ANDRE' MARTINET/7 ARMONIA E' ECONOMIA

Conversazione con André Martinet
André Martinet/1 Communication is our basic relevancy
André Martinet/2 Language articulates what we feel into a succession of items
André Martinet/3 Pregiudizi linguistici
André Martinet/4 Cosa c'è dietro le parole
André Martinet/5 La lingua non è simmetrica 
André Martinet/6 A volte le parole non bastano

Nikolaj Sergeevič Trubeckoj
(Mosca, 15 aprile 1890 – Vienna, 25 giugno 1938)

How did you start studying linguistics and which of your professors influenced you the most?
I started as a child. I discovered phonology by myself, before prague, at the age of six. I remember things very well because actually my parents were teachers. They were school teachers from one place to another, therefore I can always locate my experience, at this point, between that age and that age. And thus I know that between the age of five and seven, around seven let's say, I solved a number of problems of French phonology, not knowing it and, of course, I didn't mention it to anybody: people would have thought I was crazy, because in those days, that a kid, seven years old, could ask such questions must have sounded ridiculous. Actually my mother would have understood, because she was pretty good at it, but I didn't know that, so I didn't mention it to anybody.
That's the way I started. Therefore, when later on I read the Prague things I said: "That's fine: they give me tools, they give me the principle of relevancy", which is just the principle with which I myself operated, but I had no names for it. I was happy to have a name. i could say: now, this is the way I operated when I was a child. My problem all my life has been the fact that I had been thinking about things before people gave me the words for it. i could not at the age of seven invent a word for phonology, but I could raise problems.
My first problem was: do I pronounce the same thing when I say [gaɲe] and [panje]? My answer was: I don't, "I" don't, but maybe other people confuse, and that's true. This is a sounding problem and it's being eliminated in French at the present and not the way I thought it would be, namely the way people did in Savoy, my native province: by confusing the [n] in favor of the [ɲ] sound([paɲe] just like [gaɲe]), but the reverse: they are saying [ganie] just like [panie], which is interesting, because the number of cases in which you have in French the succession /n/, /i/, is much more frequent than the situation when you have /g/, /n/, therefore it's economy. Economy is extended in that way. This is just a demonstration of the way I approached the problem.
And, of course, later on, when I read the Prague things, I said: "well, beautiful, they gave me the tools". So I established contacts with them and that's the way I worked. But I never was exactly in agreement with anybody specifically. I was very close to Trubeckoj. He was the closest to me, but at the same time Trubeckoj was, what I'm not, a mystical man, you see... Very strange. I knew that because I talked with his son-in-law: he told me he was a mystical man. And he operated with the notion of harmony, vowel-harmony, presenting a nice system, that would be the proof of the harmony. But to me harmony doesn't mean anything. It's economy.
You see, a system like that is what? It is never regular, it is just economical, because it takes advantage of all the combinations of different possibilities. That's the reason for which there would be an orientation in language to use it, because it is economical to re-use the system, but not beyond what is economical. In other words, you can observe that some combinations, some theoretically possible combinations, are no good, because they are too difficult to make or to maintain.

ANDRE' MARTINET/6 A VOLTE LE PAROLE NON BASTANO

Conversazione con André Martinet
André Martinet/1 Communication is our basic relevancy
André Martinet/2 Language articulates what we feel into a succession of items
André Martinet/3 Pregiudizi linguistici
André Martinet/4 Cosa c'è dietro le parole
André Martinet/5 La lingua non è simmetrica

From an interdisciplinary point of view, what is, in your opinion the role of linguistics in the analysis of human communication?
After all, we start studying languages, but of course we have to remember that languages are not the only systems. There are other systems than languages for communication. It does't say communication but that's what it means. And, why not start from that? So, fine, but as a matter of fact, people started studying languages before they could imagine or think of other systems and usually it's in relationship with linguistics, with languages, that they invent other systems. If, for example, on a ship people want to communicate with another ship, they would use language, but they can't. So they have to find a way out with signals and flags, etc. There you have your semiotics.

