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<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:14.0pt;mso-fareast-language:EN-US">Dear Randy and all,<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:14.0pt;mso-fareast-language:EN-US"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:14.0pt;mso-fareast-language:EN-US">Thank you for sharing this!<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:14.0pt;mso-fareast-language:EN-US"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:14.0pt;mso-fareast-language:EN-US">In field methods classes, I have cited examples of the “attention to meaning” type from Alison Henry’s (2005) paper on working with speakers of … non-standard spoken (Belfast) English,
in an attempt to counter-act the exoticizing of “non-literate cultures”.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:14.0pt;mso-fareast-language:EN-US"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="p1"><span style="font-size:14.0pt;font-family:"Aptos",sans-serif">The following gives you a flavour
<span class="s1">(p. 1604):</span><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="p3"><span class="s1"><span style="font-size:14.0pt;font-family:"Aptos",sans-serif">‘Does this sentence sound right or not: There’s lots of new people moving in round here’</span></span><span style="font-size:14.0pt;font-family:"Aptos",sans-serif"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="p3"><span class="s1"><span style="font-size:14.0pt;font-family:"Aptos",sans-serif">‘No’</span></span><span style="font-size:14.0pt;font-family:"Aptos",sans-serif"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="p3"><span class="s1"><span style="font-size:14.0pt;font-family:"Aptos",sans-serif">‘What would you say?’</span></span><span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="font-size:14.0pt;font-family:"Aptos",sans-serif"><o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="p3"><span class="s1"><span style="font-size:14.0pt;font-family:"Aptos",sans-serif">‘There’s not many new people moving in round here. People like this area, they tend to hang on to their houses.’</span></span><span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="font-size:14.0pt;font-family:"Aptos",sans-serif"> </span></span><span style="font-size:14.0pt;font-family:"Aptos",sans-serif"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="p4"><span class="s1"><span style="font-size:14.0pt;font-family:"Aptos",sans-serif"><o:p> </o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="p4"><span class="s1"><span style="font-size:14.0pt;font-family:"Aptos",sans-serif">Henry, Alison. 2005. Non-standard dialects and linguistic data.
<i>Lingua</i> 115(11). 1599–1617.</span></span><span style="font-size:14.0pt;font-family:"Aptos",sans-serif"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:14.0pt;mso-fareast-language:EN-US"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:14.0pt;mso-fareast-language:EN-US">Best, Eva<o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size:12.0pt"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size:12.0pt"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size:10.5pt;font-family:"Aptos Narrow",sans-serif">Prof Eva Schultze-Berndt (she/her) | Linguistics and English Language<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size:10.5pt;font-family:"Aptos Narrow",sans-serif">School of Arts, Languages and Cultures |
</span><span style="font-size:10.5pt;font-family:"Aptos Narrow",sans-serif">The University of Manchester, UK</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size:10.5pt;font-family:"Aptos Narrow",sans-serif"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt"> <o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;mso-fareast-language:EN-US"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;mso-fareast-language:EN-US"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:12.0pt"><b><span style="font-size:12.0pt;color:black">From:
</span></b><span style="font-size:12.0pt;color:black">Lingtyp <lingtyp-bounces@listserv.linguistlist.org> on behalf of randylapolla via Lingtyp <lingtyp@listserv.linguistlist.org><br>
<b>Date: </b>Wednesday, 2 July 2025 at 17:24<br>
<b>To: </b>lingtyp@listserv.linguistlist.org <lingtyp@listserv.linguistlist.org><br>
<b>Subject: </b>Re: [Lingtyp] Traditional view of language and grammar in indigenous societies<o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt">Dear All,<o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt">Late last year and early this year there was a short discussion following the post by Bernat Bardagil copied below. I was not able to respond at the time, but I hope there are still people interested in this
question.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt">Chris Donley talked of his experience doing fieldwork on Khatso, and concluded that "I think the key factor here is that Khatso has no writing system and is not taught in school. Therefore, speakers are not
familiar with the concept of analyzing it as a thing in the world separate from its daily use.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt">This is my experience also. When I first started working on the morphologically complex Qiang language (Sino-Tibetan; northern Sichuan, China) I worked with an old man who had not left the mountains for 30
years, and was completely illiterate. Like Chris said, he could not conceive of what he was saying as an object of inquiry that you could treat in an abstract way. It was all about meaning for him. We couldn’t just make up sentences for him to say, as for
him it all had to be real. When I asked him how to say 'Khuəzi went out to her field', he said, “You can’t say that.” I was shocked and so asked why, and he said, “Because Khuəzi doesn’t have a field.”. He was trained as a Qiang historian, one responsible
for passing on the historical stories of the Qiang, and he took me on as his student. He would speak at length and I would ask him to help me write it down, but what he gave me was just keywords, not the full form. I asked him about “the rest of it”, i.e.
