Chapter 11 Language, Thought and Culture

Chapter 11 Language, Thought and Culture11.1 Definitions of CultureS Pit Corder, a well-known applied linguist, gives an exhaustive definition to culture in the fourth chapter of his book Introducing Applied Linguistics:The members of the community share sets of beliefs, political or ethical, they share to a large extent the way they construe the world, how they classify objective phenomena, what meaning they give to this classification. Communities share a common history and agree about what is or is not important to them, a common value system. They agree about the right and wrong ways of getting things done, of dressing, eating, marrying, worshipping, educating their young and so on. All these things are their culture ( Corder, 1967:68).Nowadays many scholars share Corder's understanding of the term "culture". And obviously this view has been influenced by the work of anthropologists who tend to treat language as one element among others, such as beliefs, within the definition of culture as socially acquired knowledge. Some linguists believe that there is an innate language-acquisition faculty. Whether or not this is so, there is no doubt that one's knowledge of his or her native language is culturally transmitted, It is acquired or learned, by virtue of one’s membershi p of a particular society (ct'. John Lyons, 1984:303).When we say that language is "learnt", we mean to learn the structure of the language concerned and by "acquired" we mean to obtain the value judgements that form alongside with the growth of the language. And "value judgements" is one of the most distinctive cultural elements flint reflects the ideals and behaviors of community. Different communities that speak different languages usually have different creative symbolic features developed from different cultures. In the study of the world's cultures, it has become clear that different tribes not only have different languages, they also have different world views which are reflected in their languages. In this sense, culture, world views (thought)and language are interrelated and have become the focus of our study.The extent to which language, culture, and thought have influenced one another, and which dominate in the communication, have been matters of controversy for three quarters of the century. The work of Boas, Sapir, Whorf, Hoijer and other scholars has exerted an active and animating influence on both speculation and research. To state simply, the current understanding is that language, thought and culture are interrelated, and cannot operate independently. To see them as three points in a constantly flowing circular continuum is surely closer to the fact than to see them as an isosceles triangle, with one dominant over the other two. Therefore it is necessary to discuss in some detail the relation among the three.11.2The Relation of Grammar to Thought11.2.1 Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whoof’s claimAs mentioned in the previous paragraph, language thought and culture influence one another, yet ordinarily, language is taken for granted. Its fluent and easy use leads to the assumption that it is a transparent medium for the transmission of thought. Because it offers no apparent obstacle to our customary flow of ideas, one assumes that it is a vehicle equally fitted to convey any beliefs. Scientifically, it is assumed to be of interest to linguists and perhaps to psychologists interested in child development, but such a conception of language has been challenged by a number of linguists and anthropologists.Edward Sapir, more than thirty years ago, maintained that:The relation between language and experience is often misunderstood. Language is not merely a more or less systematic inventory of the various items of experience which seem relevant to the individual, as is so often naively assumed, but is also a self – contained, creative symbolic organization, which not only refers to experience largely acquired without its help but actually defines experience for us by reason of its formal completeness and because of our unconscious projection of its implicit expectations into the field of experience. ( Sapir, 1931:578 )11.2.2 The connection between SAE and philosophyTo take the case of English and the SAE languages generally, there seem to be two dominant forms of sentence: first, what may be called the subject-predicate type of statement, of which The book is red may be taken as an example; and second, what may be called the actor-action type, of which John rum or John loves Mary are typical. In the first type there is no action, merely a quality attributed to a subject, in the second the subject is thought of as taking an action. In either case, however, the subject typically is an enduring object-something recognizable through time. Even when the subject is not an object in this sense, the tendency is to speak of it as if it were. Thus, an automobile mechanic will talk of fixing the timing on a car in much the same terms that he speaks of fixing the tire, even though the timing is simply a relation of events while the tire is an object. One may claim that speaking of