Evolution of Naming in European Сulture: Part. 3 The Word of the Modern World

#philosophy #historyofnames #europeanculture #derrida #modernworld #evolutionoflanguage

In our two previous sessions we followed the evolution of naming from ancient time through medieval European culture and now we reached the Modern Time, where we do not translate or adopt names anymore.

Now an atomic approach to names reigns supreme. A name is no longer part of the very language in which it occurs.

For example, if we take the same French name “Jean” and look on Russian and other Slavic languages, it will not be «Иван» («Ivan») anymore;

At its best it will nowadays be «Жан» (“Jean” with Kuril letters) or it might even be “Jean” (literally reflecting the French original in Latin letters so as not to miss the peculiarities of the French pronunciation, being the source of the “nominal phonetic atom” that the name now is reduced to be regarded as.

The point is that the emphasis has changed from meaning to phonetics, and, moreover, to the phonetics of the particular foreign language that produced or handed over the name in question.

By sacrificing not only the meaning of the name, but also the adaptation, the name does indeed become “just a name,” but that does not mean that it is no longer a name as such, but that it equates to a plain sound devoid of meaning.

When a name is carved out of its natural lingual environment, it seems that the meaning of the name is reduced to the identification of its bearer.

Thus, the name becomes objectified, it becomes a kind of a “thing-in-itself”, a linguistic atom, a semantically meaningless sound. This is the fate of the name in the Modern Time.

But that is not all. The atomism of our time requires that the language itself adapts itself to a name of foreign origin, so that the unfinished nuance of its special pronunciation is not lost.

What does this radical change in the state of affairs not indicate, if not that the integrality of meaning has been lost?

The language forms a picture of the world, in the network of which not only the picture casts its shadow on the world, as the later Wittgenstein believed, but in the weaving of which, as Derrida noticed:

“The spinning-out of language the discursive woof is rendered unrecognizable as a woof and takes the place of a warp; it takes the place of something that has not really preceded it. This texture is all the more inextricable in that it is wholly signifying”.

Видео Evolution of Naming in European Сulture: Part. 3 The Word of the Modern World канала The Metaphilosopher by Dr. Mattias Lindgren