Names

[Mia Kalish]

I’m with MJ on this. . . especially about the “humble”. 

 

Powell, by the way, for Ann, had no categories for math and science in his
document about which words should be collected. Since he controlled
publication, people who wanted to be published (read “funded”) needed to
comply with Powell’s bigotry. (And Powell WAS a bigot; his characterization
of native peoples in the document is chilling). 

 

Mia

 

  _____  

From: Indigenous Languages and Technology [mailto:ILAT at LISTSERV.ARIZONA.EDU]
On Behalf Of MJ Hardman
Sent: Tuesday, April 25, 2006 2:02 PM
To: ILAT at LISTSERV.ARIZONA.EDU
Subject: Re: [ILAT] Names

 

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 don’t 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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