fixing the timing in this wayis metaphorical, and this may be, but the point is that the metaphor proceeds via the conception of a stable physical object.This tendency is obvious in the English language. In general, events arc spoken of as if they were stable objects, and, in speech at least, much of the passing experience doesn't seem to exist. This tendency, as Whorf has noticed, extends even to time itself. Speakers of English speak of it and even think of it as a substance of indefinite extent. They may isolate a segment of it in the same sense that they may cut a link of sausage, and they may save five minutes in something like the sense that they save a scrap of meat.Such ways of looking at the world are of importance, not merely in the organization of the details of experience, but also for philosophy, in particular for logic and metaphysics. Classic logic took the subject-predicate form of statement as basic and insisted that any logical manipulations must be confined to this form. Sentences of the form John loves Mary had to be twisted until loving Mary was considered a predicate of John. Various arguments were classified and tested in terms of the relations between subject and predicate, While this conception of logic is almost completely rejected at present, there is no doubt that it was a major influence on thought up to the present century.Having noticed this connection between SAE and Hopi language + philosophy, we may turn to the contrast of them both in regard to the thought and language of the Hopi which Whorf has pointed out in considerable detail. There are five principal points of divergence, and it will be seen that they represent differences either in grammar or in the conception of time. These major linguistic differences occur in the following points: ( 1 ) plurality and numeration, (2) nouns of physical quantity, (3) phases of cycles, (4) temporal forms of verbs, and (5) duration, intensity, and tendency. Here we would like to take the fifth point as an example.English expresses duration by long, short, great, much, quick, slow, etc.; intensity by large, great, much, heavy, light, high, low, sharp, faint, etc.; tendency by more, increase, grow, tarn, get, approach, go, come, rise, fall, stop, smooth, even, rapid, slow, and so on through an almost inexhaustible list of metaphors that native speakers hardly recognize as such since they are virtually the only linguistic media available. The non-metaphorical terms in this field, like early, late, soon, lasting, intense, very, tending are a mere handful, quite inadequate to the needs.Hopi on the contrary has no such metaphors, but expresses duration, intensity, and tendency literally,without any trace of the spatial figures found in SAE. There is even a speeial elass of terms of terms and a separate part of speech, to express these fiwtors, and it is a very large class of terms. Other linguistic devices are used as well.Whorf sums up tile influence of these linguistic differences on thought by saying that speakers of SAE tend to see the would in terms of things, tile things themselves built up of a formless stuff given a determinate form. The Hopi, on the other hand, seem to have analyzed reality largely in terms of events.A similar connection between grammatical forms and prevalent modes of thought can also be shown by the following comparison.11.2.3The relationship between grammar and modes of thoughtThe apparent relationship between grammar and modes of thought can be seen in the basic types of sentence structures. Probably the most typical kind of sentence in English is the declarative sentence made up of a subject, verb, and direct object and associated with the conceptual focus of an actor, and action, and the object of an action. For example, the answer to tile question What happened could be either John dropped the ballSubject verb Direct ObjectActor Actor Object of ActionorThe car hit the bridgeSubject verb Direct ObjectAction Action Object of ActionThis sentence form is so common in English that speakers of English use the form metaphorically without being the least bit conscious of imposing the form "actor, action, object of action" where it does not literally apply. As a result, English commonly produces sentences such as:Mary took the testSubject verb Direct ObjectActor Action Object of ActionChinese, however, does not ordinarily use this kind of sentence structure. If asked a' speaker of Chinese the equivalent of the question "What happened?" be would probably get the answer in the form of topic and comment. In other words, where the American would say, "John dropped the ball, "the Chinese would say, "Ball-particle (type of object) dropping." (球掉下来了) It is not necessary for tile Chinese to indicate the actor or the time of the action. Speakers of English, in contrast, specify whether the action was in the past or not. However, they do have a sentence form where tile actor is not specified: subject and passive verb: "The ball was dropped." Nevertheless, many speakers of English feel uneasy about this construction; it does not appear complete. Since only two of tile three habitual components are present, they feel compelled to