Assignment 5

In this week's reading. Course in General Linguistics: Basic linguistic theory and terminologies, one of the points made was that speech itself does not contain meaning; nor is speech/sound alone capable of producing meaning. Some shared experience and history is required to give sound meaning and make it mutually understandable amongst people. For example, a bark might make sense amongst dogs, but is meaningless to humans; it exists as just a sound.

I think Mez Breeze's work really speaks to this concept. In her invention of Mezangelle, she shows that arbitrarily inserting ASCII text into language is still understandable. Had she arbitrarily replaced all the text with random ASCII symbols, we would have no basis for understanding the meaning of her works. Rather, given some shared understanding and experience, we are able to interpret and piece together, given context clues, the meaning of her pieces.

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