Usitative, etc.

[Mia Kalish]

Hi, Rudy, 

Where do I sound like Rousseau? I must admit to having only a passing
familiarity with Rousseau. However, I am not influenced by religion
(Rousseau was Calvinist, then Catholic, then Calvinist). 

I don't associate nature with savage man. I do admit, like Rousseau, to
taking the minority position. When people look at me, they see a person who
they expect will support the majority opinion. When I speculate, often with
data, that the majority opinion is not necessarily the "true" opinion, it
makes people think in different ways. There is a particular psychological
conflict between that they biases tell them is "true" about me because of
how I look, and my words. 

I also don't deal so much with the political. I don't characterize the world
in terms of the rich and powerful vs. everyone else. I see this as
particularly evident in the recent elections, where there was a huge
influence of the middle class . . . When I was in Florida, I happened to be
talking with a Cuban woman about a current election. She and her friends
were voting Republican because they associated themselves with the elite and
they saw Republicans as elite. So they were voting their perceived status
rather than their day-to-day reality. 

GIS: Poor Dr. Mark. His is still stuck in the Enlightenment Grand Narrative.
Notice how he separates "indigenous" from the unmarked category. He even has
hypothesized that Spanish speakers might have difficulty with an English
interface because of linguistic differences. 

To borrow from Fauconnier, who I am more like, but also Rousseau, I can say
that the issues of language and culture are a battle of compressions.
Language in human use tends to be reduced to human scale for ease of
communication, while in becoming part of common parlance, these compressions
represent the pressures of social expectation. 

I spent 25 years of my life building computer systems for people all over
the world. I can tell you with an assurance based on strong differences in
the custom systems we used to build that registers vary not only between
organizations and institutions, but also between departments, and between
functional levels in those departments. Understandings and registers vary
with the organizational history that people have assimilated and
accommodated. And like Hebb and Freeman, I also see that the knowledge that
people gather and fashion for themselves is based on what they have
previously gathered and fashioned. 

I am perpetually amazed at how much the Enlightenment Grande Narratives
still influence people's ways of looking at the world and evaluating what
might be possible. Mark hopes (and hopes and hopes to no avail) that
something will turn out to be "universal" so - like Chomsky, I might remark
- someone can develop a one-size software that fits all. I don't know if
this hope is laziness, greed, or disregard for humanity beyond all belief. 

What I still hear reflected in such writings are the views of Morton,
Galton, Agassiz, and the measures and mis-measures of (hu)man. 

Speaking of Agassiz, he was head of Eugenics at Harvard. This was the first
discipline for which America because highly regarded by European scholars. I
often hear people talking about how Hitler's philosophies and tactics. I
don't often hear the knowledge that Hitler learned from Harvard, from
Agassiz and his faculty. Eugenics - or ethnic cleansing - is an American
tradition. Is this Rousseauian? Believing that a discipline that
characterizes people as those who are deserving of a future and those who
are not is a classic and perpetual example of Human Savagery? Ironically,
the lake around which some of the earliest Athapascans lived has been named
for Louis Agassiz! 

Mia 

  

-----Original Message-----
From: Indigenous Languages and Technology [mailto:ILAT at LISTSERV.ARIZONA.EDU]
On Behalf Of Rudy Troike
Sent: Friday, May 19, 2006 3:00 AM
To: ILAT at LISTSERV.ARIZONA.EDU
Subject: [ILAT] Usitative, etc.

Mia,

     You are in danger of sounding like Rousseau. The GIS article amused me
with one point about a term for a passageway for water after a rain, in an
area like the Southwest U.S. where surface water is a temporal thing. Here
in Arizona and New Mexico, we have a similar feature which has a label, 
"wash",
which finds no counterpart in the better-watered parts of the
English-speaking
world, and might equally confound the GIS article author. I was amused 
recently
by a story told by a man here in Tucson, who took his sons back to his own
childhood home in Ohio for a visit. When they got into the Midwest, at one
point they crossed a river, and one son excitedly pointed out "Dad, look!
The river has water in it!" Unlike the assumption of the GIS author that
"river" is defined as water moving in a stream bed, here in Arizona children
grow up understanding "river" as a stream bed that may occasionally have
some
water in it. Do we speak the same language? Do Arizona children have a 
"deeper"
conceptual-cognitive understanding of "river" than speakers of English in
most of the rest of the globe? Or has the dessication of the atmosphere
impoverished their cognitive competence?
     Ever since the rise of cities, country-dwellers have been ridiculing
their "city-slicker" visitors for their atrophied awareness of country 
features,
while the urbanites retaliate by making fun of the rural "yokels" for
their ignorance of the citysphere. But their grammars don't differ in
profound ways, although rural linguistic features earn the label of
"solecisms", going back to the Greeks, and urban features may draw private
rural scorn, but public envy, which is why historically, cities show rings
of isoglosses around them as the surrounding rural populations have
imitated urban speech.
     Language changes for the same basic reason that any other form of human
behavior changes -- fashion, and the desire to imitate someone or some group
who/which is admired. Grammar is usually the most resistant part of language
to change, in part because it is so largely out of awareness, but that is
not always true. On the one hand, the -m in "am" is a first-person marker
that goes back to Indo-European, but has disappeared in all English verbs
except "be". On the other, "like" has emerged as a quotative marker in
American teen speech with lightning speed, and "you guys" has become the
new 2nd person plural pronoun with equal rapidity. Evidentials in verbs,
an old element in the Turkic language family, was borrowed into Bulgarian,
alone of the Slavic languages, as a result of the Ottoman occupation of
the area. And Gumperz has documented a village in India where three
languages are spoken, two related and one not, where all three, while
retaining their native vocabulary, have developed perfectly identical
patterns of morphology and syntax. Grammatical borrowing is so common, in
fact, that linguists are now suspicious of grammar as a major evidence for
genetic relatedness between languages.
    The interpretation of identical grammatical structures may differ
between
languages, even closely related languages, because of fashion-driven change.
We have little micro-evidence to prove why, when, or how changes start, but
we are able to catch them only after the fact, when it is too late to
reconstruct their orgins, except speculatively. So as Scott warns,
attributing understandings of the universe to grammar is a hazardous and
largely unvalidated undertaking, best avoided.

      Rudy