ask, "Dropped by whom?" In short, English and Chinese have different basic sentence structures which focus on different aspects of a situation.It is true that the grammars of the languages of the world show considerable variety in the devices they employ to classify reality. It is this level of classification, dissection, and organization, the level of diversity rather than universality, with which Whorl’s linguistic relativity hypothesis is concerned.The contention of this section, then, is that language is one of the factors influencing perception and the general organization of experience. There is at least direct evidence, a connection between grammatical forms and general characteristics of Western thought and philosophy. This influence need notbe primary or unique or compelling, but neither is it negligible.11.3 The Relation of V ocabulary and the Characteristics of Culture 11.3.1Sapir-Whorf hypothesisScholars argue that tile way our language is organized determines how we perceive the world. That is, our language will give us a ready-made system of category, which acts as a guide to us, of the world around us, through our perception. This view is the well-known linguistic relativity hypothesis (also called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis or the Whorfian hypothesis), in essence, this hypothesis suggests that the most obvious influence of language and culture on thought is that of vocabulary. As Boas pointed out, words are suited to the environment in which they are used. Palmer in his book Semantics also states: "There are no clearly defined ' natural' classes of objects in the world around us, simply waiting for a label to be applied to them." It is true that the distinctions encoded in one language may not be found in any other language. In a much quoted paragraph, Whorf stated:We dissect nature along the lines laid down by our native languages. The categories and types that we isolate from the world of phenomena we do not find there because they stare every observer in the face; on the contrary, the world is presented in a kaleidoscopic flux of impressions which has to be organized by our minds – and this means largely by the linguistic systems in our minds. We cut nature up, organize it into concepts, and ascribe significance as we do, largely because we are parties to an agreement to organize it in this way -- an agreement that holds throughout our speech community and is codified in the patterns of our language. The agreements is, of course, an implicit and unstated one, but its terms are absolutely obligatory; we cannot talk at all except by subscribing to the organization arid classification of data which the agreement decrees.Thus, Whorf notices that Eskimo languages have a variety of words for different kinds of snow where the English language has only one. Aztec is even poorer than the English language in this respect, using the same word stem for cold, ice, and snow. Sapir gives detailed evidence over a broader field in claiming that the vocabulary of a language clearly reflects the physical and social environment of a people. Indeed, the complete vocabulary of a language would be "a complex inventory of all the ideas, interests, and occupations that take attention of the community."11.3.2 Vocabulary and environment of a peopleWhorf further illustrated his view by taking examples from several languages and in particular from Hopi. In Hopi, there is one word (masa'ytuka) for everything that flies except birds, including insects, aeroplanes and pilots. This seems alien to someone used to thinking in Chinese or English. But Whorf argued, it is no stranger than English-speakers having one word for many kinds of snow. In Australia, it takes between three and fourteen English words to distinguish the various senses of hole in the aboriginal language, such as yarla (a hole in an object); pirti (a hole in the ground), pirnki (a hole formed by a rock shelf), kartalpa (a small hole in the ground), yulpilpa (a shallow hole in which ants live), mutara (a special hole in a spear), nyarrkalpa (a goanna burrow), katarta (the hole left by a goanna when it has broken the surface after hibernation).There is also nothing in everyday English to correspond to the many Arabic words for horses or camels. Speakers of English have to resort to circumlocutions if they want to draw the distinctions these languages convey with separate words – such as the ones about the size, breed, function, and condition of acamel. It is reported that there are over 4,000 words to describe all kinds of camels in Arabic language and over 200 ancient Chinese words for oxes and cows. The following are some examples:a two-year old ox/cowa three-year old ox/cowa four-year old ox/cowa black and white ox/cowa yellow and white ox/cowa pure colored ox/cowa bullThe fact that a language may have a proportionately high number of terms in particular domains is an important index to the tendency of a culture. A people should have words for objects with which they are concerned and that they should lack words for objects with which they have fewer dealings. For example, most languages of Western European countries where industry is highly developed have an exceptionally high percentage of scientific and technical terms. China, being a populous agricultural country, is one of the world's biggest' rice-producing countries. According to Shuo Wen Jie Zi ( the first book on the form and the source of Chinese characters by Xu Shen in the Han dynasty of ancient China. there are 102 words using he ( ) as part of their characters, 40 words have mf (米) as part of their form: dao(稻) and mf (米) are the two most general words. 