Links:
A fine discussion on metaphors in language in relation to culture is: http://www-personal.umich.edu/~jlawler/meta4compute.html
A very good
source on writing systems past and present is found at: http://alumni.EECS.Berkeley.EDU/~lorentz/asw/
http://babel.uoregon.edu/yamada/guides.html
A good
starting place if you are interested in specific living languages.
http://daphne.palomar.edu/language/default.htm
A
tutorial on linguistic anthropology, covering some of the same material in the
lectures
http://daphne.palomar.edu/behavior/default.htm
A short
tutorial on primates, including primate communication
symbol — a physical phenomenon
which can be either an object of some sort, or a sequence of behaviors, or a
sequence of sounds, which has its meaning bestowed upon it by those who use it.
Thus, there is no
necessary relationship between the physical nature of the cross and the
symbolic meaning of a cross to a Christian. Nor is the meaning of
"horse" inferable merely from the sounds themselves — there is no
"horsiness" in the word "horse"
Symbols have many
important ramifications, but for our purposes there are two main aspects of
this. The human capacity to make use of a large variety of different symbolic
forms, particularly vocal speech, enables man to:
1. symbols enable you to convey meaning to others. Enable
culture to accumulate through time. The late literary critic Kenneth Burke
hypothesized a particularly bright wren who managed by accident to get a
recalcitrant young wren out of the nest by gently tapping it on the beak.
Now if the wren
could write a dissertation on "The principle of leverage as a means of debirding nests, or denesting
birds" there would be enormous savings in birdhours,
and the invention might spread through birddom. Of
course, lacking symbolic speech and thought, birds are spared our capacity for
demagoguery — they cannot be filled with hatreds for bird populations which
they have never met.
While some
mammals do seem capable of "inventing" things (particularly the
higher primates), there is nothing like this uniquely human phenomenon of the
accumulation of innovations through time. It was partially for this reason that
Kroeber( a major figure in Anthropology two
generations ago) referred to culture as "super-organic" — that is,
while culture was in some ultimate sense a product of organic activity (the
human brain) once created it seemed
to have a life of its own, beyond the organism.
2. Symbols enable
experience to be continuous; they enable memory to operate in a more systematic
and ultimately efficient way. A problem can be kept in mind, even though it is
not physically present.
Necessary to
distinguish between:
analogical symbol where there is some
inherent connection or analogy between the symbol and the thing it
symbolizes or referent. The hands of the clock. A graph.
Digital symbol as where there is a
wholly arbitrary relationship between the symbol and the referent —— eg. the numbers of the clock, or
the letters on the page. [note here that this is a
broader use of the word digital than in computereze,
which refers to arbitrary messages using a binary code).
MOST HUMAN
COMMUNICATION IS COMMUNICATION ABOUT OBJECTS THROUGH THE USE OF Digital SYMBOLS
Much non-human mammalian
communication is not about objects but rather about the immediacy of social
relationships in the experienced present. Some examples.
1. Cat rubs self against human body. What
is cat "saying"? Not "I want milk", but something rather more like
"dependency!" That is, the cat is making a general communication about
the particular social relationship, of which the providing of milk is one part.
2. Young wolf gets uppity and starts messing
with the nubile females. Older wolf firmly presses young wolf’s snout to
ground. He is not saying “Don’t do that" but rather "dominance!"
3. Herd of bison stampede in certain
direction when approached by predator. Now we really do not know exactly what
is going on tin this complex kind of communication, but surely the bison are
not “saying” to each other "Tiger approaching north by northeast, stampede
south by southwest". That is the way humans would do it.
So most mammalian
communication is mainly communication about social relationships in their
immediacy. Human communication is mainly about objects —- but we must
recognize that "object" means anything which can be
"objectified". Social relationships for humans can be
"objects" in this sense, as when one says "he is my father"
— this is about social relationships but it is not about the immediacy of a
social relationship, it is about an objectified entity called a
"father."
Human
communication is mostly communication about objects or objectified
social relationships using digital symbols.
But bear in mind
that humans also communicate directly about social relationships in the manner
in which other animals do.
