Introduction to Dialectics

Une langue est un moment particulier, sur un territoire particulier, de l’évolution du langage humain.

-- Pierre Guiraud, L’Etymologie (1964)

This ponderous epigram is difficult to translate into English, since we lack a distinction equivalent to langue/langage (or for that matter to the Saussurian langue/parole -- plain “speech” won’t suffice, because there is also le parler).   Speaking somewhat archaically, we might say:  Each tongue is but the instantiation in time and space of the evolution of human language.   Or, in Chomsky-speak, and with the vague term language now switching rhetorically to the other pan of the balance:  Each (particular, and almost epiphenomenal) language instantiates the (innate, invariable) universal language faculty.

It sounds rather grander in French.

Anyhow -- your appetite for dialectics is doubtless whetted by such grand Gallic apophthegmatic legerdemain (or legerdelangue, as it were).  And as a service to our readers, the World of Dr Justice here offers some comparable nifties of our own invention, so that, taking instruction from these, You Too can be a dialectician, and fashion fashionable quotables in your own home.

=>  A coffee-cup is just the antichiral doppelgänger of its own mirror image

=> The soupstain on your necktie is simply a concrete hypostasis of the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

=> A chamberpot is but a momentary stadial synthesis of the dialectical self-development of the historical world-spirit of Indoor Plumbing.

~

Now here is another bold Gallic sally, of which, inexplicably, I am rather more fond:  perhaps because filtered through the sense and sensibility of our favorite NeoThomist:

Ce « petit cartésien », Géraud de Cordemoy, exposa ses vues … dans un écrit  dont l’importance n’a pas échappé à Noam Chomsky, et qui, peut-être grâce à l’influence de ce qu’en avait dit cet éminent linguiste, vient d’être réédité. …

[L’arbitraire du signe] est  pour Cordemoy  un sujet de vive satisfaction, car l’absence totale de ressemblance  entre les signes et leurs significations  lui prouve  que des choses aussi dissemblables  que le corps et l’âme  peuvent être pourtant unies.

-- Etienne Gilson, Linguistique et philosophie (1969), p. 75-6

*

Si cela vous parle,

savourez la série noire

en argot authentique d’Amérique :

http://www.linguasacrapublishing.com/justiceexcerptdivorce.html

*