Unlocking the secret sounds of language

[Scott DeLancey]

On Tue, 9 May 2006, jess tauber wrote:

> It would be interesting to know whether some sort of  'general attitude' -
> empathetic versus adversarial- colored such lexicalization preferences.

Indeed it would, but it's pretty tricky business, trying to say
stuff like this about a language or culture that you know only
from the outside.  It's very easy--way too easy--to speculate about
such stuff, very very hard to say anything that's substantial and
not just circular (i.e. "they have a word for it so it's important
to them, so that's why they have a word for it").  That's why,
encountering something like the difference between English and
Kurtoep that I mentioned before, I feel on much stronger ground
thinking about what it says about English, where I know the language
and culture as thoroughly as anyone, and a lot shakier trying to
say anything about Kurtoep culture.  That would be easy, too, from
this one fact we could go off on wild flights of fancy about their
attitude toward cooperation and responsibility, and differences in
where Kurtoep and English speakers locate blame, and all kinds of
stuff.  But the fact is, I don't know Kurtoep, I've never been there,
I've only ever met one speaker of the language, I really don't have
any business telling a lot of tall tales about them.

Scott DeLancey
Department of Linguistics
1290 University of Oregon
Eugene, OR 97403-1290, USA

delancey at darkwing.uoregon.edu
http://www.uoregon.edu/~delancey/prohp.html