Texte et Prononciation à la Saussure
So in addition to all of that, I've gotten some good reading time in with Saussure. Much yayness.
He makes some interesting points about the relationship between spoken and written language. He seems to give spoken language primacy over written language, though by precisely what virtue I don't quite understand. He seems to be suggesting that writing is secondary because it is developed from spoken language and can't exist in the absence of that spoken language. Something twinges me weird about that stance, though I can't identify if it's entirely off-base or just an oversimplification. Regardless, I can't deny that function of written language has changed drastically with the introduction of the Internet, and I wonder what linguistic studies (certainly there must be some) have been done on the matter.
On a related tangent, Saussure makes some comments about French pronunciation that I found interesting. Saussure's text actually consists of editorially-accumulated notes that his students took from his lectures at The University of Geneva in the early 1900s. Illustrative examples are drawn mostly from French. In describing how written language generally changes more slowly than spoken language, the text says: Probably such misunderstandings will become more and more frequent. More and more dead letters will be resuscitated in pronunciation. In Paris, one already hears sept femmes ('seven women') with the t pronounced. Darmesteter forsees the day when even the two final letters of vingt ('twenty') will be pronounced: a genuine orthographic monstrosity.
This strikes me as interesting because I was taught to pronounce sept femmes as /sɛt fɛm/ or something like it -- with the t, just as Saussure's Parisians would have. So I'm led to wonder just how Saussure himself would have pronounced sept femmes a hundred years ago if the pronunciation that I've learned was in his times a Parisian oddity....
(LJ Spellchecker Genius of the Day: Darmesteter -> Doomster)
He makes some interesting points about the relationship between spoken and written language. He seems to give spoken language primacy over written language, though by precisely what virtue I don't quite understand. He seems to be suggesting that writing is secondary because it is developed from spoken language and can't exist in the absence of that spoken language. Something twinges me weird about that stance, though I can't identify if it's entirely off-base or just an oversimplification. Regardless, I can't deny that function of written language has changed drastically with the introduction of the Internet, and I wonder what linguistic studies (certainly there must be some) have been done on the matter.
On a related tangent, Saussure makes some comments about French pronunciation that I found interesting. Saussure's text actually consists of editorially-accumulated notes that his students took from his lectures at The University of Geneva in the early 1900s. Illustrative examples are drawn mostly from French. In describing how written language generally changes more slowly than spoken language, the text says: Probably such misunderstandings will become more and more frequent. More and more dead letters will be resuscitated in pronunciation. In Paris, one already hears sept femmes ('seven women') with the t pronounced. Darmesteter forsees the day when even the two final letters of vingt ('twenty') will be pronounced: a genuine orthographic monstrosity.
This strikes me as interesting because I was taught to pronounce sept femmes as /sɛt fɛm/ or something like it -- with the t, just as Saussure's Parisians would have. So I'm led to wonder just how Saussure himself would have pronounced sept femmes a hundred years ago if the pronunciation that I've learned was in his times a Parisian oddity....
(LJ Spellchecker Genius of the Day: Darmesteter -> Doomster)