the morphology, and he said “That is just sound”. When I finally got the stories down I tried to investigate the grammar by manipulating some of the forms in the story, e.g. in a story where a cow goes down a hill, I asked how to say ’the cow didn’t go down
the hill’, and again he said “You can’t say that”, so I asked why, and he said, “Because that is not how the story goes.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt">In those days I was still doing lexical elicitation with a wordlist, but this didn’t work out well with him, as the wordlist was based on Chinese lexical categories, and he was unfamiliar with them and so
when I asked for ‘cloud’, he said “What kind of cloud?” and then described half a dozen clouds with different basic names, and no general term (though many young people learn only one word for cloud, as they are thinking in Chinese categories). The same happened
with ‘pheasant’: I couldn’t ask for a general term for ‘pheasant’, I needed to describe a particular type out of many. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt">This contrasts greatly with the speakers of the Rawang language of Kachin State, Myanmar. The speakers are almost all devout Christians, most can also speak Burmese, English, Chinghpaw, and often Lisu, and
many have studied the bible in Greek, so are very aware of grammar. They have the Rawang Literature Committee, which is like the <span style="color:#222222;background:#F3F7FF">Académie Française, attempting to regulate and improve the writing system and the
language generally. They are very aware of the tones and the morphology. One aspect was that when they told me a word, they would inflect it in a word-class specific way, so they had a clear conception of word classes.</span><o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt">I’ll attach some slides from a guest talk I gave on oral vs. literate cultures in a colleague’s course on Orality, based largely on Jack Goody & Ian Watt 1963, "The Consequences of Literacy". <i>Comparative
Studies in Society and History</i> 5.3: 304-345. Hope they can be of use, and get you to read Goody & Watt 1963, which I highly recommend.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt">Randy J. LaPolla<o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:10.5pt;color:black">Whorf 1956: 78: '... linguistics is fundamental to the theory of thinking and in the last analysis to ALL HUMAN SCIENCES.' (emphasis in orig.) p. 79: 'The very essence of linguistics is the quest
for meaning, and, as the science refines its procedure, it inevitably becomes, as a matter of this quest, more psychological and cultural, while retaining that almost mathematical precision of statement which it gets from the highly systematic nature of the
linguistic realm of fact."</span><span style="font-size:12.0pt;color:black"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;color:black"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;color:black"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:12.0pt"><span style="font-size:12.0pt"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt">On 27 Dec 2024, at 11:09</span><span style="font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Arial",sans-serif"> </span><span style="font-size:12.0pt">PM, Bernat Bardagil Mas via Lingtyp <lingtyp@listserv.linguistlist.org> wrote:<o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:11.0pt">Dear all,<o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:11.0pt"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:11.0pt">As anyone working closely with indigenous languages and cultures of the Americas, we have seen multiple instances of the awareness that indigenous peoples have of everything that surrounds them, with detailed
accounts and explanations ranging from social aspects to natural or supernatural phenomena. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:11.0pt"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:11.0pt">We have come to wonder whether, and how frequently, this type of reflection is attested also for language — not so much the origin of language, but its structure and nature. Have any of you encountered anything
similar to this notion among indigenous communities, regarding the structure of their own language? Or, are you aware of any mentions of something that could correspond to traces of this type of indigenous linguistic or grammatical knowledge?<o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:11.0pt"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:11.0pt">Thank you,<o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:11.0pt"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:11.0pt">Bernat Bardagil i Mas & Sara Larios i Ongay<o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:11.0pt"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:11.0pt"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:7.5pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif;color:#666666">- - <o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:7.5pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif;color:#666666">Bernat Bardagil<o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:7.5pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif;color:#666666">Postdoctoral researcher<o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:7.5pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif;color:#666666">Department of Linguistics, Ghent University<o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:7.5pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif;color:#666666"><a href="https://research.flw.ugent.be/en/bernat.bardagil">research.flw.ugent.be/en/bernat.bardagil</a><o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:13.5pt;font-family:"Verdana",sans-serif">_______________________________________________<br>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
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