稻, (rice plants) when not yet planted is called zh lg (种), zl (籽) or gu (谷), (similar to tile English word "seeds"). When seeds grow after being planted, they are called yang (秧) ormiao (苗) (similar to the English phrase “rice shoots”). When they grow bigger, they are called he ( ) (cereal crops, or standing grain). The large open areas in which is planted are called tian (田) (field). The kind of grain which grows in 田and looks like is bai ( ) （barnyard grass）. When is getting ripe, it will chou sui (抽穗)(heading or earing). After抽穗, unhusked rice (谷) will soon be ripe for harvest. When unhusked rice is husked, it is called “rice”. Then rice can be processed into tang (糖) (sugar), fan (饭) (cooked rice), zhou (粥) (rice gruel), fen (粉) (rice flour), gao (糕) (rice cake), ba (粑) (dialect for rice cake). Rice which is used as rent and tax or for storage is called liang (粮) (grain, food, provisions). The tool to weigh rice is cheng (秤) (balance). The rice used as tax autumn). There are of course some more characters with the semantic element of he ( ) and mi (米) like kang (糠) ( rice bran ), fen (粪) (excrement) and jt (积) (collect or deposit). This fully shows that languages differ notoriously in vocabulary, and this difference is generally correlated with a difference in environment.As Frang Boas, the founder of general anthropology pointed out, words are suited to the environment in which they are used. Eskimos live in a world of snow. Snow is part of their lives. Arabs depend more on camels than trucks for transportation in the vast expanse of desert areas. The Australian aboriginals need to know about all sorts of holes to decide what animals to hunt.Seedlings of cereal crops ( ) and other related words l however, are examples with obvious cultural and environmental emphasis. In many instances the relationship between cultural emphasis and vocabulary is much less apparent. For example Americans arc a mobile people, so transportation plays an extremely important role culturally in their society, and yet there is not a single word in English lot drivers of all kinds of motor vchicles. "Motorist" is restricted to private cars, and "driver" is unacceptable for motorcycles. Also, the English word "go" may refer to going on toot, by car, train or plane. Germans, on the other hand, use "gehen" when they go on foot, and "fahren" when they go by vehicle. The Navaho, according to Kluckholn and Leighton, make an even more complex set of distinctions:When a Navaho says that he went somewhere he never fails to specify whether it was by foot, astride, by wagon, auto, train, or airplane. This is done partly by using different verb stems which indicate whether the traveler moved under his own steam or was transported, partly by naming the actual means…Moreover the Navaho language insists upon another type of splitting of the generic idea of "going"to which German is as indifferent as English. The Navaho always differentiates between starting to go, going along, arriving at, returning from a point... ( Kluckhohn and Leighton, 1962:274-75) And so, although transportation is a major cultural emphasis in American society, the word "go" is certainly considerably less precise than the terms used by the Navaho for this activity. It becomes apparent, then, that even when an activity has considerable cultural emphasis, certain perceptions may be heightened by the language while others may remain obscure.11.4. Language is Transmissible Across Culture11.4.1 Words are culture-boundThe above-mentioned examples demonstrate that words are culture-bound and are really suited to the environment in which they are used. For example, different cultures have different ways of dividing the color spectrum. People illustrate differing world views on what color is and how to identify color. Gleason notes that the Shona of Rhodesia and the Bassa of Liberia have fewer color categories than speakers of European languages and they break up the spectrum at different points, as Figure I shows.Figure 1. Color categories in three cultures(Brown, 1980: 129-144)English: purple blue green yellow redShona: cips uka cicena cips ukaBassa hui zizaOf course, if there is tile need, the Shona and Bassa are able to perceive and describe other colors, in the same way that an English speaker might describe a "dark bluish green" Psycholinguists like Lantz, Brown, and Lenneberg have argued that having a number of terms for color distinctions is particularly useful for remembering colors that have been seen at an earlier time. The more color terms the subjects in these experiments had, the better their memories were for sorting out the colors they had seen. These examples show that there