Lecture 3

Language & Culture

Language does not exist apart from culture, i.e. from the socially inherited assemblage of practices & beliefs that determined the texture of our life.

Culture may be defined as a selected inventory of experience.

Language is a particular manner in which the society expresses all experience.

Aborigines that had never seen or heard about a horse were compelled to invent or to borrow a word for the animal when they made acquaintance with it. So, the vocabulary of a language more or less reflects the culture.

The complete vocabulary of language may be looked upon as a complex inventory of all the ideas, interests & occupations that take up the attention of the community.

Objects & forces in the physical environment become labeled in language only if they have cultural significance.

The link between form & meaning is a matter of convention & conventions differ radically across languages. Words are arbitrary in form but they are not random in their use.

Linguistic forms do not resemble what they signify & that is why they can be used to encode what is significant by convention in different communities.

The fact that there is no natural connection between the form of words & what they mean makes it possible for different communities to use language to divide up reality in ways that they suit them.

Bedouin Arabic has a number of terms for the animal which in English means ‘camel’. These terms are convenient labels for differences important to the Arabs, but none of them actually resembles a camel.

In English there is a whole host for terms of different kinds of dog & each will call up different images.

Sapir’s understanding of language

Language is a purely human & non-instinctive method of communicating ideas, emotions & desires by means of a system of voluntarily produced symbols.

To speak is to communicate ideas according to the traditional system of a particular society.

Speech is an acquired, cultural function. Speech is a human activity that varies from social group to social group, because it is a purely historical heritage of the group. It is the product of long continued social usage. It varies as all creative effort does: religion, customs, beliefs, arts.

Language has its psycho-physical basis, but it wrong to say that language is localized in frames.

We have no organs of speech – there are organs that are used in the production of speech sounds.

Language is a fully formed functional system within man’s psychic constitution.

The essence of language consists in the assigning of conventional, voluntarily articulated sounds to the diverse elements of experience.

To be communicated experience has to be referred to a class which is accepted by the community as an identity.

The single significant element of a speech is the symbol of a ‘concept’ – a convenient capsule of thought that embraces thousand of distinct experiences.

The actual flow of speech is a record of the setting of these concepts into mutual relations. Sapir is strongly on the opinion that feeling that people can think without language is an allusion. Thought may be a natural domain apart from the artificial domain of speech, but speech would seem to be the only road we know that leads it. All of this does not mean that language works before thinking. On the contrary, thinking is a kind of psychic overflow sets in at the beginning of linguistic expression. The birth of a new concept is predicted by a more or less extended use of old linguistic material. As soon as the word is at hand, we feel that the concept is ours for handling. Not until we own the symbol do we hold the key to the understanding to the concept.

Whorf: Whether grammatical structures provide frame work for orienting speaker’s thoughts & behavior. The influence of language can be both through the vocabulary & through more complex grammatical structures.

In the following English sentences Hopi people would use a different word for “that”:

1. I see that it is red – the speaker makes a conclusion by direct sensory awareness

2. I see that it is new – the speaker makes inferences

3a I hear that it is red – the speaker reports a fact providing by someone else.

3b I hear that it is new – the same

Conclusion: Hopi people are directed by grammatical requirements of their language to notice underlying causes of their knowledge of things: through direct senses, through inferences, through reported facts. Speakers of English need not to pay attention to such differences (it does not mean that they are never aware of these differences)