Title: 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?
1Wardhaugh 9 and 10Words and Culture and
Ethnographiesalso My Fair Lady and short
discussion of Nettle and Romaine(Essay and short
answer final not Scantron)3/5 id cards?
2Whorfian 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.
3Language and Thought
- Universal grammar
- Universals of human culture and language
- http//condor.depaul.edu/mfiddler/hyphen/humunive
rs.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?
4abstraction in speech thoughtactions under
self-control distinguished from those not under
controlaestheticsaffection expressed and
feltage gradesage statusesage terms
5ambivalenceanthropomorphizationanticipationa
ntonymsattachmentbaby talkbelief in
supernatural/religion
6kin, close distinguished from distantkin
groupskin terms translatable by basic relations
of procreationkinship statuses
7languagelanguage employed to manipulate
otherslanguage employed to misinform or
misleadlanguage is translatablelanguage not a
simple reflection of realitylanguage, prestige
from proficient use of
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9Kinship
- 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)
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12Discussion 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?
13What 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?
14Taxonomies, 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?
15 Larry Summers at HarvardWardhaugh 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?
16Taboo 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?
17Look at pages 254-5 in WardhaughActive
listening
18Things 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
19After breakVanishing 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?
20Endangered 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?
21More 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?
22More 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.
23Political 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?
24More Questions for the authorsOppression 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 EnglishAmericas 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?
25Read from Chapter 9 of C.S. Lewiss Out of the
Silent Planetp. 53