Wardhaugh 9 and 10Words and Culture and

Ethnographies

also My Fair Lady and short discussion of Nettle and Romaine(Essay and short answer final not Scantron)

3/5 id cards?

Whorfian hypothesis

• “We cannot talk at all except by subscribing to the organization and classification of data which the agreement decrees”

• Language determines/constrains thought• Wrong! Children, feral children, deaf people

who never learned language. They can all think!

• Pinker, (The Language Instinct 1994, 59-61) rips Whorf a new one.

Language and Thought

• Universal grammar

• Universals of human culture and language

• http://condor.depaul.edu/~mfiddler/hyphen/humunivers.htm

• But where might Whorf and his teacher Sapir have been right about a connection between language and culture?

• Do bilinguals think their languages structure the world differently? Are they right? Aesthetics? Why preserve endangered languages?

abstraction in speech & thoughtactions under self-control

distinguished from those not under control

aestheticsaffection expressed and felt

age gradesage statusesage terms

ambivalence

anthropomorphization

anticipation

antonyms

attachment

baby talk

belief in supernatural/religion

kin, close distinguished from distant

kin groupskin terms translatable by

basic relations of procreation

kinship statuses

language

language employed to manipulate others

language employed to misinform or mislead

language is translatable

language not a simple reflection of reality

language, prestige from proficient use of

MAN

WILD BOY

ORANG OUTANG

APE

HOMINID

MAN

Monboddo (1773) Nineteenth and twentieth-century biology

Kinship

• Kinship terms are a universal feature of human language. Some systems are much richer than others, but all make use of such factors as gender, age, generation, blood, and marriage in their organization

• Very difficult to get an exhaustive description• As social conditions change, we can expect

kinship systems to change to reflect the new conditions (Wardhaugh 228)

Discussion question 4. p. 230If a language uses a term equivalent to English mother to cover MoSi, MoBrDa, and MoBrSiDa, and a term equivalent to English sister to over FaBrDa, FaFaSi, and FaSi, what hypotheses might you be tempted to make concerning differences between the family structure of speakers of such a language and your won family structure?

What family terms do you use? Father, dad, mother, mom? Do you use these terms or do you know anyone who uses these terms to refer to people other than their natural parents? What else might Dad or Mother be used to mean? Papa in Old Irish, for example, referred to the foster-father rather than to the father. If you meet a randy old British man at a restaurant and he introduces you to his niece, an attractive young woman who is dining with him, what might you assume their actual relationship is?

Taxonomies, colors, race, and racism. Is racism wrong because it is immoral or because it is a categorical mistake?

Both? What is the connection?

Are racists poorly informed or evil?

Are taxonomies and colors relative?

What about societies that think of neighboring tribes as non-human because of their language, color, dress, etc?

Color and ethnicity and language?

Larry Summers at Harvard

Wardhaugh 2351. Try to account for the often reported finding that, for English at least, males usually display less ability than females in dealing with matters having to do with color, including the actual use of color terminology.2. What are some of the more esoteric color designations you have enountered reently? Where did you find them? Who used htem? What appears to be their purpose3. Two other naturally occuring phenomena capable of sub-division are years and days. How is each divided?

Taboo and Euphemism

• Definitions and etymologies

• Savants, peace-keepers, sanitation worker, administrative assistant

• Political correctness?

• Sex, death, etc…

• Watch for uses of Bloody in MFL – what does bloody mean?

Look at pages 254-5 in Wardhaugh

“Active listening”

Things to look out for in MFL• Count the number of accents you hear• What is wrong with Higgins’s categorization of

phonology?• Does the film depict different registers for the

same speaker in different situations? Examples?• Does Higgins have “cultural know-how”? Is he a

sociolinguist? Why or why not?• Is Eliza’s claim of being linguistically ruined by

Higgins tenable?• Question 2 Wardhaugh page 245

After break

Vanishing Voices

• What is language death?• Why is it a tragedy? Why is it not a tragedy?• What is the strongest argument in the book for

trying to maintain linguistic diversity?• Why do languages die? Suicide? Murder? • Is it more like moving house, getting a new

computer? What about computer languages?

Endangered languages• Like the miner’s canary: where languages are in

danger, it is a sign of enviromental stress. (Is there a necessary connection here or an incidental one?)

• Language is what made everything possible for us.• Each language has its own window on the world?

P. 14. Whorfian?• Every people has the right to its language. And the

right to give it up?• Passive construction at end of p. 15. Who or what

is destroying rain forests and languages? Capitalism? Natural selection?

More from Vanishing Voices

• “The next great steps in the scientific development may lie locked up in some obscure language in a rain forest” 16. Not very likely though.

• How much biological information, and of what sort, would be passed down via oral culture?

• Practical and scientific/industrial or aesthetic/academic reasons for preserving and studying dead and dying languages? A combination?

More from Vanishing Voices

• Multilingualism good monolingualism bad? Vice versa?

• Diversity an absolute good?• “Violence in Wales” 20? Murder?• Is linguistic assimilation usually coerced or

voluntary?• Ethnic and religious concerns mitigate against

linguistic assimilation. Hebrew reborn.

Political boundaries “artificial” are linguistic/cultural boundaries “natural” is “natural”

better than “artificial”?

Linguistic chauvanism in IrelandThe Celtic tiger vs Celtic culture

“a nation that incorporates cultural and linguistic diversity is also richer than one that denies its

existence” 23. Japan is poor?

More Questions for the authors

Oppression of women in some of these diverse linguistic cultures is okay?

What if the endangered languages are structurally racist/sexist? Is that even possible?

If language = culture does world language = English

Americas have 150 of the worlds 249 stocks of language, but only a few people populated Americas after they arrived via the icebridge? Why

relatively few stocks in Africa?

Is dialect death as tragic to Nettles as language death? Why not?

Why did the Sami leave the Arctic? Enviornmental damage? Why else?

Read from Chapter 9 of C.S. Lewis’s Out of the Silent Planet

p. 53