from time to time, Derrida writes 'vouloire-dire'. In French, vouloir dire
is the equivalent of 'wanting to say' or 'what do you mean', but this
question is simply asking for another way of saying something. But this
cannot be 'meaning', as scholars tend to write about 'the meaning' of a
word. Because there are potentially infinite number of ways of expressing
what one wants to say, there would be an infinite number of meanings, which
is contrary to the use of the word 'meaning'.
Derrida is an interesting case, because he writes in French but for
Anglo-Saxons. He writes French in view of a translation, and sometimes he
writes -- in the text or the footnote --- 'I wonder how the translator will
deal with this untranslatable expression'.
In a book I have just open as I am working, Derrida does the reverse. He
writes something about 'sens' and, because it pertains to Austin, he puts in
parenthesis the word Austin uses, i.e., 'meaning'.
Perhaps we ought to place in parentheses the original words whenever we
refer to a scholar who has written in a different language, so that we know
what someone refers to. In this way, most CHAT research would have to write
activity (aktivnost', Aktivität) rather than activity (deyatel'nost',
Tätigkeit), according to the Leont'ev / Holzkamp use of the word/s.
Michael
On 2009-11-23, at 7:35 AM, Tony Whitson wrote:
On Mon, 23 Nov 2009, Wolff-Michael Roth wrote:
Hi David, Saussure never has written about 'meaning', and the problem
with many translations into English is precisely the shift that occurs when
Saussurean (Derrida, any one else writing not in English) is translated into
the word 'meaning', when in fact there is no such word in other languages,
and when the semantic relations that subtend the words such as Bedeutung or
Sinn, or sens and signification are rendered as 'meaning'.
Bakhtin read Saussure, but not in English.
Moreover, what people do not seem to understand about the Saussurean
approach to the sign is that it is a relation, between a signifié and
signifiant. The signifiant is not 'meaning', because sens and signification
are also translated as meaning.
I don't know about Russian, and whether it cuts up the world in ways that
there is a useful equivalent.
Michael
Strangely, what I think is the most used as an authoritative translation
of Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations, with facing pages in German
and English--in a book where such matters should be handled
meticulously--"meaning" is used indifferently for Sinn, Bedeutung, and even
Meinung.
As for Derrida, one of his locutions that gets translated as "meaning" is
"vouloir-dire." "Meaning" might work for "vouloir-dire" in some contexts (in
a novel, maybe); but they are not equivalents when the "meaning" of
"meaning" is at issue.
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