Tran-Duc-Thao and the language of real life

From the 1950s, the Vietnamese philosopher Tran-Duc-Thao (1917–1993) became interested in language origins. To him, the way to investigate the roots of human language was to suggest a semiotics that would be free from the primacy of arbitrary signs. Thao called his own semiotic project the ‘semiology of real life’. The main source of that label is a passage of Marx's and Engels' German Ideology dealing with ‘the language of real life’. Thao's...