Names

[Ann Rowe]

In a message dated 4/25/2006 8:02:51 AM Mountain Standard Time, 
MiaKalish at LEARNINGFORPEOPLE.US writes:

> The discussion of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis was vicious, is still ongoing,
> and is very detrimental to the view of American languages and the people who
> spoke them. I would speculate that one of the great difficulties in
> revitalization is that American languages are considered "worthless" because
> they ostensibly "lack so many concepts". So as you can see, understanding
> what Whorf was saying maybe be critical to language revitalization in a lot
> of ways: Documentation, conceptualization, analysis. 
> 
> I once sent out an email asking if there were math words in Ñdn languages,
> and you sent back a note telling me that I would be able to find them using
> Western concepts and direct translation. This is in fact correct, but what I
> began to realize from this and other responses is that despite the vast
> physical representation of math and science around us, there is almost none
> in the collected languages. And I said, Now why is that? 

Hello, everyone and I hope you do not mind my barging into this discussion 
with a minimally informed opinion.  I am not a linguist by training, merely a 
historian.

But the two highlighted sentences in Mia's posting really jumped out at me.  
The first clearly and absolutely deals with the question of subjective 
valuation by the majority culture in a multicultural society.  Rather than moving 
toward understanding how those concepts are perceived in the culture which 
created the language, and then to an understanding of how they would be spoken of 
orally and in written form, the presumption becomes that, if the concepts are 
not readily apparent from the presumptions of the majority culture's 
interpretation of how they should be presented, they are concepts that are "absent" from 
the cultural base of the "other" language.  It is, in essence, cultural 
imperialism at one of its worst phases as Mia noted in the debate to which she was 
referring.  

In relation to the second statement - obviously, the reality could be as 
simple as this:  perhaps native peoples felt no need to separate out science and 
math from the rest of living the way that western European heritage cultures 
have.  That would, in fact, mean that the language(s) would not require 
additional terms.  This would be very similar to the idea of "kaona" in Hawaiian 
language use - meaning has layers of depth and its interpretation goes beyond mere 
comprehension of a single word - context, construction, and the purpose of the 
statement (why and for what it was created) all modify the meaning of that 
single word.  Western European cultures had to create the words to describe the 
concepts once they determined that math and science would exist separately 
from other activities in daily life.  

Just a few random ideas.    

Ann
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