David Lodge - Small World Read Online Free PDF Page B

the time.”
    “Travels a lot, does he—Professor Swallow?”
    “Lately he seems to be absent more often than he’s present.”
    Persse excused himself and pushed his way through the crowd at the bar to where Angelica was waiting for Dempsey to bring her a drink. “Hallo, how was the lecture?” he greeted her.
    “Boring. But there was an interesting discussion of structuralism afterwards.”
    “Again? You’ve really got to tell me what structuralism is all about. It’s a matter of urgency.”
    “Structuralism?” said Dempsey, coming up with a sherry for Angelica just in time to hear Persse’s plea, and all too eager to show off his expertise. “It all goes back to Saussure’s linguistics. The arbitrariness of the signifier. Language as a system of differences with no positive terms.”
    “Give me an example,” said Persse. “I can’t follow an argument without an example.”
    “Well, take the words dog and cat. There’s no absolute reason why the combined phonemes d-o-g should signify a quadruped that goes `woof woof’ rather one that goes `miaou’. It’s a purely arbitrary relationship, and there’s no reason why English speakers shouldn’t decide that from tomorrow, d-o-g would signify ‘cat’ and c-a-t, ‘dog’.”
    “Wouldn’t it confuse the animals?” said Persse.
    “The animals would adjust in time, like everyone else,” said Dempsey. “We know this because the same animal is signified by different acoustic images in different natural languages. For instance, `dog’ is chien in French, Hund in German, cane in Italian, and so on. `Cat’ is chat , Katze , gatto , according to what part of the Common Market you happen to be in. And if we are to believe language rather than our ears, English dogs go ‘ woof woof , French dogs go `_wouah wouah_’, German dogs go ‘ wau wau ‘ and Italian ones baau baau ‘.”
    “Hallo, this sounds like a game of Animal Snap. Can anyone play?” said Philip Swallow. He had returned to the bar with Morris Zapp, now provided with a lapel badge. “Dempsey—you remember Morris of course?”
    “I was just explaining structuralism to this young man,” said Dempsey, when greetings had been exchanged. “But you never did have much time for linguistics, did you Swallow?”
    “Can’t say I did, no. I never could remember which came first, the morphemes or the phonemes. And one look at a tree-diagram makes my mind go blank.”
    “Or blanker,” said Dempsey with a sneer.
    An embarrassed silence ensued. It was broken by Angelica. “Actually,” she said meekly, “Jakobson cites the gradation of positive, comparative and superlative forms of the adjective as evidence that language is not a totally arbitrary system. For instance: blank, blanker, blankest. The more phonemes, the more emphasis. The same is true of other Indo-European languages, for instance Latin: vacuus, vacuior,, vacuissimus . There does seem to be some iconic correlation between sound and sense across the boundaries of natural languages.”
    The four men gaped at her.
    “Who is this prodigy?” said Morris Zapp. “Won’t somebody introduce me?”
    “Oh, I’m sorry,” said Philip Swallow. “Miss Pabst—Professor Zapp.”
    “Morris, please,” said the American professor, extending his hand, and peering at Angelica’s lapel badge. “Glad to meet you Al.”
    “That was marvellous,” said Persse to Angelica, later, at lunch. “The way you put that Dempsey fellow in his place.”
    “I hope I wasn’t rude,” said Angelica. “Basically he’s right of course. Different languages divide up the world differently. For instance, this mutton we’re eating. In French there’s only one word for ‘sheep’ and ‘mutton’—_mouton_. So you can’t say ‘dead as mutton’ in French, you’d be saying ‘dead as a sheep’, which would be absurd.”
    “I don’t know, this tastes more like dead sheep than mutton to me,” said Persse, pushing his plate aside. An overalled lady