Professor of Linguistics Kim Sung-do
becomes the first Asian to have an academic volume written in French included in a renowned European series of linguistic-theoretic texts
A text that synthesises the achievements made in the fields of philology and media studies over the past 25 years

▲ Professor Kim Sung-do, Department of Linguistics

Kim Sung-do, Professor of Linguistics at Korea University and Vice President of the International Association for Semiotic Studies (IASS), has written an academic book in French as part of the linguistic science series “Sciences du Langage: Carrefours et Points de Vue", published by Éditions Academia, a publishing house specializing in literature and humanities based in Louvain-la-neuve, Belgium. This is the first time that a book written by an Asian has been included in this series.

The series contains research results from cutting-edge interdisciplinary linguistics and linguistic theoretical work in France and Europe, covering linguistic theory, the history of linguistic thought, language acquisition, linguistic genre theory, and Saussure studies.

The book published by Professor Kim Sung-do is titled “Essais de Grammatologie Comparée,” which is the 21st volume in the series, and is a compilation of his achievements in the fields of philology and media studies over the past 25 years.

▲ Cover of the book “Essais de Grammatologie Comparée” published by Professor Kim Sung-do

The book has been evaluated as breaking away from the existing narrow perspective that emphasizes the primary function of letters in the transcription of spoken language, declaring instead the pluralism of letters and graphic elements, and laying the epistemological and ontological foundation for a new anthropology of letters. In particular, Professor Kim has established the new methodology of comparative grammatology, which enables us to understand the Eastern calligraphic tradition and the poetry-calligraphy-painting tradition from a new perspective of mutual mediation. He has also achieved a new understanding of the principle of character creation of Hunminjeongeum from a semiotic perspective.

His book has received high academic praise from European scholars as a result of illuminating the anthropological significance of new writing styles and writing that has emerged from digital media and artificial intelligence, based on the theoretical system of comparative grammatology.

Among the major authors included in this series are Professor Pierre Caussat, a French scholar in the field of the history of European linguistic thought, and Professor Sémir Badir, a Belgian scholar in the field of linguistic epistemology and a representative European thinker in the field of semiotics.