The upcoming meeting at Book City Institute on Tuesday will be on “Prolegomena to a Theory of Language,” the magnum opus of great Danish linguist Louis Hjelmslev (1899-1965).
In 1943, the book came out to represent a breakthrough in linguistics and formed an entirely new branch in the field. The author begins by ascertaining that language is an inexhaustible wealth of manifold values; language is the tool with which man moulds thought and feeling, mood, hope, will and action, the tool with which he influences and is influenced, the last and deepest condition of human society.
The book review session is slated for July 10 at the Cultural Center of the Book City, located on Ahmad Qasir Street, on the corner of Alley 3, north of Beheshti Avenue, LISNA reported on its Persian website.
Mohammad Amin Shakeri, the Persian translator of the book, will attend. He specializes in linguistics, philosophy and glossematics (the study of glossemes which are the smallest meaningful units of a language).
Theologian and linguist Ahmad Pakatchi will also take part. He specializes in Qur’anic sciences and narratives of early Islamic history. He is a member of the Center for the Great Islamic Encyclopedia Supreme Scientific Council and faculty member of Imam Sadiq (AS) University in Tehran. He presides over the Art Semiotics Division at the Iranian Academy of Arts. Pakatchi has written 700 plus articles on linguistics, research methodology, literary motifs and philosophy of ancient Iran.
Another notable attendee is semiologist, semantics expert, theater director, art and literary critic Hamid-Reza Shaeeri. He has proposed new theories in semiotics and semantics.
Scholars will debate Hjelmslev’s analysis of language forms. Though Hjelmslev employed mathematical models, he was determined not to neglect the human subject who uses language, which ignited his interest in psychology and psychoanalysis.
The Persian translation of “Prolegomena to a Theory of Language” is released by the Tehran-based Kharazmi publishing house.
According to a preview by the digital library JSTOR (Jstor.org), the book deals essentially with three major interrelated topics: the general criteria for a theory of language, the specifics of linguistic theory and the relationship of language to non-language.
