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Chapter 17 Culture and Language Chapter 17 Culture and Language Each language sets certain limits to the spirit of those who speak it; it assumes a certain direction and, by doing so, excludes many others. — Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835) Learning a language represents training in the delusions of that language. — Frank Herbert, Whipping Star There are about 6000 languages in the world, not counting the ones that have existed in the past but are dead now. I've said that before, haven't i? There are 6000 different languages in the world, and one of the ways in which they differ is in how they correlate with reality. Reality is represen- ted in different languages in different ways. But now, think about this: How do we talk about reality? How do we think about reality? Obviously, we can't talk about reality without using lan- guage, some language or other. So the way a given language represents reality obviously affects how we talk about reality — if we're using that particular language. But let's bear in mind an important theme underlying this semester's work: Language is a social phenomenon. In some sense, a language belongs to the community of people that use it. If the fact that i am speaking English affects the way i talk and think about reality, then presumably it should have roughly the same affect on everybody else who uses English — the entire English- speaking (or at least English-using) community. And, given the differences between English and the Chinese languages, that may be a little bit different from the way a Chinese-speaking commu- nity like yours is accustomed to representing reality. What this means is that the way a given lan- guage represents reality ultimately becomes a reflection of how the community associated with that language represents reality, at least linguistically, and this is very much a matter of culture, from the anthropologist's view. So language becomes a very important tool for investigating culture; the categories that are im- portant in a given language in some sense represent the categories that are important in the cul- ture of the people who use that language. Exactly what that sense is, how to use the evidence of language in analyzing culture and how reliable that evidence is, is a matter of some controversy and we'll be discussing that controversy to some extent in a little while. But there is no question that in some sense a community's language is a very important source of information about that community's culture. And when i say that, i don't mean merely that one can use language to find out about a community's culture by using language to talk about their culture, asking them ques- tions about their culture and so on, though of course that is, in one sense, using language to find out about their culture. I mean that an analysis of their language can itself lead to information about that community's cultural outlook on reality. It is perhaps not surprising that such research, such analysis has been pursued most fruitfully in the area of contrastive linguistics. You look at two different languages and you notice the ways in which they are different, and then you consider the possibility that these differences are some- how symptomatic of cultural differences between the communities using these different langua- ges. Ways in which two languages are similar are of lesser interest in this kind of research; we expect languages to be similar to each other to some degree for the same reason we expect human cultures to be similar to each other to some degree: Because they're human, because they are ma- 313 nifestations of a common human nature. What the typical anthropologist, or anthropological lin- guist, or contrastive linguist is interested in is the extent to which human cultures and languages can differ from each other while still being jointly human. In what ways do languages differ from each other? Well, remember what we said last semester: A language consists of a vocabulary (or lexicon) and a grammar, and languages can differ in both areas. Obviously, all languages differ from each other in terms of vocabulary; that's obvious sim- ply from the fact that in my native language i say ‘left’ and ‘right’, ‘up’ and ‘down’ while you say ‘左’ and ‘右’, ‘上’ and ‘下’. But, at least to some extent, the concepts represented in our respective languages by ‘left’ and ‘左’, ‘right’ and ‘右’ and so on are exactly equivalent.1 What is much more interesting to the contrastive linguist, and therefore to the linguistic anthropologist, is the areas where the vocabularies of two different languages fail to match up. In theory, the most basic, most obvious version of such a difference would be for one language to have words for concepts that the other language doesn't have words for. More commonly, what happens is that one language will have fairly simple vocabulary, involving a relatively small number of morphemes, for certain concepts that another language will have to use much more complicated expressions to represent. One common area of such diversity is what are known as kinship terms, the words we use to refer to important family relationships. The study of kinship terms is an important aspect of re- search in anthropology and ethnography, in large part because different cultures organize families differently and have different ideas about which relationships are important and why, and anthro- pologists generally agree that the simplest, and one of the most enlightening, ways of investigating a culture's family organization is to analyze the vocabulary of kinship terms that goes with it. In other words, the kinds of relationships that a particular culture calls by different words, and the kinds of relationships that it refers to by the same word, can tell us a lot about how that culture thinks about family relationships. In (1) i've given a sample of some kinship terms in English and what i know of the equivalent terms in Chinese. Especially with regard to the Chinese, i've restricted myself to expressions made up of no more than 3 morphemes. It is immediately apparent that Chinese has at least 34 distinct terms for relationships that English subsumes under only 7. Now obviously an English- speaker could speak of hanns ‘older brother’ or ‘younger sister’ just as easily as a Mandarin- speaker could speak of hanns ‘哥哥’ or ‘妹妹’. But it seems to me that a Mandarin-speaker is to a certain extent compelled by the structure of Chinese vocabulary to make this distinction on every occasion.2 This is a rather significant matter in my case; my parents have only two child- 1Of course, it could be argued that there are subtle cultural differences between them having to do among other things with the fact that Western European languages like English have, for over 2000 years, been written exclusively from left to right while Chinese has traditionally preferred a right-to-left direction, only fairly recently adopting a left-to- right direction instead; or the use of ‘上’ and ‘下’ to mean ‘before’ and ‘after’ as well as ‘above’ and ‘below’, or the use of ‘left’ and ‘right’ as political labels. But we don't need to go into that. The main point is that, at the most basic defining level of which direction is which, ‘右’ means the same thing to you that ‘right’ means to me and contrariwise. 2This issue came up in discussion with one of my students who was concerned about how to represent in Chinese the precise content of the English sentence ‘He's my brother’, when it is impossible to deduce from context whether the ‘brother’ being referred to is older or younger than the speaker. We discussed this problem for some time, and i subsequently took the question up with several other Taiwanese friends, and there was general agreement that the closest equivalent in Chinese was the word ‘兄弟’, but that although this word is in fact occasionally used for this purpose — in translating from Western languages that do not automatically provide the information that Chinese 314 ren, and i'm the oldest of them. I normally think of my brother merely as ‘my brother’; i don't need to point out on every occasion that he's younger than i am. Whereas if i'm speaking Chi- nese, i have no choice but to refer to him as ‘我弟弟’. And as a Westerner and a native speaker of English, there's part of me that feels, Damn it, it isn't anybody's business that he's younger than i am! (1) English Chinese brother 哥哥, 弟弟 sister 姊姊, 妹妹 grandfather 祖父, 外祖父 grandmother 祖母, 外祖母 uncle 伯父, 叔父, 姑夫, 舅父, 姨夫 aunt 伯母, 嬸母, 姑母, 舅母, 姨母 cousin 堂哥, 堂弟, 堂姊, 堂妹, 表哥, 表弟, 表姊, 表妹, (姑表哥, 姑表弟, 姑表姊, 姑表妹, 姨表哥, 姨表弟, 姨表姊, 姨表妹) It is possible to distinguish in English between one's paternal grandparents and one's maternal grandparents, but it's not commonly done; normally, we would only do it in cases where there is a serious danger of being misunderstood. I don't know how routine it is in Chinese to use the clarificatory morpheme 外 in referring to one's grandparents. It gets worse. Whereas Chinese manages to distinguish between five different kinds of ‘uncles’ and five different kinds of ‘aunts’ by means of labels consisting of only two morphemes apiece, it's impossible to make the same distinctions in English without some very complicated phrasing.
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