WORDS AND CULTURE

Whorfs, Kinship, Taxonomies, Color, Prototypes, Taboo, and

Euphemism
Relationship of Words and Culture

The exact nature of the relationship between language and

culture has fascinated people from a wide variety of
backgrounds
In this chapter we will look at various ways in which language
and culture have been said to be related
Culture, therefore, is the know-how that a person must possess
to get through the task of daily living
Expert Views

The structure of a language determines the way in which

speakers of that language view the world
The structure does not determine the world-view but is still
extremely influential in predisposing speakers of a language
toward adopting a particular world-view
A third, neutral, claim would be that there is little or no
relationship between language and culture
WHORFS

Benjamin Lee Whorf(April 24, 1897 July 26, 1941)

A chemical engineer by training, a fire prevention engineer by
vocation and a linguist by avocation
Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis
The idea that differences between the structures of different
languages shape how their speakers perceive and conceptualize
the world
Whorfians Hypothesis

Sapir acknowledged the close relationship between language and culture,

maintaining that they were inextricably related so that you could not
understand or appreciate the one without a knowledge of the other
in Whorfs view, the relationship between language and culture was a
deterministic one
He does not go all the way to say that the structure of a language completely
determines the way its speakers view the world
In this view different speakers will therefore experience the world differently
insofar as the languages they speak differ structurally
Study in Whorfian Hypothesis

Fishman (1960 and 1972c) states if speakers of one language have

certain words to describe things and speakers of another language lack
similar words, then speakers of the first language will find it easier to
talk about those things
If one language makes distinctions that another does not make, then
those who use the first language will more readily perceive the
differences in their environment which such linguistic distinctions draw
attention to
the grammatical categories available in a particular language not only
help the users of that language to perceive the world in a certain way
but also at the same time limit such perception.
WHORFS

Whorfs ideas were based on two kinds of experience

One was acquired through his work as a fire prevention engineer
for the Hartford Fire Insurance Company;
the other was acquired through his linguistic work, as Sapirs
student, on Amerindian languages, principally on the Hopi
language of Arizona.
WHORFS

However, it was his work on Amerindian languages that led Whorf to

make his strongest claims. He contrasted the linguistic structure of
Hopi with the kinds of linguistic structure he associated with languages
such as English, French, German
Standard Average European (SAE) X Hopi of Amerindian
Hopi grammatical categories provide a process orientation toward the
world, whereas the categories in SAE give SAE speakers a fixed
orientation toward time and space
Whorf believed that these differences lead speakers of Hopi and SAE to
view the world differently
WHORFS

In the Whorfian view, language provides a screen or filter to

reality; it determines how speakers perceive and organize the
world around them, both the natural world and the social world
Romaine (1999) states No particular language or way of
speaking has a privileged view of the world as it really is [and]
no two languages are sufficiently similar to be considered as
representing the same social reality
Whorfians Study

If a language requires certain distinctions to be made because of its

grammatical system, then the speakers of that language become conscious of
the kinds of distinctions that must be referred
The Garo of Assam, India, have dozens of words for different types of baskets,
rice, and ants
German has words like Gemtlichkeit, Weltanschauung, and Weihnachtsbaum
Spanish have piernas and patas
German people essen and horses fressen
Bedouin Arabic has many words for camels, just as the Trobriand Islanders of
the Pacific have many words of yams
 Whorfians Study

German and French have two pronouns corresponding to you, a

singular and a plural
The Navaho of the Southwest United States, the Shona of Zimbabwe,
and the Hanuno of the Philippines divide the color spectrum
differently from each other
Japanese has an extensive system of honorifics and word order
English stone has a gender in French and German
The Kwakiutl of British Columbia must also indicate whether the
stone is visible or not to the speaker at the time of speaking
Whorfians Study

Lucy (1992a, 1996) tried to test Whorfs ideas. He used the

grammatical category of number in English and in Yucatec Maya, a
language of Mexico
Yucatec pluralization is optional and then only for nouns denoting
animates
He asked speakers of the two languages to look at pictures of ordinary
village life and, using a cleverly devised non-verbal test requiring
sorting and recall, found that the two groups did differ in the predicted
directions
Objections of Whorfians Study

Pinker (1994, pp. 5967) has no patience at all for any of Whorfs ideas.
He says that Whorfs claims were outlandish, his arguments were
circular, any evidence he gave for them was either anecdotal or
suspect in some other way, and all the experiments conducted to test
the ideas have proved nothing.
Boas (1911) long ago pointed out that there was no necessary
connection between language and culture or between language and
race. People with very different cultures speak languages with many of
the same structural characteristics
Whorfians

Finally, the claim that it would be impossible to describe certain things in a

particular language because that language lacks the necessary resources is
only partially valid at best
No society has rejected such modern advances as television, computers, and
sophisticated weaponry because its people lacked the linguistic resources to
use them
The most valid conclusion concerning the Whorfian hypothesis is that it is still
unproved
A speaker is willing to use some degree of circumlocution
KINSHIP

One interesting way in which people use language in daily living is to refer to
various kinds of kin
There is a considerable literature on kinship terminology, describing how
people in various parts of the world refer to relatives by blood (or descent)
and marriage
Kinship systems are a universal feature of languages, because kinship is so
important in social organization. Some systems are much richer than others,
but all make use of such factors as gender, age, generation, blood, and
marriage in their organization
KINSHIP

There may be certain difficulties. You can ask a particular person what he or
she calls others who have known relationships to that person, for example,
that persons father (Fa), or mothers brother (MoBr), or mothers sisters
husband (MoSiHu)
fathers father (FaFa) and mothers father (MoFa) = grandfather
in English that your brothers wifes father (BrWiFa) cannot be referred to
directly
English uncle is used to designate FaBr, MoBr, FaSiHu, and MoSiHu, and also
non-kin relationships
KINSHIP Terminology

In this approach, an investigator seeks to explain why sometimes different

relationships are described by the same term, e.g., why Spanish to is
equivalent to both English uncle and either fathers or mothers male cousin
Burling (1970, pp. 217) describes the kinship system of the Njamal, a tribe of
Australian aborigines
A young Njamal man calls by the same name, njuba, his mothers brothers
daughter (MoBrDa) and his fathers sisters daughter (FaSiDa), which are both
English cousin.
But he uses turda for his fathers brothers daughter (FaBrDa) and his
mothers sisters daughter (MoSiDa) when both are older than he is.
He calls any such daughters who are younger than he is maraga
Study of KINSHIP Terminology

All of these are cousins in English. He may marry a njuba, since a cross-cousin
is of the opposite moiety, but he cannot marry a turda or a maraga, a parallel
cousin of the same moiety
Moiety membership is the overriding consideration in the classification system,
being stronger than sex.
For example, a term like maili is marked as male, e.g., FaFa, FaMoHu, or
FaMoBrWiBr when used to refer to someone in an ascending generation and in
the same moiety.
Maili is also used to designate membership in the same moiety, but in this case
it can be applied to both males and females, to DaDaHu, BrSoDa, and
DaSoWiSi
We might feel it strange that one should refer to so
many different kinds of relationship with a single
term, but this is because we live in very different
circumstances
 Family structures are changing: in many parts of the world the
extended family is becoming less and less important as the
nuclear family grows in importance; divorce results in one-parent
families; remarriage results in mixed families.