language and culture. culture – the concept more or less synonymous with civilization (opposed to...

LANGUAGE AND CULTURE


• Culture – the concept more or less synonymous with civilization (opposed to “barbarism”); classical conception of culture (art, literature, manners and social institutions)

• This definition challenged by modern authors


• “Langue de culture” (Fr.), “Kultursprache” (Ger.) – language of culture (difference between culturally more advanced and less advanced languages)

• Another definition of culture (Herder’s view): every society has its own culture;


• Different subgroups may have their own distinctive subculture

• Culture does not relate to any human progress from barbarism to civilisation, and it is not connected to any aesthetic or intellectual quality of a particular society’s art, literature, institutions


• Culture may be described as socially acquired knowledge, i. e. the knowledge that someone has by virtue of his being a member of a particular society


• Herder also emphasized the interdependence of language and thought; he saw nation’s language and culture as manifestations of national spirit

• The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis • Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf• They formulated hypothesis that combines

linguistic determinism with linguistic relativity


• Language determines thought and there is no limit to the structural diversity of languages

• People tend to notice things that are codable in their language (things with words and expressions already available in their language)


• The famous research of Eskimo vocabulary – no single word for snow, but many different words for different kinds of snow

• Australian Aborigines – the word sand


• Psychologists made experiments with colours: monolingual speakers of Zuni (an American-Indian language) do not recognize many colours, could not encode the difference between orange and yellow; Zuni speakers who also knew English could encode this difference (they were able to perceive the difference between colours, but could not encode that in their own language)


• All experiments proved a weaker version of this hypothesis – the structure of one’s language influences perception and thought

• Whorf claimed that the Hopi Indians, whose language lacks the grammatical category of tense, operate with a radically different concept of time (no clear evidence)


• The absence of numerals in Australian languages (higher value than four) – problem of these speakers with the concept of number (the Aborigines who learnt English did not have that problem)


• Existence of different world views (Sapir-Whorf hypothesis) – not proved

• Some linguistic concepts vary from culture to culture (“honesty”, “sin”, “honour”)

• Productivity of language systems – spread of vocabulary

• Borrowing and loan-translations (calques)


• Boas (1911), Handbook of American Indian Languages – Boas emphasized both lexical and grammatical differences of structure

• It proves the weaker version of the thesis of linguistic relativity

• Colour terms: languages differ in the number of basic colour terms that they have (no word in French that exactly covers what “brown” covers in English)


• No single word in Russian, Spanish or Italian that corresponds to “blue”; no word in Hungarian that corresponds to “red”

• My favourite colour is blue cannot be translated into Russian (in the ordinary sense of the term “translation”)

• Arbitrary divisions within the continuum of colours among speakers of different languages


• Berlin-Kay hypothesis (1969) about colours: the existence of non-universal superstructure, culture-dependence, what holds for colour-terms is also true of the vocabulary in general

• The notions of cultural overlap, cultural diffusion (higher degree of overlap) and translatibility (function of the degree of cultural overlap)


• Similarities of two societies and languages; pronouns od address, social superiority, age, kinship, sex

language and culture. culture – the concept more or less synonymous with civilization (opposed to...

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