Our
non-human animal background in not very far beneath the surface. Tactile communication,
for example, in humans can directly communicate a social message (caressing,
holding etc. seem to have some universal direct potential for social
communication) But the matter because very complex indeed when we realize that
tactile behavior may have a specific digital culturally defined meaning.
The pat on the back, the specific symbolism of the black power handshake —
these are clearly digital symbols.
This
emphasis on digital object specific communication is probably closely related
to the evolution of the hand. It is not
surprising that primates, who are after all animals who have a very great
capacity to manipulate objects using the hand, should evolve an appropriate style of
communication.
Furthermore, bear
in mind that the higher apes also have some capacity for digital communication
of the sort found among humans.
HUMAN COMMUNICATION AND LANGUAGE
Obviously, the
capacity for culture is very closely related to the human capacity to
communicate through the use of vocal speech.
Now vocal speech
and human communication involves a very number of distinctive elements, but at
the outset we must notice something that is very often overlooked. The capacity
for language, as Kenneth Burke noticed, involves the ability to use the
negative. There are in fact no negatives in nature itself, and so far as we
know the negative to be entirely a property of human (and possibly some higher
primates) communication systems. "Do not touch the hot iron",
"it is not raining", "I am not going to put on my rubbers."
etc.
Aside: Freud (and
many others) noticed that when people use the
negative they must at least implicitly or subconsciously have thought of the
positive. Thus when a patient says": I do not hate my father" or
"I am not a mean person" the therapist must assume that the patient
must have at least considered the possibility that he might hate his father or
be a mean person".
The communication
systems of all higher animals is highly complex, and
human communication consists of many forms, some of which we may share at least
in part with other non-human animals. (As Gregory Bateson
pointed out) it is a real mystery and marvel that animals are able to
communicate adequately for certain purposes across species boundaries.
While vocal speech
is the most significant and important kind of communication for the study of human
culture, we must recognize other kinds of communication in humans which are
significant and which can be analyzed.
kinesics —- study of body language
forms, such as eye contact, distance, smell, touch etc. which are subject to
great cultural variability.
proxemics — study of the
communication potential involved in the way in which people use space.
Americans, for example, have very rigid (if unconscious) patterns of how far
one may position one’s body from another in terms of the social distance between
the parties and the social situation. This is often a matter of mere inches.
Latin Americans typically approach more closely in a variety of circumstances,
while Arabs may wish to approach so closely that they can smell the breath and
odor of the other, which in important. Americans generally feel that if one is
in close physical proximity to another (as in being seated at a restaurant
table with a stranger) that there is an obligation to maintain a conversation.
My own experience in
paralanguage — non linguistic sounds or
gestures which may accompany language and which either alone or in combination
with sounds carry certain meaning.
e.g. Way in which men communicate the presence of an
attractive woman. American lifts eyebrows, Italian presses forefinger into
cheek and rotates it, Greek strokes cheek, Brazilian puts imaginary telescope
to eyes, Frenchman kisses fingertips, Arab grasps his
beard.
E.g.
In most European countries head nod means "yes", but in Bulgaria and
Greece it means "no" Tausug raise eyebrows to indicate assent.
(class saw a film on different style of paralanguage around
the world)
metalanguage — communication about
communication. -- the complex set of signals and cues
which enable a hearer to interpret something in its context. As a joke, or
ironically, or with anger, or mockingly, etc.
One other very
important distinction in human communication systems, which is not found in
lower animals to any extent, is the distinction between referential meaning and
the social meaning in context. Thus "Get the hell out of here" can
mean "leave" or it can mean "you’re joking" or something
depending on intonation and kinesics (such as facial expression, etc.)
Design
Features of Speech based Human Language
Many
anthropologists understand human language in terms of 13 so called "design
features" first proposed by linguist Charles Hockett.
Most of these are obvious, but a few are really crucial and will have to be
examined in detail:
1. Vocal—auditory: produced through nose and
mouth and received through the ears.
