Animal listening

Q1 Arts and Humanities
S. Butler
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引用次数: 1

Abstract

The ‘Elegy on the Nightingale’ is a curious Latin poem of uncertain (but probably post-classical) date and authorship that is transmitted by several medieval manuscripts. It offers a catalogue of animal sounds rich in what linguists call iconicity, and literary scholars, onomatopoeia: to read these verses aloud is to imitate the sounds being described. The poem begins in address to the nightingale of its title, praised for her ability to make music by mimicking all she hears. By the end has the poem itself done the same? For all their playfulness, the verses strike at the heart of our own theoretical commonplaces, starting with the supposed arbitrariness of the sign, always unsettled by such examples, exceptional though they may be. So too did the writing down of non-human sounds preoccupy ancient linguists, who sought to segregate them from language proper. Nevertheless, it is difficult to deny that these sound-words conjure what they name, especially since, in many cases, it is only our ability to match their sounds to animals we can still hear that enables us to know what the poem is saying. What happens to our understanding of the poetic text as a transcription of human speech or song when we take it seriously as a recording of non-human sound? And even more dramatically, what happens to our understanding of human language when we strive (as this poem strives, albeit surreptitiously) to listen with non-human ears? With some help from the animal imaginings of Jakob von Uexküll, this article attempts some preliminary answers.
动物倾听
《夜莺挽歌》是一首奇怪的拉丁诗,日期和作者都不确定(但可能是后古典主义),由几本中世纪手稿传播。它提供了一个丰富的动物声音目录,语言学家称之为象似性,文学学者称之为拟声词:大声朗读这些诗句就是模仿所描述的声音。这首诗的开头是对夜莺的称呼,夜莺因其模仿所听到的一切来创作音乐的能力而受到赞扬。到最后,这首诗本身也做了同样的事吗?尽管这些诗句很有趣,但它们触及了我们自己理论共性的核心,从符号的任意性开始,这些符号总是被这样的例子所困扰,尽管它们可能是例外。古代语言学家也关注着非人类声音的书写,他们试图将其与语言本身区分开来。尽管如此,很难否认这些发音词会让人联想到它们的名字,尤其是在许多情况下,只有我们能够将它们的声音与我们仍然能听到的动物相匹配,才能让我们知道这首诗在说什么。当我们认真对待诗歌文本作为非人类声音的录音时,我们对诗歌文本作为人类语言或歌曲的转录的理解会发生什么?更戏剧性的是,当我们努力(就像这首诗一样,尽管是偷偷地)用非人类的耳朵倾听时,我们对人类语言的理解会发生什么?本文借助于雅各布•冯•尤克斯库尔的动物想象,试图给出一些初步的答案。
本文章由计算机程序翻译,如有差异,请以英文原文为准。
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来源期刊
Journal of Interdisciplinary Voice Studies
Journal of Interdisciplinary Voice Studies Arts and Humanities-Literature and Literary Theory
CiteScore
1.20
自引率
0.00%
发文量
10
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