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“Evolution is inevitable: there is no known example of a language immune from it. After a certain time, changes can always be seen to have taken place. This principle must even apply to artificial languages. Anyone who thinks he can construct a language not subject to change, which posterity must accept as it is, would be like a hen hatching a duck’s egg”. — Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics Introduction Among the many curious inventions described in Gulliver's Travels , few are more memorable than the linguistic reforms proposed at the Academy of Lagado. Gulliver visits a school of languages where three professors are engaged in a serious discussion about improving communication. Their solution is radical. Since words are merely names for things, why not abolish words altogether and communicate by carrying the objects themselves? The proposal has one obvious drawback. As Swift explains, a person engaged in extensive affairs would be obliged to carry a ...

The Great Language Reform, lithography. AI image "We next went to the school of languages, where three professors sat in consultation upon improving that of their own country." — Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels Introduction Imagine attending a scholarly conference where every participant arrives carrying sacks, baskets, tools, household objects, and perhaps a wheelbarrow or two. Instead of speaking, the scholars communicate by displaying physical objects. A discussion about agriculture requires seeds and farming tools. A debate on government demands maps, coins, and legal documents. A geologist presenting a lecture on the Earth’s formation must somehow transport a vast collection of rocks, minerals, and fossils that stand in for epochs and geological strata. The more learned the speaker, the heavier the burden. This is not a scene from a surrealist novel. It is one of the linguistic reforms proposed at the Academy of Lagado in Jonathan Swift's Gulliver...

The Machine of Lagado, lithography. AI image “Methinks I hear some objector, demanding with an air of pleasantry and ridicule: ‘Is there no speaking then without all this trouble? Do we not talk every one of us, as well unlearned as learned; as well poor peasants, as profound philosophers?’” — George Berkeley, Alciphron, or The Minute Philosopher Introduction In the third part of Gulliver's Travels (1726), Jonathan Swift describes one of the strangest inventions in literary history. At the Academy of Lagado, Gulliver encounters a gigantic apparatus composed of wooden frames covered with words. Students turn handles, rearranging verbal combinations at random. The machine's inventor proudly claims that, with sufficient effort, anyone could produce books on philosophy, law, science, and politics without the inconvenience of study. The episode was intended as satire. Yet nearly three centuries later, readers find themselves in an unusual position. Machines now translate doc...

Aber wie ist denn jene andre »düstre Sache«, das Bewusstsein der Schuld, das ganze »schlechte Gewissen« auf die Welt gekommen? Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality (II §4) Thesis This article argues that Nietzsche’s genealogy of guilt in On the Genealogy of Morality depends upon a distinctly nineteenth-century philological assumption: that the history of a word can illuminate the history of a concept. By tracing the moral notion of Schuld (guilt) back to Schulden (debts), Nietzsche reconstructs the emergence of conscience from economic and juridical relations. From a Saussurean perspective, however, this procedure is methodologically problematic. Meaning does not survive within words as a historical residue but emerges from differential relations within a synchronic linguistic system. Through a dialogue with Saussure, and subsequently with Lacan and Derrida, this article examines the tension between genealogical explanation and structural theories of signification. The issue...