is a relationship between vocabulary, cultural emphasis, and habitual consciousness.Another example is the cultural pattern of the Chinese family. Let’s take a look at figure 2.Figure 2. Family patterns in two culturesThere is also the English term "cousin". What diagram means'?1)elder (younger) son (daughter) of father's brothers堂兄、弟、姐、妹2)elder (younger) son (daughter) of father's sister姑表兄、弟、姐、妹3)elder (younger) son (daughter) of father's or brother姨表兄、弟、姐、妹There are still more Chinese terms of kinship. Westerners may shrug their shoulders in despair when they come across these terms. Of course it doesn't mean that the native-English speakers are not able to distinguish all these terms. Expressions in language are a matter of social habit. They are developed to serve the needs of the speakers. As Ronald Wardhaugh in his book The Context of Language said: It appears possible to talk about anything in any language provided the speaker is' willing to use some degree of circumlocution.Some concepts are more "codable", that is, easier to express, in some languages than in others. The speaker, of course, will not be aware of the circumlocution in, the absence of familiarity with another language that uses a more succinct means of expression. Every natural language provides both a language for talking about ever)' other language, that is, a metalanguage, and an entirely adequate apparatus for making any kinds of observations that need to be made about the world. If such is the case, every natural language mast be an, extremely rich system which readily allows its speakers to overcome any predispositions that exist. (Ronald Wardhaugh, 1976:74)Languages, whether they are considered "primitive" or"developed" or poorly-developed are equal as well as relative. The lack of some of the terms in any language is due mainly to the lack of needs.11. 4.2 Chinese – an ancient and wonderful languageSometimes we are not conscious of the need, but if it becomes necessary for us to perceive such ofexpression or distinctions, as a skier might with snow, then the terms or descriptive items would arise.Words always develop alongside the development of society. In this sense, language is transmissible across culture. In other words any culture-bound words in one language can be expressed in language.Take Chinese as an example, though China is industrially less developed, translators have no difficulties in putting the flow of modem scientific terms into Chinese. Joseph Needham said in his Science and Civilization in China, a book revealing the whole scientific-technological dimension of Chinese culture:The inhibiting influence of tile ideographic language has been grossly over-rated. It/Las proved possible to draw up large glossaries of definable technical terms used in ancient and medieval times for all kinds of things and ideas in science and its applications. At the present day, the language is no impediment to contemporary scientists. If the social and economic factors in Chinese society had permitted or facilitated the rise of modern science there as well as in Europe, then already 300 years ago tile language would have been made suitable for scientific expression. The classical language had great capacity. We do not remember any well-considered instance in which we have been seriously in doubt as to what was intended by a classical or medieval Chinese author dealing with a scientific or technical subject, provided that the text was not too corrupt, and that the description was sufficiently full. The general tendency was, of course, to make the descriptions too laconic.Fryer, a great translator of science and technological books from English into Chinese, ranging from navel gunnery to shipbuilding, navigation, coal mining, biology, chemistry, mathematics and medicine found that even this kind of translation, involving whole new attitudes and terminologies was possible because as he said, the Chinese language like other languages, was capable of growth. Having learned to value Chinese and to condemn those who did not, he wrote in 1891:We must carefully avoid standing in our own light if we want the Chinese to respect our Western learning. Our systems have no more right to universal use than the Chinese. Their ancient and wonderful language which for some reasons is more suited to become the universal language of the world than any other, must not be tampered or trifled with by those who wish to introduce oar Western sciences.Not only Fryer, but also many Western scholars, mentioned more than once that the Chinese language is natural. It follows the mode of human thinking, i.e. from general to particular and follows the sequence of occurrence of events. Vendrye recognized in Chinese writing the advantage of its being able to be read by people speaking different languages "in much the same way as the naval signal code. When the question of a universal script is debated does not the advantage out-weight all the disadvantages?”