The crisis of language surfaces among the modernist
literature – the doubt of its validity, accuracy and the causal association
with its meaning intended. Indeed, the language is built on and as a system of
arbitrary signs, which do not necessarily possess the essence or nature of the objects we’re speaking of.
For example, the word “bird” in
English does not reflect the characteristics of the species nor does it have
any consistently shared identification with other languages, as in l’oiseau,
der vogel, niao or sae. Therefore, language serves entirely as a political and
institutional agent both of aggregation and exclusion; it does not have a
meaning per se, rather with enough indoctrination and mass application any
word could do the job just fine.
The obscurity of
the nature of language appears when in the end Park kyung-won and Yoo Min were
talking via the Morse code – only Tokuda who received the same training
understood the discourse. Again, language could be reduced to a series of
numbers and codes and alienate the rest – it is a social means of communication
as well as an elite exclusion. Noticeably, an established language then does
not even require a firm root tracing back its anthropological identity; as long
as two entities recognize a mutual signal a language is built.
It is a highly
intricate and dangerous function as language then could be the most effective
and invisible mechanism of social hegemony. Driscoll related to the Antonio
Gramscian domination: the entity will be under the hegemony without realizing
its control. English, for example, has been the political means of alteration
of culture and mentality, facilitating the cultural domination – it seems that
to a large extent an individual’s thoughts are based on one’s language; the
failure of language would inevitably affect his ability to Think with coherence,
precision and logic (even if language itself is not coherent, precise or
logical)– that is also why people report that they seem to be a different person
when speaking another language.
Language changes
mentality.
On that note, isn’t
it fascinating the actors could speak fluent Japanese.
Yes, and there are different cultural and historical factors that determine the patterns of language acquisition; Japanese and English were the dominant foreign languages through the last decades of the 20th century, for reasons of economic development and cultural proximity, and now Mandarin is overtaking Japanese (explaining why the actors were so fluent; but how interesting that they can thus convincingly play colonial subjects...)
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