Documenti di Didattica
Documenti di Professioni
Documenti di Cultura
anthropomorphization
anticipation
antonyms
attachment
baby talk
belief in supernatural/religion
kin, close distinguished from
distant
kin groups
kin terms translatable by
basic relations of
procreation
kinship statuses
language
language is translatable
WILD BOY
HOMINID
ORANG OUTANG
MAN
Wardhaugh 235
1. Try to account for the often reported finding that, for
English at least, males usually display less ability than
females in dealing with matters having to do with
color, including the actual use of color terminology.
2. What are some of the more esoteric color
designations you have enountered reently? Where did
you find them? Who used htem? What appears to be
their purpose
3. Two other naturally occuring phenomena capable of
sub-division are years and days. How is each divided?
Taboo and Euphemism
• Definitions and etymologies
• Savants, peace-keepers, sanitation worker,
administrative assistant
• Political correctness?
• Sex, death, etc…
• Watch for uses of Bloody in MFL – what
does bloody mean?
Look at pages 254-5 in
Wardhaugh
“Active listening”
Things to look out for in MFL
• Count the number of accents you hear
• What is wrong with Higgins’s categorization of
phonology?
• Does the film depict different registers for the
same speaker in different situations? Examples?
• Does Higgins have “cultural know-how”? Is he a
sociolinguist? Why or why not?
• Is Eliza’s claim of being linguistically ruined by
Higgins tenable?
• Question 2 Wardhaugh page 245
After break
Vanishing Voices
• What is language death?
• Why is it a tragedy? Why is it not a tragedy?
• What is the strongest argument in the book for
trying to maintain linguistic diversity?
• Why do languages die? Suicide? Murder?
• Is it more like moving house, getting a new
computer? What about computer languages?
Endangered languages
• Like the miner’s canary: where languages are in
danger, it is a sign of enviromental stress. (Is there
a necessary connection here or an incidental one?)
• Language is what made everything possible for us.
• Each language has its own window on the world?
P. 14. Whorfian?
• Every people has the right to its language. And the
right to give it up?
• Passive construction at end of p. 15. Who or what
is destroying rain forests and languages?
Capitalism? Natural selection?
More from Vanishing Voices
• “The next great steps in the scientific development
may lie locked up in some obscure language in a
rain forest” 16. Not very likely though.
• How much biological information, and of what
sort, would be passed down via oral culture?
• Practical and scientific/industrial or
aesthetic/academic reasons for preserving and
studying dead and dying languages? A
combination?
More from Vanishing Voices
• Multilingualism good monolingualism bad? Vice
versa?
• Diversity an absolute good?
• “Violence in Wales” 20? Murder?
• Is linguistic assimilation usually coerced or
voluntary?
• Ethnic and religious concerns mitigate against
linguistic assimilation. Hebrew reborn.
Political boundaries “artificial” are
linguistic/cultural boundaries “natural” is “natural”
better than “artificial”?
Americas have 150 of the worlds 249 stocks of language, but only a few
people populated Americas after they arrived via the icebridge? Why
relatively few stocks in Africa?
Why did the Sami leave the Arctic? Enviornmental damage? Why else?
Read from Chapter 9 of C.S.
Lewis’s Out of the Silent Planet
p. 53