(Etiemble, 1961:113)15 The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis Remains Only a Hypothesis11.5.1Linguistic categories and biological categoriesSapir and Whorf suggested that a given language, especially in its grammar and vocabulary, provides its speakers with habitual ways of expression which predispose these speakers to see the world in ready-made patterns. They produced arguments in the 1930s that the language of American Indians, for example, led them to view the world differently from those who spoke European languages. Let us look at some more examples of this reasoning. Whorl claimed that the Hopi Indians of Arizona perceived the world differently from other tribes (e. g. the English-speaking tribes) because their language led them to do so. In the grammar of Hopi, there is a distinction between "animate" and "inanimate", and among the set of entities categorized as "animate" were clouds and stones. Whorf concluded that the Hopi believes that clouds and stones are animate (living) entities and that it is their language that leads them to believe this.Now, English docs not mark in its grammar that clouds and stones are animate, so English speakers do not see the world in the same way as the Hopi. The ease is the same with the French language, French classifies all nouns as either masculine or feminine -- le soleil, "the sun", is masculine, but la lune, "the moon", is feminine. Despite this classification, the Frenchman does not actually perceive these gender distinctions as real; they are simply grammatical devices. Whatever relationships these classifications once had with reality are now very remote.The problem with the conclusions in both these examples is that there is some confusion between linguistic categories ( "animate", "feminine" ) and biological categories ( "living", "female" ). Of course, there is frequently a correspondence in languages between these categories, but there does not have to be. Moreover, the linguistic categories do not force you to ignore biological categories. While the Hopi language has a particular linguistic category for "stone", it does not mean that the Hopi thinks he has killed a living creature when he runs over a stone with his car.11.5.2 Language and thinking patternsGrammatical rules are devices which speakers use to organize their thoughts. But does tile language of a speaker provide him with a structure for seeing the world in ready-made patterns? Take tile grammar of the Chinese and the English languages as an example.In English, we may say word-inflection forces native English speakers to think in categories, such as thing, quality, action, past, present, future, singular and plural. For instance the grammatical categories of singular and plural are important ones in English grammar, so important that they can hardly be ignored. Can we say that a speaker of English finds it natural to divide his universe into things that are either singular or plural? Or can we say that a speaker of English thinks in subject-predicate patterns? Likewise, as Chinese words arc uninflected and their functions marked only by particles and by word-order, can we say that logical thought is obstructed by the absence in Chinese of such categories its subject, predicate and object? Alford Forke, a pioneering historian of Chinese philosophy, even put forward a fairly controversial argument that the Chinese radicals established the categories of thought of the Chinese. He said the words that expressed thinking were put under the radical "心" or" '" (heart). For this reason, the Chinese assume that all the spiritual functions are located in the heart (such as nu (怒) (angry), shu (恕) ( forgiving ), kong (恐) ( frightened ), zhi (志) ( ideal ) , ji (忌) ( envy ), zhong (忠) ( loyal ), hen (恨) ( hateful ), you (忧) ( worry ), qie (怯) ( timid ), lian (怜) ( pity ), pa (怕) ( afraid ) and of course there are also phrases that related to "heart" such as hui xin (灰心) ( lose heart), guan xin (关心) ( take to heart), bian xin (关心) ( a change of heart), hei xin (黑心) ( black hearted) , xin dui xin (心对心) ( heart to heart ), shan xin (善心) (kind hearted), etc. It is true that Chinese radicals have played a very important role in the development of the Chinese language, but it is still uncertain whether or not radicals really affect the thinking pattern of the Chinese people.Since the thesis of linguistic relativity is no longer as intensively discussed as it was a generation ago, it is difficult to know the recent scholarly opinions. It is probably lair to say that most psychologists, linguists and philosophers would accept that language does have the kind of influence on thought and culture that has just been indicated, but they would be skeptical about the hypothesis that language determines the categories or patterns of thought. Whorf himself claimed that the Hopi Indians, whose language lacks the grammatical category of tense, operate with a radically different concept of time from that with which speakers of European languages operate. But he gives no satisfactory independent evidence of differences in their behavior or patterns of thought to justify this claim. It can also be noted that he exaggerated the difference between the grammatical category of mood in Hopi and what is traditionally classified as tense in European languages. Similarly, the absence of numerals of higher value than four in。