BREV TIL: Eli Fischer-Jørgensen FRA: Charles Ernest Bazell (1955-11-15)

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Istanbul l5/fi/t>5

^ear A4iss. ^jLsear-^ijfr

rgenoen, ‘“’orry i did not return your paper before •

± am doing so now* Of course we may notice the difference between two flowers without them having special names* -“ut if no flowers had diggerent names in the languages we know it would not occur to us to apply this test to a new language*

^nd when we do apply the test, e*g* by pointing to the two flowers in the endeavour to elicit different responses from a speaker, it is not the 'substance If it were, we should afterwards undertake a

of the content' we point at* careful examination of the flower in order to find out just what the speaker meant, just as we unde take a careful examination of the sound-flifthsfsuv&% in order to find out just what he pronounced* f ![) Instead of this ridiculously irrelevant examination, what we do do if we wish to find out more about the meaning, is to observe the linguistic contexts in which the flower-name is used« we turn awav from the flower, and back to the utterances of the speaker* ^y examining the flower we should be “dealing with a substance, but not. wiuA gewa'ntimi,} by observing how the speaker uses the word (does he call the flower a weed, or does he compare its beauty to that of golden shield?) we study semantics but not a substance« ^ither substance without semantics, or semantics without substance* l‘here is no semantic sub- stance•

fours sincerely