2. Broadcast transmission: heard from all
directions (but often subject to gestural cues
depending on culture)
3. Rapid fading: words do not stick around
(as distinguished from communication based on smell – urination, etc.)
4. Inter—changeability: speakers can both
utter and understand the same words. The words bring out latently in the
speaker that which they are intended to communicate to the hearers We can talk to ourselves.
5. Total feedback: speaker can hear what he
says and monitor it. Again, this presupposes a sense of self in humans
S. Specialization: speech serves only to
communicate and speaker and hearer can do other things at the same time.
7. Semanticity:
there is a regular connection between spoken words and regularly accepted
meanings.
8. Arbitrariness: connection between words
and their meaning is completely arbitrary.
9. Discreetness: humans can produce a great
variety of sounds, but every language makes use of a very small range of these
possibilities.
10. Displacement: humans can communicate about
things and events not physically present or remote in time and space.
11. Productivity: people can say new things
never before said.
12. Traditional transmission: while humans are
programmed biologically to learn a language, the specific language they learn
must be acquired from others —— it is not instinctive.
13. Duality of pattern: language has two levels
of patterns -- the patterns of the sounds or phonemes, and the patterns of the
morphemes, or units of meaning.
Discreetness
The human vocal
apparatus is capable of producing an almost infinite variety of sounds.
A little
reflection will convince you that if every sound had a specific meaning
then any variation or deviation in the way the sound was made would alter the meaning
and thus interfere with the communication. All communication systems (even for
animals) must deal with the problem of what communication theorists and
computer jocks call noise — interference in the channel which blocks the
efficient transmission. The easiest way of dealing with noise is to increase
the redundancy (roughly the "repeatability") of the message.
Very obvious in
military and aircraft transmissions ("calling all cars, calling all cars,
be on the lookout for green, repeat green, Cadillac.").
Redundancy is
such an important feature of human speech that in most instances we are still
able to understand the message in even the most garbled transmissions. In fact,
very few human utterances are phonetically, semantically or grammatically complete.
If you were to set up tape recorder and record "ordinary" speech you
would find very few complete sentences or "proper" pronunciation.
Even a formal lecture is likely to have less than 50% complete sentences.
One extremely
important type of redundancy in human speech is the fact that of all the
possible sounds humans can make, each language regularly uses only a small
proportion in any regular patterned way. Thus, for example there are several
sounds used in Dutch which have no significance in English.
/sch/ as in schip (ship)
and /g/ as in schrevinegen ( a seaside resort) or brug (bridge)
phone —— simply a sound . Phonetics
is the study of the vocal mechanisms involved in the production of speech
sounds.
phoneme - a groups of similar
related sounds which function in a similar way in the language, and which serve
to contrast meaning, although phonemes do not carry meaning in themselves. Phonemics
is the study of the system of phonemes in a language.
The significance
of the phoneme is only in relation to the way in which it contrasts with other
phonemes in the language. No phoneme exists in isolation, but only as part of a
system of contrasts.
Thus in English /th/ /d/ contrast as in time-dime, tip—dip, toe-doe,
tame-dame, do—to, trove-drove, tat-dat, tot-dot,fad—fat, mad—mat, cad-cat, sat—sad, etc.
In Tausugs daya (wealth)— daya’ (glottal stop]’ (to lie
on back)
In
English.
The night rates are falling
The
nitrates are falling
(here juncture is phonemic)
The method of
determining the phonemes in a language is based on identifying the minimal
contrasting pairs: minimal differences
in sound which make a difference in meaning.
Languages differ
in the number of phonemes: English about 35 (depending on dialect), Italian
about 22, Hawaiian about 15, some languages may have as many as 55 or 60
phonemes, but that seems to be the upper limit.
Note: a phoneme
is not a sound per se, but rather exists solely as a classification of
sounds in the mind — it is a psychological reality rather than being a physical
thing.
in English /v/ b/ distinction phonemic as in
base-vase and vat-bat, but in Spanish vaso (glass)
could just as easily be said baso There is no
phonemic distinction between b and v , although a clear difference in sound.
Actually, most Spanish speakers make this phoneme somewhere between spoken
English b and English v.
