575. Can you make a language?

Language is a social product, based on communication and forming a basis for it. An individual cannot decide what the collectively accepted meaning of a word is. Yet individual language use can become publicly accepted, and then becomes part of shared language. How does this work?

In earlier items in this blog, I presented the distinction that Ferdinand de Saussure made between ‘langue’ and ‘parole’. Langue is the public meaning shared by all competent speakers, synchronic, at a given moment, that enables communication and provides order, with more or less clarity of meaning. But next to that, parole has a penumbra of personal meaning, based on experience along an individual life course, with associations from that experience that develop in time. In identifying an object as belonging to a class, one scours memory, which is a memory of particulars.

According to the ‘hermeneutic circle’, language develops from an interaction between langue and parole. A concept in langue, along the ‘paradigmatic axis’, bumps into others in discourse, along the ‘syntagmatic axis’ and becomes dis-ambiguated there. The general notion of ‘cat’ comes to denote a particular cat, and in doing so carries along memories attached to that cat: the way she clamours for food, rips up the settee, chases flies, and washes herself. All cats do that, but she has a particular style. Once, on the way to a vet, walking through a parking garage, she escaped and hid under a car. Confused by the combination of the unfamiliar environment and our familiar voices, she did not dare show herself. It took lengthy cajoling for her to finally appear and let herself be caught.

Individuals, often public figures, such as politicians, columnists, popular writers, artists, or song writers, can voice new notions or meanings of existing notions that catch on in public usage. They can arise from parole, to become part of langue, or, in terms of the hermeneutic circle, arise from the syntagmatic axis and become part of the paradigmatic axis. In this way, individuals can feed language without directly making it. This interaction yields change of language.