QUESTIONI DI CUORE, MA NON SOLO

L'Oxford English Dictionary lo considera una voce e gli attribuisce il significato di to heart. Un disegno dunque, quello del cuore, entra a far parte a tutti gli effetti del dizionario e presumibilmente è il primo di una serie piuttosto lunga.
Dovremo rivedere la nostra cultura della catalogazione della lingua? E, ancora di più, come è cambiato il rapporto tra segno e significato?
Ne parla qui Francesca Chiusaroli, nellla sezione "Che carattere" del blog www.scritturebrevi.it .
Vi consiglio vivamente la lettura.

ANDRE' MARTINET/5 LA LINGUA NON E' SIMMETRICA

Conversazione con André Martinet
André Martinet/1 Communication is our basic relevancy
André Martinet/2 Language articulates what we feel into a succession of items
André Martinet/3 Pregiudizi linguistici
André Martinet/4 Cosa c'è dietro le parole

As it seems that there is a general consensus on the importance of the study of phonology in the Nineteenth Century and, conversely, as it is not the same for the study of syntax, which has a very complex and fragmentary background, I would like to know why you chose the term syntax for that part of your study dedicated to the analysis of the monemes?
No, first of all, you seem to hint upon the problem of the connection betwwen the phonology side of the picture and the rest of the picture.
Now, I would say the first thing we have to remember is that in contraddistinction to practically all linguists and in any case in contraddistinction to the hjelmslevians, I don't operate with isomorfic systems. I don't think that whatever is good for the signifiant is good for the signifié (they oppose signifiant-signifié in the saussurian way).
I have a sign and my sign has signifiant-signifié and my point of view is that they shouldn't be put on the same level, because as soon as the unit is a significant unit, the meaning of that unit is decisive, not the form. While those people who operate with signifiant-signifié think that phonology covers the signifiant and, well, the rest should be covered by I don't know what name, but that doesn't make any difference. You know, with the double articulation you start from the sentence, that is, a text or a segment of a text, in which the relationships have a status. They have sense within this status.
So, that's the first part of it and then the second part of the double articulation is the second articulation, which is very different, which has no bearing upon meaning at all. I see no relationship between the two sides, not the way the hjelmslevians do, because they want to find on the one side what they find on the other side. I don't care about that. I don't care about presenting something which is not symmetrical. Nature is not symmetrical and language is not symmetrical, because if you have the double articulation, if you know very well that on the one hand you have a lot of units, it is necessary to have a lot of distinct significant units, because you have to describe the world, and on the other hand you have a minimal number of distinctive units because those are the tools, plain tools with no function, no value, except in reference to expressing the world.
You see, we should really try to understand what we are operating with. What strikes me is... take for example something I mentioned yesterday*: my objection to Hjelmslev is that, because in a language like latin and most European languages, substantives can be used in the singular or as a plural, and, at the same time, used in a certain case, he concluded that there was a natural relationship between case and number, which is ridiculous. It just happens to coincide there.
And this, of course, would not strike people if, instead of endings, you had had prepositions, because the prepositions would be there. And if the number had been indicated by means of numbers, you would again have something totally different.
So, from the point of view of signification, which is foundamental when we tackle problems of the first articulation, we should, of course, reckon with the fact that those coincide in the form... usually in such a way - a cohincidence is such - that you cannot tell what is number and what is case. Take for example rosarum in Latin. well, which is the stem? You don't even know. The stem would be rosa- and the ending would be -arum. What is the plural and what is the case? It's just amalgamation. Functionally... it is just morphology and we shouldn't fall victims to morphology. And that's what those people, those hjelmslevians, do all the time.
They insist on the substance. I don't mention substance, because I know very well I would have to operate with substance at a certain point. if I don't operate with substance, I cannot tell what's the difference between this and that. They are so abstract in their approach and they don't care about it. At a certain point they don't care about saying what distinguishes this from that and, later on, they have to create a new science in order to explain why finally they reckoned with substance. There you are. And the very fact that they create something they call semiotics, induces a lot of people to prepare a semiotic which has nothing whatever to do with what real semiotics should be.
Have you read my wife's book La Clée puor la semiology? She presents the writing system in a semiotic system. We, as linguists, should consider a language as basic and everything connected with language should belong to linguistics and not to semiotics. Semiotics is the science where all the systems which may be used for communication are studied and compared with each other.

So, semiotics is interdisciplinary...
Exactly, but we linguists start with languages. We should be interested in linguistics and not try to start with semiotics before we have finished with languages. Languages are a semiotic system, but a very special one. It is the only one where you can find just those elements which we present in the definition of a language.


