-------- Original Message --------
> Stan Kelly-Bootle wrote:
>
> "Apart from a few onomatopoeic words, sounds and
> meanings have
> no innate connection. Recall Saussure¹s key notion that
> the mapping from
> signifier to signified is quite arbitrary, a point that VN
> and some Nabokovians choose to ignore."
I wrote:
> Maybe Nabokov chose to ignore it because he believed, as
> you and I don't, that something supernatural was
> involved,
> that the players of some game above our world shaped the
> evolution of "stranger" and "danger" to
> provide a convenient rhyme at our period of history.
Anthony Stadlen wrote:
> But Saussure's key notion, accepted uncritically by so
> many, seems to me
> itself arbitrary. One doesn't have to postulate
> supernatural players of games
> above or beyond our world to notice profound links between
> words, and between
> words and things, in a given language, and also between
> languages. Why should
> these links have been devised above and beyond our world
> rather than by
> generations of men and women living in our world?
Are you asking me or VN?
I thought about that possibility but decided my post was
long enough already (since I wanted the Davies quotation).
An example of a link between words is that "stark"
(describing a landscape, for instance) has been influenced
by the etymologically unrelated "stark naked". An example
of a link between words and "things" is the common
American "mischievious" (misCHEEvious). I've asked people
about it, and they've said it sounds more appropriate for
the meaning than "mischievous" (which some of them had
never heard). I suspect the rhyme with "devious" has
something to do with this. So we may see the American
standard form of a word change to a sound felt to be more
appropriate to the sense (and maybe Stan would consider
this onomatopoeia). But I don't know whether you'd call
these links "profound".
I can imagine that the change in the meaning of "danger"
could have been influenced by the rhyme with "stranger",
though I can't imagine evidence for it. Nor can I
imagine any meaningful link between "cosmic" and "comic".
I mentioned only the possible supernatural explanation
because I know Nabokov believed in the supernatural and
doubted "commonsense", which might include the
arbitrariness of signification that Stan and others are
Saussure of. In my limited reading, I don't know of
anything he said about how words are influenced by
each other or by things.
Jerry Friedman