Kinship terms are one of the areas in which culture is expressed in language. In Yoruba, spoken in SW Nigeria, there are no words for brother, sister, son, daughter, aunt, or uncle. There is a word that means elder sibling, which includes cousins, and another that means younger sibling, and there is a word for child. If one has to specify a relationship it takes several words to do it, but in the extended family of this culture it's relative age that counts, as well as generational differences. Any elder male is "father" and any elder female is "mother." In Navajo, the sibling words mean "sibling of the same sex" and "sibling of the opposite sex." Clearly vocabulary and metaphor are very culture-sensitive. However, morphological and syntactic structure seem not to be.
Herb
Herbert F. W. Stahlke, Ph.D.
Emeritus Professor of English
Ball State University
Muncie, IN 47306
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________________________________________
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar [[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Dick Veit [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: June 12, 2009 4:43 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Metaphors we don't live by
I came late to this thread, so I may be going over old territory.
Isn't there a middle ground between "thought is determined by language" and "language and thought are completely separate"? Surely the categories chosen by a language at least influence the way we think. For example, with the word "uncle," English labels four very different relationships with the very same term (father's brother, mother's brother, father's sister's husband, mother's sister's husband). As a boy, I considered all of my uncles to be equally close relations. Would that have been the case if, say, we had different terms for blood-related uncles and uncles-by-marriage?
Juliet claimed that "that which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet." That's one of many things she got wrong. Would it really smell as sweet to us if the plant were called the "skunk cabbage weed"? Advertisers and politicians devote untold effort to naming products and programs because they believe names matter. Think of "the death tax," "Operation Iraqi Freedom," "the Patriot Act." People in opinion polls respond differently depending on what the thing is called. You get different results if you ask people if they're "pro-life" or if you ask if they're "anti-choice." Words have connotations, and connotations affect our responses.
Certainly we can have thought and opinions without language. Of equal certainty, names and labels for things affect our responses to them.
Dick Veit
On Thu, Jun 11, 2009 at 12:45 PM, Robert Yates <[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>> wrote:
Colleagues,
I started my first reply on the metaphor string to suggest that there is
an alternative view from the one that language “structures our thinking.”
I believe that language and thought are completely separate.
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