Saturday, September 12, 2020 – 8:00 a.m.

As usual at that hour, voices can be heard on the street through a megaphone sometimes a woman’s, sometimes a man’s. I don’t know if they’re from the coast or from Venezuela. What I do know is that I no longer distinguish the difference between all the products they advertise: “scallions for 2000,” “yes, we have peas,” “yes, we’ve got a potato sale”… “8 pounds of yellow potatoes for 2000”; “Anything you want for 2000”; “Get your sapotes, your papayas”… In short, it’s a scene that over the past few months has become a routine sight and sound.

9:00 a.m.

While paying attention to the professor during a synchronous class on the Meet platform, I couldn’t help but relate the topic being discussed to the scene with the street vendors. Sometimes, when we’re in class and vendors pass by, most of us who have our microphones on say, “Sorry about the noise, there’s a street vendor passing.” Others apologize when the soundscape is shared through the microphones. It feels like a voluntary interruption. My mind kept going back to that moment…

11:00 a.m.

While the teacher explained the topic, I couldn’t get the images of the street vending out of my head something that, as I said, has become part of the everyday. Yes, as the professor spoke about language, I recalled and recreated in my mind the fruits and vegetables I had heard about earlier that day.

I also thought about the different names these products are known by: I reflected on the yellow potatoes and the red-skinned potatoes, noticing how important context is—something that becomes evident in an act we often see as invisible.

Source: prepared based on class materials and videos from a seminar

I remembered the vendors and how difficult it was to tell whether they were from the coast or from Venezuela, linking this to the variables the professor explained: geographic, social, individual. I wanted to recreate this example because everything around us reveals who we are.

12:00 noon

In that small everyday scene, I found a powerful example to reflect on something specific that often goes unseen. I remembered Ferdinand de Saussure as the professor explained that language encompasses both tongue and speech, and that everything communicates. That speech represents the specific, concrete, and individual realization of a language.

Monday, September 14, 2020

I reviewed the text I had written that Saturday afternoon, but I felt something was missing. Once again, I thought of the street vendors. In that scene, not being able to tell if they were from the coast or Venezuela brought the geographical variation of language into play: their accent, their unique way of speaking. I concluded that language is a vital part of a community’s identity, and as Karl Ludwig von Bertalanffy suggests, it is also systemic, an open system that, through interrelation, generates a change in energy.

 

Written by: Álvaro Gerardo Fernández Sánchez – Professor, Department of Social Communication