Sunday, 10 May 2015

After Babel: Aspects of language and translation, 3rd Ed.,
George Steiner, OUP, 1998, page 40

After including women with children as another group that have a language-world within a language as a response to exploitation and domination, Steiner suggests that humand sexuality and human speech probably developed in close-knit reciprocity. Using the primal taboo of incest as an example, he says:

We can only prohibit that which we can name. Kinship systems , which are the coding and classification of sex for purposes of social survival, are analogous with syntax. The seminal and the semantic functions determine the genetic abd social structure of human experience. Together they construct the grammar of being.