Abstract
It would be a commonplace to say that language is the most important invention of man. In fact, it is more than that, because man and language are parallel developments. It is consequently of no use arguing about the priority of one or the other. If we say that primitive man invented language or that the invention of language made some intelligent primate into man, we say the same thing. Man is a talking animal; no other animal talks. It will be clear, I suppose, from later chapters that the so called languages of some animals (bees, etc.) are not languages in the sense in which this concept is taken in structural linguistics (cf. particularly Chap. XI). So we could more suitably say that the making of man and the making of language are identical. Homo sapiens is homo loquens.
“... a totality does not consist of things but of relationships” (Hjelmslev, Prolegomena to a Theory of Language, 2nd ed., p. 23).
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It will be pointed out later that, contradictory though it may seem in certain respects, a structural approach to the linguistic expression must be supposed to have directed early comparative method and determined the Neogrammarian conception of sound laws.
As for the terminological and conceptual difference established here between opposition and distinction, see also Chap. III.
It is on the other hand a matter of fact that the comparative method — which was based on the identification of expression elements (just called “letters”, later, and already in the second edition of Grimm’s “Deutsche Grammatik”, mentioned as “sounds”) on the basis of identical function, e. g. Latin p in piscis, pater, pecu equals Germanic f in Engl. fish, father,Germ. Vieh — implied a functional point of view in the sense that functional identity was supposed to remain unaltered independently of substance and of change of substance. The regular sound correspondences alone, not any kind of physical sound ressemblance, were proofs of genetic relationship. An often quoted, striking example from Indo-European comparative linguistics is Armenian erku = Latin duo etc., two forms which can be identified, phoneme by phoneme, according to well established laws of correspondence, though they have no substantial (phonetic) ressemblance whatsoever. E. Buysserrs has tried to explain Saussure’s structural and functional approach by his historical comparative and Neogrammarian background. L. Hjelmslev has in a similar way pointed out the part played by the same formal, “structural” approach in Rasmus Rase’s thinking.
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© 1963 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Malmberg, B. (1963). Introduction. In: Structural Linguistics and Human Communication. Kommunikation und Kybernetik in Einzeldarstellungen, vol 2. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-13066-7_1
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