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<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:11.0pt;mso-fareast-language:EN-US">Hi folks –
<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:11.0pt;mso-fareast-language:EN-US"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:11.0pt;mso-fareast-language:EN-US">I think it’s pretty hard to draw exceptionless generalisations about this sort of thing, and while I can’t speak for either of them I doubt that either Randy or Chris had aimed to
make such strong claims. In my own experience (with related but different languages/communities) the tendencies they’re describing are real, and are generally observable on a generational level, but also depend greatly on individuals, and not only on people’s
different extents of formal education, other literacy training and/or other prior exposure to different ways of thinking/talking about language, meaning, categories, “correctness”, etc., but also on more-or-less inscrutable individual differences in capacity,
willingness, patience, and/or interest in engaging in this sort of thing. I’ve had consultants with more or less identical backgrounds (as far as I could tell – I could have been unaware of some significant difference in their life experiences, who knows),
from the same generation and village, both expert speakers, one of whom was either unable or unwilling to operate on a metalinguistic level no matter what I said or did, the other of whom could work out exactly what was going on after just a few minutes of
observing me working with someone else, and jumped right in to volunteer their own contribution. Part of the challenge is that there tends to be a limited vocabulary (at best) for discussing these sorts of things in language (no pre-existing terms for “meaning”,
“correctness”, “word” (in the sense of a unit of language), far less “prefix”, “sense”, “tone”, etc.), but speakers who grasp the idea of a denotatum can quickly develop conventional circumlocutions to refer to it, and people who worked with me on the Galo-English
dictionary, having already worked with me for a few years already, had no problem coming up with neologisms to denote many of the relevant structural features of their language, things we had lacked a technical vocabulary for up to that point (so, for example,
<i>gom¹-c</i></span><i><span style="font-size:11.0pt;mso-fareast-language:EN-US">̌</span></i><i><span style="font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Arial",sans-serif;mso-fareast-language:EN-US">ɨ</span></i><i><span style="font-size:11.0pt;mso-fareast-language:EN-US">r²
</span></i><span style="font-size:11.0pt;mso-fareast-language:EN-US">‘speech-pellet’ for ‘morpheme’ – well – not
<i>exactly </i>morpheme, but close enough to it to make discussions about word and phrase structure much easier than they had been up to that point)</span><span style="font-size:11.0pt;mso-fareast-language:EN-US">. I’m not an expert by a long shot, but I can
imagine that the same thing would have been true in Panini’s day – a few innovators thinking about language in non-traditional ways and developing the vocabulary to do so, while many others might have found it inaccessible, uninteresting, whatever. The “inaccessible”
group almost certainly declines with the rise of formal education, which more or less presumes literacy and/or experience with related types of abstraction (such as processing 2d images), but those aren’t the only factors.
<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:11.0pt;mso-fareast-language:EN-US"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:11.0pt;mso-fareast-language:EN-US">Cheers<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:11.0pt;mso-fareast-language:EN-US">Mark<o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:9.0pt;font-family:Helvetica;color:black"><br>
Dr. Mark W. Post | </span><span style="font-size:9.0pt;font-family:Helvetica;color:black;mso-fareast-language:EN-US">Senior Lecturer (<a href="https://www.sydney.edu.au/arts/about/our-people/academic-staff/mark-post.html"><span style="color:#0563C1">Linguistics</span></a>)<o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:9.0pt;font-family:Helvetica;color:black;mso-fareast-language:EN-US">Co-Director (<a href="https://ccld-eh.org/"><span style="color:#0563C1">Centre for Cultural-Linguistic Diversity</span></a>)
<br>
Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences<br>
Rm 838 Brennan MacCallum Building | A18 Manning Road | The University of Sydney | NSW | 2006 | AUSTRALIA<br>
+61 2 8627 6854 (ofc) | +61 4 5527 0776 (mob)<br>
<a href="mailto:mark.post@sydney.edu.au"><span style="color:#0563C1">mark.post@sydney.edu.au</span></a> | <a href="http://sydney.academia.edu/MarkWPost"><span style="color:#0563C1">sydney.academia.edu/MarkWPost</span></a></span><span style="font-size:11.0pt;mso-fareast-language:EN-US"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:11.0pt;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="color:black">From:
</span></b><span style="color:black">Lingtyp <lingtyp-bounces@listserv.linguistlist.org> on behalf of Adam Singerman via Lingtyp <lingtyp@listserv.linguistlist.org><br>
<b>Date: </b>Friday, 4 July 2025 at 10:25</span><span style="font-family:"Arial",sans-serif;color:black"> </span><span style="color:black">am<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">Dear Randy,<o:p></o:p></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal">Thanks for providing this very interesting description of your experience working with the non-literate elderly Qiang historian. Did the (presumably younger) Qiang speakers you worked with later also insist on talking about the content
of narratives/histories rather than the code? From what you described, it sounds like there was a mismatch between what you wanted to learn about (the language) and what the historian wanted to teach you (the history of his people). If he felt that his pedagogical
goal was to teach you the histories themselves, then it's not surprising that he rejected the hypothetical sentences you constructed. <o:p></o:p></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal">What I'm less comfortable with is the suggestion that this individual teacher's preference for the content of the histories rather than the linguistic code itself tells us anything deep about the distinction between oral and literate cultures.
(But I am open to being persuaded that I am wrong about this.) <o:p></o:p></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal">My experience working with the speakers of Tupari, a Tupian language spoken in the Brazilian state of Rondonia, has taught me that even non-literate speakers can have quite impressive metalinguistic awareness about the structure of their
language. The Tupari pronominal inventory doesn't encode a formal-informal distinction, but the language has lots of number-sensitive verbal suppletion and agreement; and traditional speakers always make sure to talk to/about their in-laws as duals rather
than singulars, with many morphological consequences seen in the suppletive verbal roots and in the agreement suffixes. The reason I mention this is because many speakers I have worked with, including speakers who aren't literate in Tupari or in Portuguese,
know how to talk about this aspect of their language: they explain that one must speak about one's in-laws as if each individual in-law were two people, not just one. There's even a specific term for this kind of respectful speech (kiarowak ara). I'm not claiming
that non-literate Tupari speakers have metalinguistic awareness about all of their language's grammatical properties, but in this area at least they can and do talk about structure.<o:p></o:p></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal">I would like to bring up one other potential counterexample to the idea that a society without writing is automatically going to be one in which "speakers are not familiar with the concept of analyzing it as a thing in the world separate
from its daily use" (quoting Chris Donley). Didn't Panini (<a href="https://url.au.m.mimecastprotect.com/s/iG2cC2xMQzi8mKm2NunfZi5ci1d?domain=w.wiki">https://w.wiki/EP5f</a>) compose and teach his treatises on Sanskrit grammar orally, centuries before the
language came to be written down? Perhaps the important distinction isn't oral versus literate cultures but rather the question of whether there are schools or educational institutions in which language is taught as a subject in its own right. We're used to
schools emphasizing written language, but as the case of Panini shows, language can be taught without writing, too.<o:p></o:p></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal">If I'm wrong about Panini, Sanskrit, etc, please let me know — I'm just regurgitating what I'd read in the literature on non-Western grammatical traditions.<o:p></o:p></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal">All the best from Syracuse,<o:p></o:p></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal">Adam<o:p></o:p></p>
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