*Comunicazione di André Martine al convegno Hjelmslev oggi: Une relecture de Hjelmslev, San Marino 12 ottobre 1993

LEZIONE DI SCRITTURA

CINEMA & CERCATORI DI PAROLE

ANDRE' MARTINET/ 4 - COSA C'E' DIETRO LE PAROLE

Conversazione con André Martinet

André Martinet/1 Communication is our basic relevancy

André Martinet/2 Language articulates what we feel into a succession of items

André Martinet/3 Pregiudizi linguistici

One of the aspects of your work which fascinated me was the limpid exposition and your rejection of symbolism and neologism. This, in a context of linguistical studies based on the creation of complex metalanguages. Could you explain me the reasons for this methodological decision?
When I write I always think of the public. I say: I want to communicate with that public and I will try to use the language which will be acceptable to this public, of course without betraying my ideals.
I try to adapt the language I use to my public. I do create a metalanguage to some extent, I have to do it, but I'm very careful about defining the words I use. They are very often the same words used by other people, but I define them more accurately as a rule.
It's always very difficult to be clear all the time, but...
For example, this business about the choice of moneme, it's not too clear in Elements de linguistique générale. You have probably read the Italian version, which was translated from the first edition of the book. Now in 1980 a new edition appeared, which was modified in many respects and particularly on the point presenting the moneme. In the first version I was not too sure about what I should do about it in France: whether I should keep the word morpheme which was used in reference to grammatical matters and semantheme and those things. I didn't know: I was just coming back from America. I didn't know where I stood, where my public stood. So, I hadn't decided what I should do about the minimal units.
Therefore I thought choosing the word moneme was good, which I had to borrow from Henry Frei, with a different sense, because the meaning attached by Frei to moneme was that which is normally attached to morphemes by the Americans.
Therefore for me it was wrong in that respect, because he was using a term in order to avoid the implication of morpheme, but the word moneme had fallen victim to the use of morpheme. They just changed the form without changing the value. I change the form expecting that people would accept a new value for it.
To some extent it was all right, but to a large extent I rejected the use of lexeme and morpheme. I presented morpheme as a possibility for grammatical monemes and this, finally, I discarded. And when people wrote theses on my direction I said "no, don't do that": not morpheme, just consider that monemes are alla monemes and when you come to a point when you have to make differences between monemes, then you have to reconsider the problem and not by opposing some grammatical monemes to  non-grammatical monemes, but opposing connectives, grammar connectives and determinants, grammatical determinants, which I finally called functionals and modalities.
Functionals is not very good, because it makes use of the notion of function in a sense which is not the general sense of function in my functional linguistics. My functional linguistica uses function in ordinary sense: I want to see how it works, how it functions and elements which contribute to the functioning should be functionals. Well, the functionals in question, they contribute to the function of meaning, but in a very special way and this is restricted to grammatical functions.
The term functional is referred to grammatical functions. Until this day I'm sorry I've chosen that form, because it might have been better to call them connectives and I've been writing papers in English and in French where I call them connectives, but I hope people will at last understand that we should not make there a two-fold distinction between grammatical and non-grammatical, because the modalities, which are grammatical, stand much closer to the lexemes than to the connectives. Because how can you define a modality? Modality is a determinant which cannot be determined. And what is a functional? A functional is an element which needs two elements to appear.
You see, a modality needs only one element to appear: it is the determinant of something, whereas a connective requires two elements. Unless, of course, it can be used as an adverb. Then, of course, it shifts category.
If you said, for example in French, aver, it goes with something, but you can say it in spoken French: avec, ça va avec, that's an adverb. It shifts to adverb. In the same way as but, which is a connective, can become an adverb if it is sentence initial, because within a sentence you have to suppose it,a stipulation. Whithin a sentence. You have to assume that the grammatical relationships are within the sentence, not outside it. Therefore the but is a restriction to what eas said before, it must be presented as a restriction which bears upon the content of the sentence in which it appeared.

