Vimarsh

Once upon a time, in a bustling village of thinkers, two wise scholars argued endlessly about what “language” truly was. The first scholar, a cheerful man named Activityus, insisted: “Language is nothing but the noise we make! It is speaking, writing, gesturing, and storytelling. Look at the marketplace—shouts of traders, songs of poets, whispers of lovers. That is language. If no one speaks, there is no language. It is an activity, pure and simple.” The second scholar, a quiet woman named Facultia, shook her head. “No,” she said softly. “Language is deeper. It is an invisible faculty hidden inside every human mind, like the ability to see or to walk. Speaking is merely what this faculty does when it wakes up. The real language is the power itself, not the noise it produces.” The village grew tired of their quarrel. One evening, a clever child named Little Why approached them both with a question that sounded innocent but carried a dagger. “Tell me, wise ones,” the child asked, “if lan...

I would like to discuss first chapter entitled "Three Functions of a Text" from the book Universe of the Mind: A Semiotic Theory of Culture . The book is originally written in Russian by Yuri Lotman. 1. About the Author Yuri Lotman (also Spelled as Juri Lotman, 28 February 1922 – 28 October 1993 ) was a prominent Russian-Estonian literary scholar, semiotician, and historian of Russian culture, who worked at the University of Tartu. He was a founder of the Tartu–Moscow Semiotic School. The present book from which the chapter is being discussed is one of the key works on his ideas of signs, semiotics, and culture. 2. What is this Chapter about? The central argument of the chapter is that semiotic systems, particularly language and the texts they produce, have functions that extend far beyond the adequate transmission of a pre-existing message. The text identifies and elaborates on two additional, crucial functions: the generation of new meanings, identified as the creativ...