Читать книгу Resilience. Persistence and Change in Landscape Forms онлайн

39 страница из 59

For methodological reasons, the study of secondary landscapes has been largely abandoned due to its complexity, in favor of studying planned parcel systems: medieval urban foundations, parcel systems resulting from land clearances, rural parcel systems in Eastern France, etc. These specific town and land plans are still “readable” in the present, having undergone very limited degradation due to their original coherency. In this approach, time is seen as a framework which is external to the observed object, and acts on elements in the sense of alteration.

In the 19th century, linguists developed a theory of linguistic decline, whereby all languages are considered to be derived from a proto-human language (Ducrot and Todorov 1972). For Saussure, time is a universal law, which acts on language just as it acts on any other element: “For time changes everything. There is no reason why languages should be exempt from this universal law... This evolution is fatal” (de Saussure 1995b, Part I, Chapter II, § 2).