this poor soul would say “Aie!”). Saussure, like most structuralists, is not concerned with the diachronic, or how communities fix their ideas for meaning on certain arbitrary terms over time, but is rather concerned with the synchronic, or the analysis of the structure of the language system at the present moment.
If you don’t find Saussure’s explanation of onomatopoeia to fit your experience you aren’t the only one. Take a look at Hugh Bredin’s article “Onomatopoeia as a Figure and a Linguistic Principle” for another take. He defines the term more closely and takes Saussure to task somewhat in the lived experience of sound articulation and meaning making:
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/new_literary _history/v027/27.3bredin.html
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