Common language of all people: The innate language of thought

Esteemed Colleagues, Dear Friends! I am so pleased to be able to meet with you that I want to take this opportunity to present to you a talk about what is for me the most important thing: the common human language, the innate semantic system shared by all people. Russia is a country where semantics has traditionally been particularly strong (as has mathematics), and where scholars have always devoted themselves to the study of meaning more than elsewhere. Russia is also a country of obshchenie—an essential and uniquely Russian concept which has no equivalents in other languages. (The anthropologist Dale Pesmen (2000) tried to explain it for English readers with the word communion, and in translating Bakhtin’s frequent references to obshchenie alternated dialogue with communion.) Russia is a country of close and strong personal relationships which often last a lifetime even when fate (sud’ba) disperses people to the furthest corners of the world. And finally, Russia is a country of arguments, of intense arguments about abstract subjects. Of this, you may remember, Turgenev had something to say. I myself have written an article “Arguing in Russian,” which was published in the most recent number of The Russian Journal of Communication. It is with great joy that I am now returning to the “obshchenie,” the discussions and arguments, in which I was fortunate to be able to participate in Moscow more than forty years ago.