Duality of Patterning
Another
distinctive design feature of human language is the fact that patterning occurs
on at least two
levels at once. The first level is the structure of the phoneme in the
language. The second level is the level of patterning of morphemes.
morpheme -—smallest meaningful
units of a language
the/man/brough/t/ the/box/es/to/the/teach/er
(+ intonation as in ?)
Bound v unbound
morphemes—a bound morpheme must be attached to some other morpheme.
Note: a phoneme
can be a morpheme at the same times English plural /s/ is a
single phoneme which acts as a morpheme because of this "duality of
patterning".
Note: morphemes can
have different phonemic shapes e.g. English plural /ez/
or /s/
Important
to recognize the difference between language (the system) and speech
(the actual behavior).
There are a few
common misconceptions about language:
1. There are no
so—called "primitive" languages. No language is less or more complex
taken as a whole than any other, although some languages are simpler and more
complex in terms of certain of their features. Thus the phonemic structure of
Hawaiian is a bit less complex than in English (fewer phonemes) but it would
appear that this is made up by having longer and generally more complex words
(discrete strings of morphemes).
2. All languages
have a grammar and vocabulary adequate to its needs. It is true that English
has a much larger vocabulary than any other existing language, but this is due
to the fact that it has a rather special history in which Norman French derived
and German derived cognates exists for most words (thus ‘calculate’ and
‘reckon", or "kingly’ and ‘royal’, etc). But the average speaker of
English has a no greater vocabulary in everyday use than the average speaker of
say Tausug or Navaho.
3. All
languages equally easy to learn as first languages by children, although the
ease of learning of a second language is influenced by the similarity of the
second language to the original language of the speaker.
4. All languages
are equally old, in the sense that there is a historic continuity which can be
traced back always in those instances in which the records are available.
Linguists generally classify languages historically in terms of the presumed
connections between them. These connections are best seen in terms of a small
number of words --in the core vocabulary of a language — a group of
several hundred words in which it is assumed are present in all languages (words
for hand, mouth, eye, simple verbs like to walk, to
run, objects like the sun, etc)
Indo-European macro family —spoken by about 1/3 of the world today.
Came out of central Asiatic steppes or perhaps
Sino-Tibetan
—Chinese, Burmese, etc.
Austronesian - including all Malay—and
Polynesian languages (including Tausug and other Philippine languages].
Turkic languages
—— including Hungarian, Lapp, Lithuanian,Turkish,
Mongol, etc.
Many
American Indian languages and language families. Some American Indian
languages may only have a few hundred speakers. In the US Navaho has perhaps
the largest number of speakers. In South America Guarani,
is widely spoken in
Japanese has no
known historical connections (although some possibility may be related to the
Turkic family). This is not because Japanese is really unique, but rather
because that it has been isolated so long. Although his theories have been
soundly criticized in some respects, the linguist Morris Swadish
estimated that languages tend to change their core vocabulary in a fairly
predictable rates ( about 87% retention every 1000
years.) This means that after about 7000-8000 years or so it would become
difficult to identify, with any reliable degree of statistical accuracy, any
resemblance between two languages which had diverged from each other for that
length of time. Japanese is thus an old language not in the sense that it has
not changed, but only in the sense that the point at which it branched off was
so long ago that all similarities have been lost.
Thus, modern
Japanese is just as different from the Japanese of 5000 BP (before present) as
contemporary English is to Proto-IE.
When we say that
all languages are equally old (or equally "new") there is one
exception:
Pidgin’ —— very simplified special
purpose language (usually for trade, or master-slave relations) which arises in
situations of inter—ethnic contact. A pidgin is always a second language used
for some specialized purposes -— it is simpler (both in terms of grammar and
vocabulary), but still adequate for its special purpose. One of the best known
is an English based pidgin spoken in
Creole —in some situations a
pidgin is so widely used that it begins to become more complex in grammar and
vocabulary and attains the status as a full general purpose language. Creoles
are always based on some the grammar of some existing language, often with many
changes, and sometimes a very mixed vocabulary. Creole
languages in
Productivity
Humans can make
up new sentences which have never been said before — human communication is
completely open ended in this sense.