Anche: http://www.scritturebrevi.it/2013/03/18/andre-martinet4-cercatori-di-parole/
e: http://segmenti.blogspot.it/2013/03/penso-spesso-alle-sudate-carte-di.html

ANDRE' MARTINET/3 PREGIUDIZI LINGUISTICI

Conversazione con André Martinet
André Martinet/1 Communication is our basic relevancy
André Martinet/2 Language articulates what we feel into a succession of items

We have defined the notion of language and we have talked about your approach to languages, that is, about the double articulation. Can you apply this method to all the languages, dead ones included?
Yes. We just have to forget a number of things in well known languages, because everything is mixed-up in our mind about culture, literature. It is very important to come to the literature of the language at a certain point, but to start, we forget about it or we retain from it the tools, our corpuses for example. We may use the corpus which is a corpus of a written language, Molière or Dante, etc. . It is different. But we have to forget about that, and principally we have to apply the same methods whether they be dialects, local dialects, or standard languages, or languages spoken in New Giunea or somewhere far-away, where people have never seen a written form of the language.
So, basically, it is the same. We should try to apply a method which will finally yeld comparable results. For example in France people who want to give a phonological description of a language usually use my small handbook called La description phonologique. It is the phonological analysis of my mother's dialect. I am from Savoy and my mother as a child spoke the local so-called francoprovençal, a romance dialect of our language. No French man can understand a word of that. It sounds like Italian, in a way. You have a stress. Woman, for example, is fanna (femina). It sounds far more like Italian than French. Anyway, the book has been used as a model by practically all my students and by a number of other people as well.
Well, I think that is understood, but of course you are right to ask that question because the question arises: you may say the approach to different languages is not necessarily the same, because in German, for example... how would you go about describing German?

If I had to describe German to Italian people...
Wait a minute, you say to Italian people: that's important. You have two possibilities: you describe the language for scientists, for us: we are scientists, whether we are Italian, French, German, you describe scientifically, and then, later on, you take into consideration your Italian public.
When presenting German, for example, to my Italian readers, I will have to stress a number of things which they don't know in Italian.
There are two different levels: you have the level of scientific description, which is not meant for Italian readers. You may write in Italian, but it is meant for general readers, people of all languages and cultures.
And then, of course, at a certain point you have another stage of your research: you have to think of your public, your new public, that is the Italian public, on this or that level, elementary school level, etc. . Those are different problems: describing the language for different people.

And what is the difference in the description?
You have to take into consideration your public: what are the prejudices of your public? You have to reckon with that.
A prejudice is the existence of a phonemic pattern in Italian, of a grammatical pattern of Italian, which is not the same as the German one, etc. .
You have to stress certain facts which the others will not understand. Take for exemple the Umlaut in a plan describing German to Italian people.
Before you tackle your first articulation units, your monemes, you have to explain to your Italian people they are going to be faced with a problem of morphology in German: there would be words whose form changes from one use, one context, to another and according to a certain rule which is recurrent, which they're better learning in advance.

Anche: http://www.scritturebrevi.it/2013/03/15/andre-martinet3-scritturebrevi-e-pregiudizi/

T9 SULLA MANO

Avevo un orologio d'acciao della Marina Militare. Mi piaceva molto il quadrante bianco con la bandierina sui toni del blu, del rosso e del bianco, con la corona d'oro sopra. Angelo queste cose non le vedeva, eppure mi riconosceva, prima di tutto, dall'orologio. Gli tendevo la mano, lui lo toccava e poi mi diceva ciao. Io digitavo ciao sulla sua mano: la c sul polpastrello del dito medio,  la i sulla falangina dell'anulare, la a sul polpastrello del pollice, la o alla base del mignolo. Parlavamo così, io in silenzio, lui un po' con la voce, un po' con le mani, picchiettando le dita della destra sulla tastiera immaginaria disegnata sulla sinistra.

Non ricordo le cose che mi diceva e quelle che mi scriveva sulle dita. Sono passati quasi vent'anni. Però ho chiaro in mente il contenuto delle nostre conversazioni: mi mostrava il suo laboratorio, dove impagliava le sedie, mi raccontava di come lo aveva progettato, senza vedere e senza sentire, con l'aiuto di un bastone che gli serviva per misurare lo spazio, mi chiedeva di me, dei miei studi e della mia famiglia, si arrabbiava con alcuni suoi colleghi troppo fastidiosi ed era questo il motivo per cui si era fatto costruire uno spazio solo suo su un soppalco, lontano dagli altri, per lavorare in pace. La comunicazione, direbbe Martinet, è lo scopo delle nostre lingue. E la comunicazione funzionava.

