Names

[MJ Hardman]

This has been of serious concern to me the whole of my professional life.
Although I only mention it when pressed ‹ because of the viciousness and the
distortions and the ridicule ‹ my theoretical construct of the linguistic
postulate is a way to operationalize the Lee-Sapir-Whorf (Dorothy Lee got
seriously written out) in a way that did not lead to the ranking described
below and in a way that seemed to me to get at what they-all were attempting
to make understood.  It was also a way for me to discuss the languages I was
working with without getting those ranking reactions.  It also takes the
focus off of vocabulary ‹ far too easy a game to play ‹ and onto perceptual
patterns.  And there, if you please to play the ranking game, linearity and
singularity don¹t come off quite so nicely as fat dictionaries do.  Grammar
in so many Ndn languages is so beautiful and complex and can leave the
rankers feeling a bit humble.  Not bad.

MJ
website:  http://grove.ufl.edu/~hardman/


On 04/25/2006 12:37 PM, "Ann Rowe" <AEROWE at AOL.COM> wrote:

> 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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