This is a crucial
and very unique feature of human communication, although some recent evidence seems
to indicate the higher apes have at least some biological capability along
these lines.
Earlier attempts
to teach apes to speak failed for the obvious reason that chimps and gorillas
lack the human vocal mechanism.
More success
recently in using American sign language, which is a gesture based system
founded on the model of human speech in terms of grammar and vocabulary (it is
a fully developed language in spite of the fact that it uses visual signs
instead of speech) . A few chimps have been taught to
use a couple hundred "words" with. a very
simple grammar (although chimps do not seem to distinguish between certain
kinds of word order) . But some evidence for a minimal amount of word
productivity — combining word for "food" and word for
"feces" to mean "radish".
Some critics of
these studies have argued that the animals are merely acting out complex
sequences of stimulus and response, like trained pigeons .
But Koko the gorilla was often observed
"talking" to herself when alone, and this at least is very
significant.
Your text
discusses Chantek the orangutan who was taught to
sign.
The only thing we
can say about these experiments is that the higher apes are a lot closer to us
in language ability than had been thought, but we should not underestimate the
considerable gulf that does exist however.
Note: evolution
often results in latent capacities which are not used by the organism in its
natural setting. Chimps have a capacity (to use a proto "human" type
language] which they do not make use of because they have no need for it in the
wild. If humans were captured by some aliens from outer space, could they teach
us to make use of capacities we latently have, but do not make use of?
Productivity (the
ability: to say things not said before) implies a very crucial distinction
between competence and performance.
Noam Chomsky, at MIT, has very
radically redefined the nature of the debate and the crucial issues in
linguistics in the last 40 years or so.
Take two
superficially English sentences (to use his well known example)
Time
flies like an arrow
Fruit
flies like bananas
Any speaker of
English intuitively "knows" that these are grammatically not the
same at all. That is, the grammatical rules which would enable a speaker of
English to create two new sentences of the same type are very different. Or take:
Flying
airplanes can be dangerous.
We intuitively
know that this sentence is ambiguous, that is it has two grammatical structures
which vary the meaning, much like those drawings by Escher.
The ability to
intuit the difference is a fundamental component of linguistic competence — the
possession of rules for encoding and decoding speech messages, as distinguished from the speech itself, or performance . .
Possible
to have adequate performance without competence. If one learns all the
right phrases from a Berlitz phrase book as to how to
order a meal in a French restaurant. One could — in theory at least—- learn
this well enough that one could not be distinguished from native speaker. But
if one could not create new sentences (no productivity) there would be
no competence.
Thus
language is not acquired through simple rote memorization. It would be
impossible to memorize all the possible things you could say in any language.
Furthermore, we would be unable to understand messages which are incomplete,
garbled, ungrammatical, etc, because in order to do this we must have a model
structure of the language (the competence ) in
our minds.
Between
the ages of 2—3 1/2 there is a tremendous burst of linguistic competence
acquired in children in all societies. The kids build up an intuitive
competence in the language based on very rough and limited experience of the
speech itself.
This
acquisition is based on a very partial limited and usually poor sample of adult
speech. Children build up an amazingly good competence in their first language
with only rough evidence to build upon.
Further,
linguistic competence is largely unrelated to other cognitive skills and
various forms and intelligence in other respect.
But note: the
acquisition of performance skill must be based on some social interaction with
others. Hearing children who grow up with deaf parents will learn
Related to this
is the ability to "understand" grammatical nonsense: “twas brillig and the slithy toves did gire and gimble in the wabe”, colorless green ideas spin furiously (Chomsky’s
classic example).
Buts
"ideas green colorless furiously spin" — this is truly meaningless
because it is not grammatical. (although it may be
poetic in some sense]
We have the
competence to understand grammatical nonsense because of the ideal structure of
the language which we carry in our minds, even though we could never imagine
the infinite variety of nonsense sentences which could be said in English.