Usavamo il Malossi, un metodo inventato maestri napoletani Artusio e Aurelio Colucci nei primi anni del 1900, che permette alle persone sordocieche di comunicare tra di loro e con gli altri, toccando le lettere che nell'immagine qui sopra sono nere e pizzicando leggermente quelle azzurre.

In pratica ci messaggiavamo, anche se né io e né lui sapevamo che cosa fossero gli sms. Questo succedeva infatti alla Lega del Filo D'Oro di Osimo nel 1994, quando ancora si telefonava dalle cabine pubbliche. Era il mio primo studio e fu il mio primo lavoro dopo la laurea in linguistica e non fu facile spiegare al dirigente che mi fece il colloquio lì dentro perché una laureata in lingue voleva lavorare con i sordociechi.

Ripensandoci, dopo quasi vent'anni, mi rendo conto di quanto l'esigenza di comunicare si faccia strada, ogni volta, in ogni situzione, in ciascun momento storico, con i mezzi più veloci e più efficaci. E di quanto alcuni metodi abbiano funzionato e continuino a funzionare, sotto spoglie diverse, in tutte le epoche.
Pensate che, dopo i saluti, se digitavo una parola sulla mano di Angelo e lui la intuiva prima che io finissi di scriverla, mi fermava e la pronunciava a voce, così potevo proseguire più velocemente nel mio discorso. Era o non era un T9?

Anche: http://www.scritturebrevi.it/2013/03/14/t9-sulla-mano/

ABOCCACHIUSA

Spigolatura: nel corso della mia intervista ad André Martinet, che in questi giorni sto rivedendo e pubblicando, sia qui sia sul blog di scritturebrevi, a un certo punto il linguista fa cenno al linguaggio dei non udenti e dice: "La lingua è l'articolazione di ciò che noi vogliamo dire in una serie successiva di espressioni in sequenza. Perché una sequenza? Perché parliamo. Quando usiamo la voce deve per forza esserci una sequenza. Il linguaggio dei sordi è interessante perché in quel caso abbiamo una doppia articolazione, ma, per la natura del mezzo che essi usano per comunicare, il concetto di sequenza non è necessario. Queste loro espressioni, che corrispondono ai nostri fonemi, sono contemporanee, perchè loro usano le mani, la mano destra, la sinistra, il viso, la posizione del corpo, ogni cosa. E' diverso".
E così, come dice, anzi mima,  Daniele Silvestri in questo video, "a bocca chiusa, le idee vanno avanti insieme, anzi... lo stesso".



Il periodo storico è decisamente diverso dal nostro, perché Martinet poi aggiunge: "E' interessante studiare quella lingua, per renderci conto di che cosa sia effettivamente la nostra lingua normale". Con la sua analisi diacronica Martinet arriva a teorizzare che la lingua, in quanto strumento di comunicazione, è un sistema molto più ampio e complesso di come tradizionalmente lo si concepisce. Ecco perché le parti del discorso nella sua costruzione teorica non hanno una corrispondenza biunivoca con la loro forma, ma solo con la loro funzione. "Molti linguisti americani - diceva - direbbero che la /-s/ di /books/ non è lo stesso morfema della /-n/ di /oxen/. Hanno ragione, perché morfema fa riferimento alla forma e, quindi, la parola morfema non va bene. Ed è ridicolo insistere con la nozione di forma nel caso dei morfemi, che sono unità significative, perché, quando hai una unità significativa, l'importante è il significato e non la forma".
La tecnologia Internet diventa pubblica proprio nel 1993, anno di questa intervista con André Martinet. La nascita del web risale al 6 agosto 1991, giorno in cui Tim Berners-Lee mise on line su Internet il primo sito. Inizialmente utilizzato solo dalla comunità scientifica, il 30 aprile 1993 il CERN decide di rendere pubblica la tecnologia alla base del web. Agli stessi anni risale, inoltre la nascita degli sms: il primo sms della storia è stato inviato dall'ingegnere britannico Neil Papworth il 3 dicembre 1992 da un computer ad un cellulare sulla rete Gsm Vodafone. Il testo del messaggio era "MERRY CHRISTMAS". Il primo SMS da cellulare a cellulare invece venne inviato all'inizio del 1993 da uno stagista della Nokia.
La teoria di Martinet, dunque, non aveva il supporto di tutta la storia successiva, che ha visto la scrittura trasformarsi progressivamente da un mezzo di comunicazione prevalentemente grafico a un mezzo multimediale: grafico, pittorico e in qualche caso anche acustico, molto più vicina alla comunicazione verbale, che non si è mai servita solo delle parole, ma, in parallelo, anche di altri linguaggi, primo tra tutti quyello del corpo. Gli anni '90 del '900 erano il periodo in cui le persone scrivevano poco e leggevano meno. Oggi, proprio grazie ai nuovi media e ai nuovi sistemi, la scrittura come mezzo di comunicazione è tornata nell'uso comune, soprattutto delle nuove generazioni.
Eppure la teoria di Martinet, grazie all'analisi diacronica, coglie un aspetto che oggi è fondamentale: la lingua è funzionale alla comunicazione e la segmentazione della lingua in unità significative non può essere fatta in via esclusiva in base alla forma di queste ultime, ma in base al loro significato.
E', di fatto, il viatico per le scritture brevi, che assurgono a espressioni del tutto autorevoli delle rispettive lingue, in quanto assolvono al compito principale della comunicazione, inglobando in sé una dimensione che per lungo tempo era stata dimenticata nelle lingue definite normali: quella della multiformità e della contemporaneità delle espressioni.

