Wardhaugh 9 and 10 Words 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.e du/~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 & thought actions under self-control distinguished from those not under control aesthetics affection expressed and felt age grades age statuses age terms

ambivalence anthropomorphization

anticipation
antonyms attachment baby talk belief in supernatural/religion

kin, close distinguished from distant kin groups kin 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

APE

W ILD BOY

HOMINID

ORANG OUTANG

MAN

Monboddo (177 3)

Ni neteenth and twenti eth-century bi ology

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. 230

If 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 nonhuman because of their language, color, dress, etc? Color and ethnicity and language?

Larry Summers at Harvard Wardhaugh 235 1. 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 purpose 3. 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 Higginss 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 Elizas 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 miners 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 Ireland The 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. Lewiss Out of the Silent Planet p. 53