Quest for the Essence of Language

Since “in human speech, different sounds have different meaning,” Leonard Bloomfield's influential manual of 1933 concluded that “to study this coordination of certain sounds with certain meanings is to study language.” And one century earlier Wilhelm von Humboldt taught that “there is an apparent connection between sound and meaning which, however, only seldom lends itself to an exact elucidation, is often only glimpsed, and most usually remains obscure.” This connection and coordination have been an eternal crucial problem in the age-old science of language. How it was nonetheless temporarily forgotten by the linguists of the recent past may be illustrated by the repeated praises for the amazing novelty of Ferdinand de Saussure's interpretation of the sign, in particular the verbal sign, as an indissoluble unity of two constituents— signifiant and signifié— although this conception jointly with its terminology was taken over entirely from the twelve-hunded-year-old Stoic theory. This doctrine considered the sign ( sêmeion) as an entity constituted by the relation of the signifier ( sêmainon ) and the signified (sêmainomenon ). The former was defined as “perceptible” ( aisthêton ) and the latter as “intelligible” ( noêton) or, to use a more linguistic designation, “translatable.”