Now , the fact
that the fact that all children pick up competence in their language based on
very fragmentary speech experience is strong evidence for the argument that
there is a basic innate capacity for language in humans, (he calls this the
fundamental deep structure] though the specific language must be learned by
example.
By the way,
although we think that children must be "taught" to speak (say "da—da", etc) in fact in most
societies children just pick it up by being around adults with only minimal
encouragement.
The distinction
between ‘competence’ and ‘performance’ has applications to aspects of culture
other than language.
eg. take
flower giving behavior in American culture. We give flowers at a number of
occasions, and we all have certain intuitive knowledge of the rules as to when
it is appropriate to do so and when not. Flower giving often occurs in life
crisis or transitions between social roles:
wedding funerals, births. We could if we wanted think of new situations in which one
eight give flowers and then intuitively "know" whether it is
appropriate to do so even if we have never encountered that particular
situation before. That is we "know" that it would be appropriate to
give flowers to the wife of the mayor at the dedication of a new building, but
not to the female lawyer after her summation to the jury. Flower behavior in
American culture is not simply a matter of rote memorization of all the
possible situations in which one has experienced flower giving conduct, but
rather the presence in our minds of a set of latent rules for generating
appropriate flower giving conduct.
Proscriptive
and descriptive Grammar
The grammar of a
language as described by the linguist is the grammar which is actually used in
any given speech community. So called proscriptive grammar is the
"correct" grammar taught you by your English teacher. It is almost
always based around the standard speech found in some particular social class,
and therefore is a phenomenon found only in societies which have social
classes. "Correct" speech when applied between speech communities is
always a question of political and cultural domination and prestige.
Take so called
black English vernacular , which is usually regarded
as a socially stigmatizing form of speech. Your text discusses this so-called
Ebonics controvery,
So
called black English very close to some southern
dialects, but different as well.
Phonology. some phonological
differences such as /f/ for /th/ as in /roof/ for
Ruth or /def/ for death. Thus when a child sees "DEATH" in his reader
and says /def/ he is actually correctly translating his own dialect into the orthography( spelling system) of English and should be
rewarded. But the teacher may say "That’s wrong" and insist on
correcting his pronunciation , so the kid just
gets confused.
Loss of final clusters, especially /t/ and /d/. Thus the kid says /ghoses/ and /teses/ as plurals for
ghost and test, which is actually correct, given the fact that /ghos/ and /tes/ are the singular.
The kid is actually making good use of English rules for making plurals.
Your
brother — /yu bruver/ this is correct.
There
are some grammatical distinctions made in black
English which are not made in literary standard "correct" English.
he be busy now (he is always busy now)
he busy now (he is busy at this moment)
Most
speakers of black English learn BE at home and then
learn a number of other dialects to cope with other social situations. This is
called code switching or style
switching, and many adult Afro-Americans are very adept at it.
(Listen
to Jesse Jackson’s or Al Sharpton’s speech in a
variety of situations).
Code
switching is less familiar to most middle class American whites, but very
common in
In some languages
code switching is institutionalized to reflect social class and relative social
position of the speakers. Two examples;
1. In Javanese
there are three different levels or styles of speech, each quite different from
each others. A person chooses based on a complex set of expectations depending
on social class, the situation, degree of respect, and the relationship between
them. A single sentence such as "Are you going to eat rice now" is so
completely transformed in Javanese that not a single word is shared between the
"highest and the "lowest" codes.
2. Another
radical example of code switching occurs in
Other examples of
this include: English aristocrats spoke Norman French well into the 15th
century, and as late as the early 20th century educated Russian and
Poles spoke French among themselves and Russian or Polish only when talking to
the lower classes. Educated Czechs spoke German among themselves and Czech to
the lower classes.
Most languages
which have a number of different speech communities will show dialectical
variation. These variations can be in phonology (sounds), vocabulary, and
grammar, and can vary by geography, and social class..