Anche: http://www.scritturebrevi.it/2013/03/13/andre-martinet2-aboccachiusa/

ANCONA 2400 VOLTE

E’ Leonardo Artale, 46 anni, architetto palermitano, il vincitore del concorso di idee per l'elaborazione del logo per le celebrazioni dei 2400 anni di Ancona. Il suo progetto è stato scelto dalla commissione del concorso di idee, composta da personale interno all’Amministrazione e presieduta dal direttore generale Caterina Grechi, tra le 164 proposte presentate in base al bando di concorso.
Il logo accosta una rivisitazione della figura del pistrice, animale mitologico marino presente nel pavimento dell’anfiteatro di Ancona, con il pay off Ancona 2400 volte, dove la n di Ancona è spezzata, così da poter essere letta anche come “ancora 2400 volte”.
L’insieme coniuga efficacemente e con una grafica moderna la tradizione di una città millenaria e lo sguardo rivolto al futuro che queste celebrazioni vogliono proporre. Il logo contiene inoltre non solo un richiamo all’epoca classica ma anche una riproposizione – nella creatura mitologica marina - della forte relazione della città con il mare.
Sia nella versione colorata, sia in quella monocromatica, in bianco e nero o oro (colore presente nello stemma del Comune), questo logo è facilmente declinabile nelle comunicazioni strettamente istituzionali, così come nel materiale promozionale.
Da oggi il marchio delle celebrazioni dei 2400 anni diventa una sorta di sigillo di qualità e di riconoscimento di questa ricorrenza e accompagnerà tutti gli eventi e le iniziative pubblici e privati.
Spiega l’autore del logo: “La realizzazione di un marchio celebrativo dei 2400 anni di storia della città di Ancona ha presupposto la ricerca di un elemento intrinseco alla città, escludendo rappresentazioni semplicistiche o scontate. Di forte impatto e con grandi propensioni grafiche, la forma del pistrice ha portato alla conformazione di questo logo. L’utilizzo di molteplici colori, oltre che definire un aspetto positivo al segno grafico, ne rappresenta e simboleggia le differenti epoche storiche succedutesi in questi 2400 anni”.
Al concorso di idee sono stati presentati complessivamente 167 progetti: anche quelli arrivati fuori termine, quindi esclusi dall’esame, saranno oggetto della mostra che si sta organizzando a palazzo Camerata. Qui verranno appunto esposti tutti i lavori pervenuti, a omaggio e testimonianza della partecipazione e dell’attenzione che questo concorso di idee ha suscitato.
Molti i giovani grafici, alta la qualità dei lavori, moltissimi i progetti da fuori città: sono infatti arrivati da tutta Italia, da Napoli a Pordenone, da Empoli a Cantù, a Foggia.
Tutti i loghi saranno anche visibili on line nella sezione dedicata del sito dei 2400 anni, attualmente in fase di realizzazione.
da: Ufficio Stampa Comune di Ancona