Words and Culture

This I am posting just to illustrate the boring shit I was fucking with this entire afternoon. I don't expect it to be read by anyone.

Words and Culture

1. Introduction

There is a relationship between the language a person speaks and the way a person experiences the world. Not only does the world influence the language but language plays a great role in forming a person's view of the world. In languages spoken in different parts of the world, different parts of vocabulary are more or less developed, depending on the importance of the thing that is being described or talked about in that particular society. The most famous example would be the number of words that Eskimos have for snow.

2. Whorf's Theory

There is a claim that the language structure influences the way its speaker views the world. The opposite would be that the culture of people reflects in the language they speak. It does not say that the culture determines the entire structure of the language but that it determines certain bits of it and makes them the way they are.

A linguist and a student of Edward Sapir, Benjamin Lee Worf, said that «we cut nature up, organize it into concepts, and ascribe significances as we do, largely because we are parties to an agreement (…) that holds throughout our speech community and is codified in the patterns of our language» (Wardhaugh, p221).

It means that a speaker of one language would perceive the world differently than a speaker of another language. Also, if a language have words to describe certain things and another language does not, then the speakers of the first language will be able to talk about those thing much easier than the speakers of the second language. It does not meant that the speakers of the second language will not be able to talk about them at all; it only means that they will have to use more words and «beat around the bush» more, so to say.

Another important way of language influencing people's views of the world is through grammar. Grammatical categories such as gender, number and time differ from language to language and not only do they help a speaker to perceive the world but also limit such perception. Worf compared the category of time in SAE (Standard Average European), languages that share many structural features, such as German, French, English, and Hopi, one of the languages of Native Americans. He concluded that in SAE events occur, have occurred, or will occur, in a definite time; in Hopi an event can be warranted to occur, or to be occurring, or to be expected to occur. Unlike the speakers of SAE, who perceive time as fixed segments such as minutes, hours and says, speakers of Hopi perceive the world as an ongoing set of processes. Naturally, it reflects in the languages they speak.

Grammatical category of number is important in SAE and various words must be in singular or plural in these languages. However, in Chinese number is expressed only if it is somehow relevant.

Even though some things are easier to describe in some languages than in some other ones, it does not mean that it would be impossible to describe certain things in the latter ones. In most cases, speakers are usually ready to use circumlocution, to use as much words as necessary to say something.

3. Kinship

Kinship is important in every social organisation and therefore kinship systems are a universal feature of languages. The important factors of the kinship system organisation are gender, age, blood, generation, and marriage. Whether a certain kin relationship has a term or is described by using circumlocution also shows the importance of that particular relationship in that society because the most important objects and relationships are usually expressed by a single word rather than through phrases.

Social changes can also influence the changes in a kinship system. One of the example of these changes would be the Russian language. There used to be terms referring to your brother's wife (nevestka) and your wife's brother (shurin) are out of the use today and there are circumlocutions zhena brata and brat zheny instead. That happened because the family structure has changed. These kins are no longer in the daily contact and there is no need to refer to them constantly.

4. Taxonomies

A folk taxonomy is the way in which people classify the parts of their reality such as flora and fauna of their environment or any other phenomena relevant to their society. The analyses of taxonomies show how speakers of a certain language use it to organize the world around them.

For instance, the Subanun of mindanao in the southern Phillippines use numerous terms to describe disease, especially skin diseases. They have categories that allow them to discuss the sets of symptoms at various levels of generality. They use nuka for «eruption» that they further divide into beldut,»sore», meŋabag, «inflammation», or buni, «ringworm». Then they further distinguish types of beldut and so on. This is because skin diseases are of such importance for their society and they need to organise them systematically to be able to understand them.

5. Colour

Colour is not treated everywhere in the same way. In some societies it plays a more important role than in some other ones. However, there are some basic colour terms in every language. Primarily there are black and white (or dark and light). The third element added is red, followed by yellow and green, then blue and brown. Basic colour terms also include grey, pink, orange, and purple added in no particular order. These eleven colours are basically the most important colours and they all have their terms in the languages of the technologically developed societies. Some less developed societies have fewer terms for colours, such as the Tiv of Nigeria that have three or the Burmese that have seven.

It is also important to notice that speakers of any language find it easier to point out the part of spectrum that they find to be typically orange, typically blue or typically red than to draw the line that would separate yellow from orange or blue from green. This shows that they have some uniform ideas of «typical» colour just as they have about other thing which leads us to the idea of prototypes.

6. Prototypes

There is a claim saying that people perceive certain concepts by connecting them to the prototypes of those concepts rather than to the sets of their features. That means that when a person thinks of a bird, he does not think of characteristics such as wings, eggs laying and warm-bloodness but rather of a «prototypical bird» such as a sparrow or a robin. This also applies to other concepts such as furniture with a chair being typical unlike an ashtray, or to fruit where apple is typical representative of the group and coconut is not.

It is easier for people to learn new things by connecting them to a certain prototype than to a number of characteristics especially because not only would they have to know what features that certain concept have but also what features it does not have.

7. Taboos and Euphemisms

Language is used not only to express things but also to avoid expressing them. Things that are never talked about are called taboos. Some other things are talked about only in a very roundabout way by using euphemisms.

Taboos can relate to sex, death, excretion, religion, politics and often talking about these subjects in a certain society can cause anxiety or embarrassment. The members of the society know what the taboos are and usually do not talk of them. Then they use euphemisms. For instance, in the Kaban language of Papua New Guinea people are often named after objects used in everyday life. What causes problems is the fact that one should never say the words that their in-laws are named after. There are two solutions to this problem: they either use a different word from Kabana with a different meaning or they use a word from some neighbouring language with the same meaning as the word they are trying to avoid.

Sometimes people who are bilingual have difficulties saying some words from the second language because they can cause embarrassment. That is often the case with names from one culture transferred to another such as Vietnamese name Phuc in an anglophone group.

Euphemisms help people to talk about unpleasant or embarrassing things and that is the socially acceptable way of discussing them. We may know certain words but we we would still never use them. Taboos differ from society to society but are nevertheless their universal characteristic causing that no social group uses language completely uninhibitedly.

8. Conclusion

Language influences the way people perceive the world around them. It helps them define and explain certain concepts but it is not a one-way process. Society has agreat influence on its language as well. For instance, things that are of great importance in a particular society will be easier to describe because the vocabulary necessary for describing them will be more developed. It does not that a certain language is incapable of talking about things that are not as important; it only means that it would take greater effort to describe them, at least until the new words enter the vocabulary. On the other hand, words that are rarely or never used in a certain language, due to social changes or social taboos, are likely to disappear from language altogether. That is just another way of society effecting language.