The micro- dialects in the
Some dialects
change very rapidly across certain boundaries, while others may show very slow
gradations. One could take train from
Same thing if
travel from
Most European
languages have certain literary standards which are in fact merely local
dialects (usually of the capital or major city). Parisian
French, Castilian Spanish, the Dutch of
Aside: although
we have no recordings, and dialects do change, it is a good bet that Abraham
Lincoln (born and raised in central
What is the
difference between a language and a dialect?
This is a very arbitrary distinction.
Linguists generally define a dialect as a local variety of a language
which is more or less intelligible with other dialects of the same
language. But “mutual intelligibility”
depends on situation and what is being talked about. If one is conversing only about very simple
things, Spanish and Italian are sufficiently similar to allow some small degree
of mutual intelligibility.
In popular usage
there is a political dimension to the definition of dialect vs. language. Thus, Filipinos usually use the word
“dialect” to refer to what are in fact different languages. Mandarin Chinese and Cantonese are clearly
different languages, although they are referred to as different dialects. On the other hand, Macedonian and Bulgarian are sufficient
mutually intelligible to be called dialects of the same language, but since the
political independence of
Thus, language
can be, and is, a powerful focus for nationalism and indeed some nations have
really used their language as their national foundation (Czech identity was for
many years really carried though the language and Czech literature). Quebecois
identity is closely tied to language. In some states (
Writing is a set
of techniques for the graphic representation of speech.
logographic systems— representations
of whole words or morphemes or parts of words, or ideas -- Ancient Egyptian,
Chinese,
syllabic systems— represent
syllables. Japanese, Cherokee.
alphabetic systems — representations
of sounds (very roughly). How closely the spelling represents the actual
phonemes is greatly variable. English spelling today still a legacy of the King
James Bible, and sound patterns have changed a bit since then so our spelling
is out of date, and thus hard for kids to learn. Spanish spelling is easier.
Writing certainly
invented by Bronze age Egyptians and Chinese, alphabetic systems by early
Semites, possibly Phoenicians (but based on some models that might have
originated in
The Tausug write their own language using a modified Arabic script,
although the writings are mostly for religious and political purposes.
Writing
introduced a very radical change in human culture in a whole variety of ways, and in particular after the coming of printing and
mass literacy. One clear effect we can afford to be sloppy with oral language,
backed up as we are by writing forms. In most non—literate
cultures oral forms are highly prized and memory is very great.
Even the Greeks
(one of the first, if not the first, society in which everyone—free males-- was
literate) were very ambivalent about the effect of writing, preferring oral
forms for most education. Plato in the Phaedrus says
"written words seem to talk to you as if they were intelligent, but if you
ask them anything , for a desire to be instructed,
they just go on telling you the same thing forever."
Since
written communication is not usually accompanied by kinesics, proxemics, gestures, metalanguage, etc. written forms tend to have much
stricter rules. Written language cannot be just a translation of speech
performance into text – as any beginning English comp student knows.
Easy to think of
language as simply a set of neutral markers for objects which exist in reality,
but the opposite is actually more likely. The reality of objects is in large
measure created by the act of naming them.
This was an idea
of a brilliant linguist-anthropologist named Edward Sapir,
one of his students Benjamin Whorf. You have read the assigned article by
Whorf.
Great
controversy over the relationship between language and the processes of
thought.
To what extent is the language we speak in some sense a channel which
influences the nature of the kinds of things we can think?
1. First of all
how sentence are understood depends upon the experience of the hearer, which is
of course heavily influenced by culture. Thus "The violinist got on the
subway ahead of me" vs "The violinist asked
an interesting question in our music theory course" The first implies that violinist is carrying a violin. The second
implies that the violinist is asking a music theory question from his
perspective as a violinist.
2. Now there is
an obvious relationship between culture and vocabulary. The lexicon ( list of words) of any language is likely to reflect the
kinds of things which are of interest. Navaho has lot of words for sheep and sandpainting, while many varieties of English have lots of
names for parts of automobiles. This is obvious. This is focal vocabulary.
3. Another
important approach to this is the analysis of folk classification systems: such
as tree is divided into pine, which divided into Monterrey Pine, etc. Or color
terms which are greatly variable. (but if one knows
how many terms there are for primary colors one can predict what they will be).
