From Latin nomen – name; nomenclature called by name, list of names. The naming process; the result of this process – a series of names.
Early in his Course in General Linguistics, Ferdinand de Saussure put forward the question, “Why is semiology (general study of signs) not yet recognized as an independent science with its own object like all other sciences?” And he answers his own question in the following manner: “Linguists revolve around: languages, better than anything else, offer a basis for understanding the semiological problem (this is the problem of understanding” the life of signs within society “); but the language it must […] be studied correctly; so far the language has been studied in connection with something else … “(16).
For example, language in accordance to the “superficial idea of a common audience” was seen as “nothing more than a naming system“, ie. nomenclature. In contrast, Saussure believed that language was not a series of names. This denial means at least two things.
First, language is more than nomenclature. Naming things is only one and not necessarily the most important function of language.
Second and even more radical – each language is a system of signs and more exhaustively, a self-sufficient system of relative relationships between signifiers and signifiers (for example, the acoustic image and the conceptual content – the phoneme “dog” and its associated meaning).
This suggests that there are no independently existing concepts, let alone independently existing objects to which names are attached.
Rather, the concepts are acquired only through language: “Psychologically, our thought – apart from its expressions in words – is only an amorphous and indistinguishable mass” (111). And the world itself is divided differently by different languages.
Hence, according to this view, language does not give us names by which to mean pre-linguistically familiar things; it gives us the world. Because outside of language, everything (not just our thinking), at least for us, would be an amorphous and indistinguishable mass.
