ABSTRACT
In printed English the word landscape appeared in 1603, and had origins in Middle Dutch (landscap), Old Norse (landskap) and the German word Landschaft, meaning a restricted piece of land. A previous formation in English was ‘landskip’. As is often discussed, e.g. by Olwig (1996), any confusions in research entailing the common word ‘landscape’ is not a novel affair. Hartshorne made a reflection on this in 1939 (apud Olwig 1996): Landscape is ‘perhaps the most single important word in the geographic language’, and he pointed to the confusion the word created. Hartshorne observes that ‘the English word is […] used in an aesthetic way to refer to ‘appearance of land as we perceive it’ and ‘the section of the earth’s surface and sky that lies in our field of vision as seen in perspective from a particular point’ (Hartsthorne 1939; apud Olwig 1996: 152). This, Harsthorne argues, enable users to shift ‘from the use of the same word to mean, on the one hand, a definitely restricted area and, on the other, a more or less definitely defined aspect of an unlimited extent of the earth’s surface’ (Hartsthorne 1939; apud Olwig 1996). These shifts between area and aspect are interesting – but I find it interesting in a slightly different manner: ‘Landscape’ is all about aspects of an area, and the relation between an area and an aspect is a vital core of what ‘landscape’ is. The relation between area and an aspect of the area is clearly something cognitive, thus it must irreducibly imply a logical third, someone for whom the relation between an area and an aspect exists. Semiotics is well equipped to analyse this triad of relations, between area, aspect and someone.