Tausug does not distinguish between blue and green, and there are other languages
which put green-blue-black into the same category. But this does not mean they
cannot experience the difference. In English bats and birds are contrasted, but
there are other languages where they are put into the same category.
3 Another
important consideration is the uses of metaphors and metonyms in any given
languages. Actually this is not so much a property of the language itself as it
is of the ways in which the language is used in everyday speech and writing.
Metaphor vs metonym "The king is a lion",(metaphor)
"Give the ham sandwich his check" (metonym).
These are not
merely dead metaphors, but living conventionalized ones which may influence our
world view, and reflect it.
In English, we
talk of time as if it were a commodity as in "time is money",
"save time", waste time" budget time, "lose time",
etc. We talk of emotions in terms of space: "high spirits" or
‘feeling low, and temperature ("heated discussion) or color ( feeling blue or "seeing red". We have a
widespread use of military and battle metaphors ("the war on drugs"
"battle of the sexes" etc.) These are not merely dead metaphors, but
on the other hand they do not necessary reflect deeply held views of the
universe. Rather, they are something in between: cultural conventional ways of
talking about things that by their nature are not easily conveyed in the formal
patterns of the language. As such the use of metaphors
changes more rapidly than the structure of the language itself.
4. Another
consideration is the distinction between referential speech and speech acts.
Sometimes when we speak we are merely describing something which we presume
exists, but we also use speech to create the reality in a deliberate way: the
best examples of this is the common use of words as elements in rituals, the
very saying of which in the proper ritual context, creates the reality which it
proclaims: "I christen thee the USS Swordfish", " I now
pronounce you man and wife". Magical spells and incantations are another
example of this use of speech; "May the blessing of the Lord be upon
you", "The womb of my garden wakes, the womb of my garden works, the
womb of my garden makes my yams grow strong" (Trobriand).
5. The power of
labels. Every culture labels people in terms of moral, political, medical, and
all kinds of social categories. It is reasonable to assume that if a culture
has a particular label for a certain sort of person or characteristic of a
person, people will come forward from time to time to claim the label.
In 1952 when the
APA DSM-1 was first promulgated there were 106 forms of psychiatric
abnormalities identified. In the latest edition the DSM-IV there are over 300 labels., including such culture-bound things as
"disorder of written expression" (bad spelling?), and "lexical anhedonia" (inability to get pleasure out of reading.)
As fast as new
medical categories appear, or new sexual or criminal or moral categories are
invented, new kinds of people seem to appear to accept the labels. Let yourself
fall into the new slots which define one’s self. The
term "addict" comes to mind as more and more things are defined as
being "addictive". Is it possible to become an "addict" if
ones language and culture do not have the label? Not saying here that there is
no experience (there are objective physiological effects of psychotropic
substances) but only that self identification with the label is necessary for
there to be significant perceived changes in conduct.
"Premenstrual
syndrome" – this is a fairly recent medical condition. I would not argue
that it does not "exist" objectively in the sense that there are no
physiological realities, but only that the identification of these realities is
made considerably more likely if the label exists. There is no such medical
condition among the Tausug.
6. But is there a
connection between culture and the grammatical patterns of a language?
Idea of B. L.
Whorf: that grammar forces us to confront certain patterns of reality more than
others. He is not saying that language determines thought, but only that it channels
it in the sense that it is easier to say certain things in certain languages,
and therefore more likely that people will say them. One could translate Kant’s
Critique of Pure Reason into Eskimo, but it would
not be easy and it is unlikely that you could get an Eskimo to understand it.
Examples: In
English four demonstratives this, that, these, those (sing v plural, relative
distance from speaker). In Kwakiutl there are six demonstratives (visible v
invisible and near me, near you, near him)
In English not
possible to speak without specifying whether a noun is singular or plural
(words like sheep are oddities). In most situations this is not
really necessary as a property of reality, but we are forced to do it. Does
this means that speaking English forces us to think that number is more
important than it really is? In Tausug one does not have to indicate the
plurality of nouns, although one can if necessary.