Ferdinand de Saussure course in General Linguistics gave me a whole new view point on language. It is something that we use in our everyday life to communicate with one another, but according to Saussure there is much more to language. One concept that I found the most interesting was the process between psychological and physiological. It requires at least two or more people and the whole process starts with “A given concept unlocks a corresponding sound-image in the brain; this purely psychological phenomenon is followed in turn by a physiological process: the brain transmits an impulse corresponding to the image to the organs used in producing sounds (Saussure).” What I learned from this process is that language is much more than just words that come out our mouths but that it is also just as much a physical process as it is a mental one. I can see this relating to design in the way that when we come up with ideas we are doing the psychological part. When we communicate the idea we do it through a design which is the physical part.
“Language is not a function of the speaker it is a product that is passively assimilated by the individual (Saussure).” This specific quote stood out to me the most while I was reading. It made me think about how each individual person communicates based on their own opinions. For example, Someone’s reaction to a specific painting might be different than someone who knows more about it. How a person responds in language is possibly just not based on what they are responding to but how. This makes me wonder how this fits into design. Since it is called communication design, language does play a big role since it relates to how an individual will respond to a specific design based on the information shown. As Saussure states, “ It is the social side of speech, outside the individual who can never create nor modify it by himself it exists only by virtue of a sort of contract signed by the members of a community.” The social side of language plays a role in communication because most of it is based on what we socially know, especially in one country a specific word might mean something else in a different country.
Reading Linguistics was definitely confusing at first, especially when it came to describing how language works. After reading some sections a few times I think I came to understanding it a little more especially when the topic of words came up. Words aren’t exactly just a meaning or a name, but a reference to two terms. As Saussure describes it, “The linguistic sign unites, not a thing and a name, but a concept and a sound-image.” In the reading the example used with arbor and the image of the tree reminded me of last week’s reading, because it brought me back to the idea of symbols and how a symbol can sometimes be an exact representation of the meaning just like how arbor means tree.
