Article

Name: On the Perfection of “Imperfect” Languages (Based on the Pages of Texts by Slavic-Speaking Authors)

Authors: Elena E. Brazgovskaya

Russian Christian Academy for Humanities named after Fyodor Dostoevsky, St. Petersburg, Russian Federation

Abstract:

In the discourse of modern cognitive-semiotic studies, the concept of semiotic perfection goes far beyond the myth of the language of Adam. In this paper, I present an alternative (in relation to the mystics of the Renaissance) view on this problem. I analyse the system of ideas about the perfect language in the texts of Slavic-language authors of the 20th – 21st centuries (Cz. Miłosz, O. Tokarczuk, S. Lem, M. Paviċ, etc.). The novelty of the work is determined by the understanding of semiotic perfection, where the semiotic optimality of the sign system is opposed to absolute representation. Adamic language is considered as a theoretical construct which is created by the method of possible objects modelling. I show the criteria of semiotics “perfection” of this language: the absence of a “semiotic threshold” between language and the world (language as a “mirror” of reality), a singlevariant substitution of the referent, etc. An analysis of these criteria within the framework of the pragmatics allows concluding that the language of Adam is a “linguistic nonsense”. The representative capabilities of the Adamic language contradict the development of forms of human thinking and culture as such. An analysis of the representative potential of the current state of verbal systems leads to the next conclusion: those attributes of natural languages that, at first glance, indicate their semiotic “insufficiency”, turn out to be evidence of their semiotic perfection. Among the parameters of semiotic optimality: the probabilistic nature of language, its creative potential, complementarity of verbal and non-verbal systems, the phenomenon of “extended consciousness”. The ideal of sign representation was not lost after Babylon: the history of culture is the history of the improvement of language tools.

Keywords: semiotic perfection, Adamic language, representation, semiotic optimality

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